Serious Player

Archive for November, 2009

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 : Read the rest of this entry »

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: Read the rest of this entry »

I remember old discussions with other computer gamers about First Personal Shooter (FPS) games some years ago and how masochistic console players could be playing with a pad controller. Since 1997, the year of Quake 2 on PC and Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64 there has been many discussions about the so “valuable” skill of PC players compared with console player. Because of the lack of handiness providing by a gamepad, FPS players on game console got a poor reputation. Even if gamepads have been improved nowadays, the same reputation seems to affect the console players.

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.

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Checking my RSS reader yesterday evening, I found a very brief post from Jesper Juul’s blog that drew my attention because of its title : “Gamer facing an Ethical Choice?“. He was talking in a single sentence about the fact that a game could help people consider ethical dilemmas, if it is played in a serious manner/state of mind, instead of looking for an optimizing approach, such as high scoring.

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). Read the rest of this entry »