Author: AdamGincel

Toward the end of my high school career I loved the idea of asynchronous multiplayer games, especially ones that were easily accessed on mobile devices.

This became relevant to me as my school gave every student an iPad (how good of an idea that was is still up for debate — we had to give them back at the end of the semester). Naturally, the students learned how to play games on them, but various sites and such got blocked as administration learned about them. I just so happened to be in a Web Development class offered by the high school, where anything we posted was on the school’s local server, which was logistically impossible to block.

When we were asked what we wanted to do with our final projects, I realized I wanted to make a game with asynchronous multiplayer, that people could tab over to, take a turn, then resume with class. I, for some reason, decided a version of Monopoly was the best idea for this. Over the next several months I wrote an entire monopoly game in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL. By the last two months of school, people could create accounts, start games with up to 4 players, and play asynchronous games of Monopoly.

At its peak I had 50 active players. As the admin I could peek in and see how every game was going. The biggest request I was given was a chat system, so I added a global and a game-specific chat system. Due to game balance, the games would effectively never finish. While unfortunate, people still enjoyed playing the game, and I would get reports of people angrily quitting a game after landing on Boardwalk with a hotel on it.

This experience taught me the value in these asynchronous experiences; they could add an overarching common context to a mundane school day, and players could see each other in the halls and make references to these games. The games helped connect people who may not have otherwise connected, and they really showed me the power games have as a social tool.

The Wii Remote really kicked off prominent motion control in video games. Its reveal trailer showed off playing tennis, conducting music, and other activities that would have otherwise been abstracted away by button presses prior. The act of actually performing an action, as Isbister explains, is much more engaging and engrossing than simply acting it out via middle men, like action figures, or even standard controllers.

Unfortunately for the immediate longevity of motion controls, the technology was good enough to catch interest, but not good enough for some of the more advanced motions users expected to perform. The Wii MotionPlus was created to improve accuracy with the Wii Remote, and was used in games like Wii Sports Resort and Zelda: Skyward Sword to facilitate a greater level of immersion. This was met with mixed reviews — some liked the increased accuracy, others didn’t enjoy waggling their arms and calling it swordplay. The level of immersion wasn’t there.

Fast forward a bit — the Kinect, Playstation Move, and the Wii U all offer the market more varied methods of motion control. They all have some successes and some failures, as the tech isn’t really clicking with a lot of people long term, but then comes along Virtual Reality. As the need for highly accurate motion tracking came about, motion controls were given new life. The HTC Vive’s wand controllers and now the Oculus Touch controllers are highly accurate, very versatile motion controllers that, when paired with quality VR, actually provide that sense of engagement one would expect from immersing oneself into a virtual world. The technology had finally reached the point where it could be as engaging as say, mock sword fighting. As the technology gets cheaper and more broadly accessible, we may see a whole new era of unique experiences that will offer us never before seen ways of interacting with each other.

I loved Isbister’s section on Non-player characters, as it was one of the topics I discussed in my midterm paper. She believes, as I do, that NPCs provide character and are “living, breathing others” within the game world. These characters provide weight to the player’s actions, and even provide a real sense of social interaction. NPCs can turn a single player experience into something far from isolating, and can teach valuable lessons in real world social skills.

In my research paper, I talked about how EarthBound has many NPCs that do next to nothing in terms of driving the main plot of the story forward. Not only that, many of those do nothing to point the player in the right direction, nor do they provide any tangible in game benefit, like an item or other usable thing. Instead, these NPCs provide a sense that Eagleland, the setting of EarthBound, is a real, breathing world. In the real world you have simple, small conversations with plenty of people all the time. They may not do anything to progress your overall story — they may not be giving you life changing advice or giving you anything tangible, but its these small human interactions that teach you how to “be a person,” for lack of a better phrase. Humans are social animals; they need social interaction to survive. That games recognize this and implement it into their games not only acts to their benefit, but acts to the benefit of anyone who plays them, too.

Sicart gives some focus to Game Designers in Chapter 7. As someone with lots of experience talking with , and teaching, developers and designers of all skill levels, I take issue with his notion that designers do not deserve to say they have authorship over the things they create.

Creation is a very personal act. Art, music, poetry, games — all of them come from the creativity and mind of one person, or a group of people. It is fair to argue that the interpretation of these works is not up to the creator; poetry gets interpreted in many ways, sometimes directly conflicting with the interpretation of the author. However, it would do the author an injustice to remove that authority over their own work. People take into account the motives and livelihoods of creators when interpreting work. If a AAA quality game came from one person in their garage (see Lost Soul Aside), we would interpret it differently than if it came from a large corporation.

Sicart argues that designers only set the stage for users to play upon. I don’t disagree, but I don’t see how this entirely relates to how authorship is “troublesome to [him]…impl[ying] authorship, a privileged communication model, an implied authority or reference.” To call authorship over a creative work “privileged”, and suggesting that the authority of the creator holds no bearing over its interpretation and further use is upsetting to me, especially as someone who actively facilitates the creation and development of games.

 

sorry for the lateness of this post, I was running and participating in SGDC’s 9th Game Jam

Memes have entered the political sphere. If you haven’t had a chance to read this article, please take a few minutes out of your day and enjoy it. If you’re lazy, it is an article wherein the Hillary Clinton campaign posts an “explainer” of the popular internet meme Pepe the Frog. In it, they cite a few meme pictures retweeted by members of the Trump campaign and assert that the meme is a symbol for white supremacy.

If you’ll humor me, read that last part again. Read it twice — read it to somebody nearby who has no idea what you’re talking about. They will ask what kind of nonsense this random college student is writing about. They’ll say that, but I’m not the one who got paid to write about Pepe the Frog for a political campaign. 

This has to be play. I have to view it as hilarious because if I don’t it’s just more evidence that our current political climate is the result of some sort of sick joke. More evidence that the spectacle of politics has become increasingly more important than any real ideal any candidate or public servant could ever hold. How else could one explain the past year of the U.S. political climate? Look at this picture.

Does this cover domestic or foreign policy? Will this help impoverished or disenfranchised people? Should I vote for one party over another because they criticize the Navy SEAL copypasta (warning: vulgar) for inappropriately representing the military?

I apologize for digressing — at face value, all of this is hilarious. Upon evaluation, it’s horrifying. This dichotomy may become the new “play” of the political sphere. Politicians have tried and failed for years to get people to listen to actual policy. Creating this spectacle and uniting people with fear of others seem to be the only tactics that have had the results the parties want. Until we, the populace, prove we can handle a more responsible, mature form of political play, this may be what we get.

November can’t be over soon enough.

Play is a very subjective word.

The word’s conventional definition is not robust enough to adequately cover, say, the relationship games have with our complete emotional spectrum. To play is to have fun; playing is positive, and pleasurable. Sicart starts off his book by covering this exact topic.

Games have evolved beyond simple means of entertainment, and have moved into the realm of art; all sorts of games are created for all sorts of reasons, and achieve several different goals. Some aim to meet that conventional definition of “play” — they aim to provide fun, positivity, and/or pleasure. Others aim to terrify, to inform, to provoke thought, or to be open to interpretation. As the author states, though, games are merely a manifestation of our desire to play. The games create worlds with their own rules, and as he states, “rules are not sacred.” Speedrunners and hackers find whole new ways to “play” beyond the boundaries of any specific game’s rules, just to name one example.

I particularly enjoyed the book’s reference to Horse_ebooks. While I don’t fully understand the author’s use of the word “dangerous”, nor do I think Horse_ebooks revealed any dramatic things like “showing us a new way of seeing the world and understanding ourselves”, I do respect Horse_ebooks as an important piece of performance art unique to the 21st century. The community’s relationship with the account could be interpreted as a form of play, and is a great example of how new forms of interaction can form and proliferate in unexpected ways.

I am rather attached to the conventional definition of the word play. I don’t know if the word has to be updated or modified to expand its meaning, rather than using some other word. I do, however, agree with several of the author’s points. We play to escape the harshness of the world. Our urge to play is always in flux with competing forces, and play’s victory time and time again may prove that there is more to it than I currently understand.