Here are some selected informations about it:

—> 58% of social game players in the UK are women, as are 54% of those in the US.

—> There is two big major categories of social game players: single people with no children (28%) and married people with children living at home (28%).

—> Social game players’ average age in the UK is 38, which is far more younger than the 48 year old average in the US. As you can see on the graph below, 46% of americans are 50 or older, that is twice as much as UK players (23%), whereas only 15% of americans are under the age of 30, while they are twice as much in UK (31%).

—> Housewives are commonly thought to be the main target of casual and social game, but the numbers show that only 11% of the respondents are homemakers and 41% work full time.

—> The top three reason motivating people to play social games are the fun and excitment they get, followed by playing as a stress-reliever and enjoying the competitive spirit.

—> 49% of social game players said that when they connect to social networks, they do so specifically to play social games. In addition, Facebook is by far the most popular web platform destination to play social games (83% of respondents said they play games there, compared to Myspace which is in second place with only 24%).

—> 47% of social gamers said they are very unlikely to purchase virtual items with real money, with only 9% saying they are very likely. Women are more unwilling to purchase virtual items with real money (54% said “very unlikely”) than men (38%).

Many others informations can be found in this paper and if you feel concern about it or if you are just curious, you can find the full document online at Information Solutions Group website.

However beyond all these appealing datas, there are some fuzzy points I would like to mention :

The first one is about their use of the term “social game”. It is probably an academic remark, but they never offer a word of definition in their study. They are defining who are social game players without any explanation about what are social games. Acccording to the replies they get with their survey, “social game” stands for social network games such as FarmVille on Facebook or Mafia Wars on Myspace. So we assume this term is understood as a mix between multiplayer and casual games, mostly perform on social network (even if we can roughly doubt of it when we see that Bejeweled Blitz is, according to their results: “the most popular game among social gamers” – as I’m currently writing this article, Bejeweled Blitz gathers around 10 millions monthly active users against Farmville with more than 80 millions).

My second point is all about the age of the respondents. According to the numbers, the average age is around 43, but is it reality? When we take a closer look to the age of their respondents we notice that people between the age of 18 and 30 are only 231 (19% of their panel population), people between 30 and 50 are 499 (42%) and people older than 50 are 462 (39%). In my opinion, we can seriously question the lack of young players representation. Because the online survey was completed by members of Toluna’s Internet ePanel players under 18 wasn’t really a part of it. To not count this young audience is probably the biggest mistake of this research. I think we can firmly argue there is a wide number of players between 13 and 25 who are involved and concerned in “social gaming” as much as they are not huge part of social network (last year 55% of Facebook’s US audience was under the age of 26).

In my opinion, the reality behind this research is distorted because it ignores an important part of the youngest audience. It’s an important lack which needs to be emphasized in order to avoid it as much as possible for any future researches about social games and their players.

Simon Bachelier: First of all, thank you very much for accepting to answer to this interview.  The summary above is short and I’m sure there is plenty of things I forgot to tell about you, so what about a second informal introduction by yourself? What kind of interest lead you to study games for “serious purposes”?

Per Backlund: After I finished my PhD in 2004 I was in a position to choose what to do. I had good contacts with some of my colleagues who had just started to organize research about computer games. As our university had run study programmes in computer game development for a couple of years it was a good situation to do a real commitment to research within that area. At that time I had not done any research having anything to do with computer games. I had an interest as a consumer and parent so my thought was: are these possible to combine? My background is in information systems and to my mind a serious game (or any game for that matter) can be seen as an advanced information system. Hence it’s actually the case that moving to serious games has been a way for me to both broaden and deepen my filed of research.

SB : The InGaMe Lab was officially founded in january 2007 at University of Skövde and is currently formed by 17 interdisciplinary specialists (including 9 PhD). How many people were involved in this project at the beginning and what area or domain did they come from? Why did they decide to create this research group?

PB : Three colleagues and I started already in 2004. However, we had to educate ourselves and build sufficient lab facilities before we were allowed to call ourselves a research group. There were already people doing research within computer games but these activities were more on an individual basis. One of our professors in artificial intelligence was able to find funding for a project to build a game lab and that became the start of what would later become InGaMe Lab. One of the interesting things about computer games is that they can form a truly interdisciplinary field of research. Just look at our background. My colleagues come from cognitive science, computer science and database systems; and my background is in information systems. One other colleague comes from film and media- He is actually the only one of us who did his PhD about games. Then there are others who all find games interesting from their respective field of research. Some examples are social psychology and pedagogy. I think that is one of the things that are good about our group. We all bring different competencies to study the subject of computer games from different angles. In research you most often end up working with people who do the same things that you do and come from the same background. The nice thing about InGaMe Lab is that we don’t have that much overlap. And I think that is one of the things that attract people to the group.


SB : We can find different definition of what is a “serious game”, but a consensus in this young industry seem to stick to “a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment” (Source: Wikipedia). Am I right if I say that you have also worked on a serious game definition? Could you share with us your vision and idea of the serious games?

PB : At the moment we like to be pretty open minded about our definition of serious games. We simply define it as: games that engage the user, and contribute to the achievement of a defined purpose other than pure entertainment (whether or not the user is consciously aware of it). A game’s purpose may be formulated by the user her/himself or by the game’s designer, which means that also a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) game, used for non-entertainment purposes, may be considered a serious game.

However, there is also the aspect of using game technology for some purpose beyond entertainment, typically visualization. When we meet people from industry it seems that this is a very common opinion but we really want to add the dimension of play. If you think about it, playing is a very powerful way of learning both with humans and animals. A kitten looks really cute when it plays but in practice it is training to become a lethal hunter. To summarize, we are really interested in all these aspects: game technology, COTS games, adapted and modified COTS games as well as specifically designed serious games; or any combination of them.


SB : Here we arrive to the new Master degree in serious game at University of Skövde. Serious games are pretty hot topic these last years but there is still a need to define the “genre” and find true specialist in this domain. What are the reasons that lead to the creation of a new Master degree? Why did you create it?

PB : We have a lot of talented game developers among our students and we think that serious games may actually be a possibility for them to broaden their competence and find a place in the game business. Apart from being an interesting field of research we also think of serious games as an emerging business opportunity for game developers. This is also the reason that we offer courses in business development and entrepreneurship (currently these courses are only in Swedish, foreign students will take alternative courses in computer science) in the study programme. So, serious games are really interesting from both the academic and business aspects.


SB : Currently, it’s possible to find information on the webpage of the Master degree but if a non-swedish student want to get more details in english about the programme, is there any email to contact? For instance, I’m curious about what is behind the title of “Serious Games Research and Development”? And the course named “Project in Informatics with a specialisation in serious games”?

PB : Concerning the two courses. The research and development course is a series of seminars about current research in the field of serious games. The students will read a set of scientific articles in order to become acquainted to the field and then they will write a “position paper” to formulate an area of interest which may be further researched in, for example, a thesis project. The project course is a more practical one. You will work in a small team together with two or three other students to develop a game prototype for a client.

Some examples of projects so far are: training games for fire fighters (client: Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency); a game about the Old Testament (client: the Church of Sweden); an exergame about Tae Kwon Do (client: a Tae Kwon Do organization in Sweden); a game about learning the Kanji (client: a small firm which designs language training). One important aspect of the course is to learn to work together with a client to analyze their needs and provide an example of a solution. If you are looking for more informations, you may find some relevant material on the Master webpage presentation or the InGaMe Lab page. Further questions can be directed to me (per[dot]backlund[at]his[dot]se).


SB : What are the prerequisites (skills, knowledge or/and diploma) for a student who would like to join this master degree? Is there any restriction or selection process to join it?

PB : You will need a bachelor’s degree in computer science or game and media or something equivalent.


SB : As far as I know, you currently have some international students in your Master degree. Are some courses in swedish?

PB : This year we have two Turkish students. Our courses are in English with two exceptions (business development and entrepreneurship). Foreign students will replace these with optional courses in computer science, research methodology or academic writing in English. In that sense the international version of the study programme is more research oriented whereas the Swedish version is somewhat business oriented.


SB : The courses seem especially to be focused on Informatics and Computer Science (applied to serious game). Apparently, this degree is not designed to train students to be “serious game designers”, or am I wrong? What kind of specialists will you have at the end of the year?

PB : We find a background in game design, media sciences or computer science suitable for the study programme. The courses cover both the practical angle of serious games (for example the project course) as well as the academic/research aspect (for example the research and development course). Depending on your background you will be able to take on different roles in a serious games project. For example, if you are a designer you will broaden your competence to apply game design to a variety of fields such as training and educational games. So, from a practical point of view I think that there will be opportunities in corporate training and similar areas. We have also had interesting meetings with representatives from museums. They have to target a new audience and competences from game design and visualization may be of interest to them. With respect to research, there is more and more research within serious games throughout Europe and the world. In the last call for EU funded research the term serious games was actually used explicitly.


SB : This master degree is probably the first of its kind in Europe, is there a particular reason that it has emerged in Sweden at University of Skövde? How is the video game market in Sweden? What about the serious game market?
PB : We have a pretty big video game market in Sweden.  A lot of talented people working in both small Swedish and international studios. I think it will be a growing area for some time to come. Serious games is a complement to the entertainment game market. There are other opportunities and other types of customers. As I said earlier, the corporate training market is expected to grow.


SB : A last and personal question before to end this interview: do you play games, and if you do, what kind of games do you play?

PB : I have always been a fan of games involving words. All varieties of Scrabble and similar games.


SB : To end on a pun, you are a serious player too !

PB : Indeed !


Photos courtesy of Per Backlund and the InGaMe Lab.

*** A french version of this interview would be soon available in order to be published in a newspaper, blog platform or specialised magazine. If you are interested to edit and publish it, please contact me at (sim[dot]bachelier[at]gmail[dot]com) ***

Last monday, I was at the 2nd edition of e-virtuoses in Lille, which is a convention of serious games producer. There are around 60% of french products and all the others were international products (from India, USA, Sweden, Netherland, UK, etc.). During this event I was moderator of the workshop on high-risk job (e.g. firefighter). I could talk a lot about what I have seen and who I have met but for this post I will only focus on the Noah Falstein’s opening talk. Just to recap, Noah Falstein was an employee at LucasArts Entertainment (formerly Lucasfilm Games) and later at 3DO Company. For instance, he worked on two great adventure games: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992). Currently he runs The Inspiracy, a consulting firm specializing in game design and production for international clients and tries to focus on serious game development. During the opening session of the convention, Noah Falstein gave a twenty minutes talk about his 30 years of experience in the video game industry and about serious game production. He presented 10 tips to lead a serious game project to a successful production :

1 – As simple as possible

Falstein summarizes this advice in a single quote by A. Einstein: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. It means that it is important to create an accessible game by simple interface for instance without having too simple content.

2 – Prototype quickly, Iterate often

Falstein emphasizes the fact prototypes are very important in a project. It doesn’t matter which tools you can use to create your prototype, it can be made of paper and scissor, C++, PHP, Flash, you name it… the most important point about it is that your prototype must represent your concept. A first prototype can always be enhanced and modified, so don’t be affraid to draw and build the basis of it because it will provide you with a concrete and substantial object to work with.

3 – All games are about learning

Falstein argues that learning is at the core of why we play: “learning may be the source of the feeling we call fun”. His point reminds me alot the Raphael Koster’s books titled A theory of Fun in which he wrote: “the definition of a good game is therefore one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.” Basically from this theory, fun and games stick together by the process of learning.

4 – Mutual respect

This point is about the work of each person involved in your project. There is a need of willingness to learn from each others area. Programmer, publisher, marketer, etc., subject matter, so you better not denigrate what others area can bring to you and to the project.

5 – Fit game genre to serious purpose

Falstein talked about the fact that too often people are tempted by what is the most popular in order to paste the concept to their projects. That’s definitely a bad idea. For instance, he  described World of Warcraft as the perfect exemple to not follow in a serious game production, unless you really have enough budget and, most of all, it really serves your purpose.

6 – Fun is not magic

It is not because a good game designer can turn a dull subject into a pretty funny one that the dullest topic will be transform into a very fascinating one. Game designer are not magician, even if sometimes they can be ! A serious game can be fun, but do not overestimate the “potential fun” of a very serious topic.

7 – Stealth learning

The process of learning can occur indirectly. For instance, if you play to a FPS game, you will be more likely to improve your orientation skill in a three dimension space, without being aware of it. If you are interested in this topic, I really recommend you to have a look at an interesting book by Paul Paul Gee  titled What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Falstein also raised the importance to not directly connect the player to the serious lesson that is behind the gameplay or the narrative. It is important to do it subtly than too directly. Falstein suggested the more player succeed in the game, the  more (serious) content they should receive.

8 – Consider testing and assesment

In a traditionnal game project, test sessions are crucial so they are in a serious game project. It is important to plan test and assessment in the budget production. A good consideration of this can prevent you a lot of bad surprises at the end of the production.

9 – Different countries, different cultures

There is many serious game which don not travel well from a country to another. According to the subject your game covers you might have to consider differences in culture, language, environment, but also uniform, vehicule, etc. These considerations also apply to business development and distribution, because usually each country has its own way to do and its specific rules (not only law, social habits are important).

10 – Clarify roles of everyone involved

This last point and the 4th go together. Here, Falstein underlines the fact each role has to be properly define in the team. Because each party’s member has a role to play in the project, everyone should mainly sticks to his field of expertise and not overflow on the work of the other. Be sure to clarify roles of everyone involved in the project in order to not lose time and get good synergy between them.

I would like to thank Noah Falstein for this nice speech he gave during the e-virtuoses convention opening and Etienne Armand Amato for the picture he shot during the talk.

Six years ago, I had to move from a place  to another one, and I needed a lot of space so I decided to re-organize my stuff and sort it by categories : things I wanted to keep VS things I wanted to throw away. Many old junks have been thrown in the garbage but the hard part was about all my videogames. There was no way for me to throw any of my games away but in the other way, I really needed space and all these boxes were taking so much space ! It was a heavy dilemma for me, but I had to make a choice and I finally find a solution : If I could just fling away the boxes and only keep the disk/cd I would still have the games ! After all, boxes were useless or at best decorative, and there was no other motivation for me than materialist one… Finally I was nearly convinced and proud to be separated from these materialist object which were invading my place, year after year !

Recently, I just felt stupid about this choice because I thought I was making a kind of “preservation of video game heritage”, but in fact, I wasn’t ! Nowadays it is generally easier to get a good “abandonware” copy of any of my old games than get a good scan of their covers or even their handbooks. If you consider this from a player point of view you will probably don’t really think there is much to worry about. If you consider this from a historian point of view, it is a real shame. As an art historian and a game studies researcher I now realised that I have lost precious informations. Video games covers and handbooks embody a part of video game history. I will try to summarize why:

- Marketing and audience : Video game covers are all different depending on which country they are sold. It can help to identify editors marketing approaches according to national audience and local rules/laws and give us some clues. If we take a look at two samples of Carmageddon (1997) back cover : German edition and US edition, you will notice the german one didn’t praised the violent part of the game (for reader who don’t know this game, it’s about car race, bloody crash-car and crushing pedestrians), while the US box did use textual and visual information. The reason why is that the game has been harshly censored in Germany (mature-rated content are also interesting informations you can find in different versions).

- Design and extension of the game : Some games was delivered with goodies inside their box. For instance, Sam & Max: Hit the Road came with a funny handbook, including boardgame, Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter offered a fake valuable coupon for a Keronian ale or Leisure Suit Larry 7 came with its “Odorama” which reproduces contextual smell according to the scene (in fact, the player had to rub one of the 9 areas on the “Odorama” card to create the odor). Collectionors enjoyed these kind of objects very much. Indeed, these goodies embodied the spirit of the game. In 80’s and 90’s, when you got a new video game, you usually take some time to read, or at least to browse, the handbook. Most often, you read it during the installation time (believe me, it took times to install some of these old computer games at the time they were released) and by doing this, you did your first encounter with the game’s world. Handbook was usually the first step before playing a game. It provides you useful informations about the rules of play, but also about the story you will soon be a part of…

- History of technology : A lot of computer video game covers and handbooks displayed information about system requirements you needed in order to run the game on your computer. Many boxes displayed these informations on the corner of the back cover. Such information could be useful to draw a map of technological requirements through the years. It can be also interesting to have such information when you play and analyse an old game with an emulator.

Of course, I’m exaggerating a little bit about the importance of video game boxes and handbooks, but I think that a good historian could get interesting information from such object. From a video game museum perspectives these objects might be as important as the software itself. According your approaches of game studies, I’ll be interested in your opinion about it if you have one, so please send me an email or put your comment below.

For those who are looking for some scan cover of old video game you can check these website:

- Mobygame

- CoverBrowser (Dos Games category)

- Wikipedia Category: Video Game covers

Damien Lopez - A History of Game Controllers (edited version)

The frequently blame we can hear about it is the fact that gamepads do not allow an accurate aim unlike the use of a mouse. As far as I know no real experiment or serious observations have been made about how “good” a player can be according to the controller device he uses. It is just generally accepted that keyboard and mouse are the best way to perform in FPS and nobody seems to be looking for the reasons why it might be true (or not). It could be interesting to confront a group of very good console players against another group of very good computer players in a FPS game that would have been designed to be released, on computer and game console (e.g. Halo series). What could be even more interesting would be to observe and to analyse how console players play in comparison to computer players. Perhaps it could be possible to detect different performances and playing behaviours between both groups. This could leads to draw some behavioural patterns according to player habits and raise assumptions about the influence of the controller devices.

This thought pop up after reading a nice article titled “The FPShuffle” by Richard Terrell on Critical-Gaming Network blog. To sum up what FPShuffle is about, here is the author’s words :

The FPShuffle is an emergent behavioural occurrence in first or 3rd person shooters. [...] Picture one player moving back and forth in a fairly unpredictable fashion shooting at every opportunity at a single opponent who is doing the same. Neither can cause enough damage to kill the other quickly. So this dance of sorts continues until someone runs away, gets lucky, or other factors intercede.

Point after point, Richard Terrell explains why this kind of behavior occurred in video games. Even if he believes that some variables such as player skills and play styles are also contributing to this situation, he was mainly focused on gameplay mechanisms. For instance, some of these structural factors can be the weapons attributes, avatars movement, or level design. While it is certain that game structures are really relevant points, I would like to complete his approach by pointing out that FPSshuffle can also occur on account of controller devices used by the player. I argue playing a FPS with a gamepad won’t develop the same behaviour and performances than with a keyboard & mouse. That’s not new since developers have always seperated consoles and computer users for multiplayer on internet. Actually, there is no technical reason to explain why it is still seperated (it is as easy to get an internet connection with a game console than with a computer), but only the fear of an unfair balance between the skills of the computer players and console players. I’m not saying that a console players is less capable than a computer player, but it seems that developers emphasize this idea since a long time. Because of the lack of convenience providing by a gamepad for a FPS, game designers have also adapted the structures of their games. The famous “lock on” and “aim assist” features  have been created to facilitate aiming with a gamepad, especially during bustling actions in game where it is hard to keep his target on sight. “Aim assist” feature has always be banned from the use of most FPS computer players even if some games were providing it. In recent games such as Borderlands there is a mix between “aim assist” and “lock on” features that is activated by default. Knowing the fact this game has been developped for Xbox360, PS3 and PC, it’s not really surprising.

In the following video, you can see an exemple of aim-assist feature on Halo2 during the first minute:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To come back to FPShuffle, my assumption would be that because of gamepad mechanism, it is easier to move quickly and dodge attacks (especially projectiles) than aim accurately and shoot deadly his opponent. Supposing this, we could argue gamepads are partly accountable for an emergence of FPShuffle behaviour.  In order to check the hypothesis about how controllers can shape the way players perform, it would be useful to design a rigourous experiment. I will try to think about it and draw the big lines of it for the next weekf. When I’ll be finish with it, I’ll post it on the blog, so it’s a “to be continued”…

It is too bad the author didn’t develop more about this topic. Instead of that he has put a funny video on his blog I have embed here in order to start with a funny point before getting more serious (it’s about ethical choice but also a parody of a scene in the movie The Box):

Jose P. Zagal, a professor at Depaul University who mainly explores the challenges of using games as the subject of learning, add a link to one of his last paper called “Ethically Notable Videogames: Moral Dilemmas and Gameplay“. I think this paper is quite interesting on many aspects. It drew my attention particularly because of the choice of Manhunt as a case of study. Manhunt is a third-person stealth action game with a lot of violent graphics (if you don’t know it yet, it could be interesting for you to have a quick look at the wikipedia article). In summary, the player’s score is given at the end of each level and rating on 5 stars according to three different elements:

- How fast you finished the level (can give you 1 star).

- How gruesome and violent were your executions (can give you 3 stars).

- How hard you set the difficulty (can add 1 more point to the element above if you chose the hardest difficulty: Hardcore).

The best way to eliminate an opponent is to surprise him before he could have a chance to detect you and silently (but brutaly) execute him. There are three kinds of execution the player can perform depending on how long he will hold down the action button. The more he holds down the button, the more violent and brutal will be his execution – for some of you who would like to watch how violent are each of these executions, you can click on this link to Youtube, but if you dislike violence, I strongly recommend you to avoid it).

If the player is focusing on getting the highest score, he will have no choice but to perfom the most violent executions during his progression (remember, the story of Manhunt is about a puppetmaster director who is forcing Cash, the avatar, to be a part of his snuff movie, so the avatar leads by the player have to be “creative” in his kills).

Here comes the first point of Jose P. Zagal :

As mentioned, the brutality of an execution is a choice made by the player. Manhunt effectively forces the player to question and evaluate his actions and motivations for how to play the game. Essentially, the player is forced to examine the role of successful play as a moral dilemma itself. There are no intrinsic (in-game) benefits for carrying out executions in the most brutal way. [...] So, why should I, the player, choose to execute Cash’s opponents in the most brutal way possible? How far are you willing to go, as a player, in carrying out the executions?

If the gameplay of Manhunt doesn’t force the player to carry out executions in the most brutal way to finish a level or even the whole game, it has been designed in a way he must perform these brutal executions sometime during his play to reach a higher score (and optionnaly unlock some bonus features). For such a player who enjoys to get big high score and complete achievements there is no other way to do, but to carry out these brutal executions and assume his actions.

Their only purpose seems to be to tempt the player. To force the player to question how much he really values a meaningless measure of achievement. How far would you go for the 5 star rating?

Here comes the second point where Jose P. Zagal looks deeper from the position of the narrative:

The Director is the antagonist, what reason would Cash have to want help him? Also, executions are risky to execute. While the player keeps the attack button pressed, he is exposed and vulnerable to attack. We might expect Cash to reason that a solution to his predicament might be to kill as few enemies as possible and to do so in the least gruesome way (thus not allowing himself to further the Directors ends). From the context of the narrative, the player has no reason or motivation to opt for greater brutality in executions. Role-playing Cash does not exculpate the player from Cash’s actions.

In other words, player can not really argue he has to act the most atrocious way in order to suit well his avatar (Cash) storyline. So there is a kind of uncertain opposition between a narrative which offers no special motivations to act more violently in killing opponents and a gameplay structure which is build on brutal actions to earn high score (but not mandatory to finish the game). But is that all?

Editor's screenshot from Manhunt

Assuming the fact that Manhunt player agrees to bear or enjoys a certain degree of violence, some aspects of the game seem to have been forgotten. Because of the diversity of the executions, the player is implicitly invited to discover, at least once a time in his play, how each new weapon works and how it will be used to kill the enemies. Because of the “deviant creative” way the avatar use its weapon (plastic bar, crowbar, hammer, etc.) and how each execution are shown (using default settings, execution are seen through the screen of a dynamic camera as you can see in this exemple), the player’s curiosity will be hooked and he will provide a reason to try each different executions several time in order to expose it fully. Moreover, the “boredom factor” can also be raise in this case. If the player decides to perform only the less violent execution, he might be bored to play this way seeing the same repetitive action , in addition to lose some big part of the challenge offered by the level design (some levels can be really challenging if the player plans to carry out as violent as possible his executions to get 4 or 5 stars at the end of each level). 

The juxtaposition of the games’ reward structure and its narrative highlights the true moral dilemma of Manhunt. We argue that Manhunt is an ethically notable game because:  It creates moral tension between gameplay rewards structure and the motivations of the characters as defined by the narrative.

I might be wrong, but I think in the case of Manhunt the gameplay rewards structure is quite different from the narrative of the game. Even if the bonus features brought by the highest score are not very attractive for most of  common players, the game rewards structure is still build on how far in violence can the player go. About the avatar, James Earl Cash, nothing is really known about his life and the player only discovers at the beginning of the game that he was sentenced to death. Playing this kind of character could facilitate the player to forget about his own personal ethic. And after all, playing to Manhunt is not for everyone. I’m actually wondering if some mechanisms of the game haven’t been designed in order to help the player to perform executions as an aesthetic action.  The different camera points of view during an execution or the same efficiency of a plastic bag compared with a chainsaw to eliminate opponent are here to push the player to discover by himself this horrid creativity. When the player will get a new weapon, he will probably not think about how strong or destructive it will be, but rather think about “how the hell this thing will be used to execute the next one??”. These parts of the game design will stimulate the player to perform, not only the worst and brutal executions, but every different ones to vary or to renew his experience of the game.

I think the Jose P. Zagal’s approach in this paper is really interesting (have a look to the part about Ultima IV for instance) but I believe Manhunt wasn’t a good case of study to serve his ideas about moral dilemmas and gameplay. I’m not really convinced about the moral tension he describes between the gameplay and the narrative of the game. Instead of Manhunt, I think it would have been better to have studied the case of Carmageddon or even a more provocative one: Postal ! I will probably post some thoughts about these one another time…

2D Boy also published details about customers OS and how much each group paid (Linux groups are the most generous). One element that makes me happy is the last board they published about customers country. I was very surprised to saw that french people was in second position in the list of the best average payments done during this special offer. Of course, it is just a mean and without more details informations (such as standard deviation) we can not properly estimate how these payments have been mathematically distributed, but this is the only indicator we get. The first three countries at the top of the list are Switzerland, France and Norway, while the last three countries are Lithuania, South Korea and Turkey.

For fun, I have estimated the average payment done by European Union countries gathering each one mentioned in this board (only 18 countries on 27). The result is: 2,42$. Of course, according to the lack of more accurate numbers on these sale, this is not very reliable.

One more time, I would have love to get more precise results about the sales, such as how many units have been sold for each country (it would have been more relevant than the “per capita GDP” in order to estimate the “generosity” of people), or even about the whole sale. Why 2D Boy didn’t announced the final amount of unit they sold at the end of this special offer ? Is it just an omission ? We will probably not know since they wrote they will “never say another word about this ever again”. That’’s too bad…

But seriously, I would love to have an access to these entire datas in order to make more accurate analysis. I bet it could be very useful for the game studies field.

Anyway, thank to the authors for these nice information release !

I’ll be glad to share my view about this childlike/dreamlike adventure game, but in order to not spoil your own experience about it (if you didn’t tried it yet), I invite you to stop your reading at this line and try it for 5 or 10 minutes here. My tips for you before you play are : put your sound on, take your time, be as curious as a kid, “touch” (click) everything and enjoy ! The first half part of the game is available online for free, and if you want to usnlock the other half, you will have to pay 3$. A relative fair price in my opinion, even if the replay value is close to nought for an adult player.

Now I can speak about the game without any guilt-feelings ! The main goal of Windosill is to lead a small blue toy truck through different screens where you will deal with interactive landscapes full of weird creatures and surreal places.  In order to progress, you need to find  a cube which is a key to open the door that leads you to a new screen. Each time you discover a new place, you have to solve the same goal : find the cube. Beside this simple purpose, each landscapes are designed in a way that you need to explore them by yourself before you find the solution.  At this point, people will probably stop me and ask : “Okay, but what’s the difference with many other kind of exploration games we can find online?”. Well, it is all about how the game has been done. Every object you will discover in the game obeys its own set of physics (trees are harder to shake and move than the small blue truck, leafs and sheets will slowly twirl around in the air until it fall on the ground, etc.) and seems to be three-dimensional. Considering the fact that the game has been entirely made in flash, this is a genuine work !

The perfect mix between physics and sounds emphasizes the feeling of touching and seizing each object.  It creates a sort of tactile experience using your mouse. The virtual world of Windosill arouses the player’s curiosity and invite him to play with every details he will meet during his exploration. It reminds me all those stuffs we can find in a kindergarten that are used to develop children’s senses and to enhance their sensitivity to new spatial environment. I’m not sure this game has been designed to aim a specific public (about age) and I’m sure that adults and kids can enjoy it as well. At first, I have played Windosill alone, then I have introduced the game to my youngest nephew (a 5 year old boy). At the beginning he asked for some help each time he got stuck, but at least, he has a lot of fun playing and experiencing each elements he discovered. Two weeks later, he is still asking for “the blue car game” again, and again.

I really think that Windosill is not “another” simple puzzle game as you can find many on the web. In my opinion, Windosill is much more a tactile experiment that will awake your curiosity and will play with your childhood memories than just a nice puzzle game dealing with physics features. It is simple, short and soothing. I would love to see more game with such an efficient result that make you “feel” what you are playing without any special devices. Simplicity is often so efficient…

Recently (since the 13th october), the creators of World of Goo, 2D Boy, have launched a special offer for their game. In order to celebrate the first year old game, you can buy World of Goo at whatever price you like. A lot of blogs and websites have spread the word during these last days and a lot of copy has been sold (around 57 000 items in six days).  2D Boy have published some statistical data about their sales on their blog in order to show what kind of results one could have with such a special offer.

According to these numbers, I must say I was quiet surprised by the number of people who only gave them, not 1$, but 1 cent. There are 16 852 people just bought World of Goo for 0,01$, while 6483 bought it for a price between 0,02$ and 0,99$, that is 23 335 who just purchased it under 1$ (almost 41% of the customer in 6 days). Knowing the fact that PayPal fees are usually around 5% plus a minimum amount of 30 cents for each transaction, 2D Boy didn’t earn a penny under 31 cents . If these customers had paid exactly a buck to get the game, they would have given around 15 000$ (Paypal fees subtracted) to their creator…

According to the first results of this experimental offer, I’m not sure the authors of World of Goo will grow richer, but for sure, they probably have found one of the best way to spread their game over computers of players who would have never played to it ! If we consider the fact that 2D Boy won’t stop their creativity to World of Goo, they are making an interesting investment to increase their image and their visibilty on the games market at mid-term.

Some other datas would have been pretty useful to push deeper analyses, such as customer’s country for instance. The author have put a survey for their customers but it wasn’t done at the start of the offer and it was not mandatory. It could have been thought in a way that if the customer want to download the game, he has to reply to the short survey before. In my opinion, the actual presentation to reach the survey is not enough noticeable, especially if the customer doesn’t know english very well or if he reads lines very quickly (click to enlarge the screenshot) :

I think it would have required a nice big button in harmony with the design of the blog which would have said something like : “Click me before to play” or “4 questions during your download”. Maybe it would have been more efficient to catch the attention of customers in this way ?

Anyway, the survey is still updating day after day and you can consult it here. I think it will be a good case of study when the offer will end, so don’t miss to check their blog after the 25th october, I’m sure they will post a interesting review of their experiment !

NB: I have used the nice and simple Paypal fees calculator tool written by Ryan Olbe to do some calculation.

It seems to be more and more trivial nowadays to write a blog about games, after all it begins to be a pretty common topic to talk about, don’t you think ? No ? Well, personally I don’t. Actually, my purposes are not to open another blog about video games review. Instead of that i would like to study relationship between games, art and education, and also think about games in our “modern society” in a more general way…

Having been a player for the last 20 years doesn’t made me an expert in this field, or a “veteran” to quote Leigh Alexander, the actual director of Gamasutra, about one of her recent blog entry, but it provides me my own personal background and a purely practical knowledge. As an academic, I also want to use some methodological approaches to analyse and observe topics I’m interesting in. These topics would be about serious game, independant production (sometimes mainstream prod.), digital art, experimental game, game design and a lot of other issues around games studies.

I didn’t want to limit my object of studies too much at the beginning of this new blog . Days after days, I will shape the borderline of  my studies by my own, but at this time I just need to write online and confront my thoughts with other people, so don’t be shy and put comments on my incoming entries if you find it interesting or if you disagree with my opinion or analyse. I enjoy a lot to discuss about issue I study , especially about games !

My name is Simon Bachelier, I’m a postgraduate student living in France. I have been studying Art History for more than 6 years at University Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne). Since almost two years, I’m trying to focus on game studies in order to involve my “gamer” background in a more reflective and academic approach…

Thank you for reading and welcome aboard !