gamegirl advance links to two great articles on cheating, or 'advantage playing', which is funny, because I was really just thinking about this this past week. Games are one of the few cases (in a society that arguably respects and promotes independence) that we, for fun, let someone else dictate constraints to our behaviour. So, given this contract between game and player, 'playing the game play' is an interesting phenomenon that shows playing the game as meta-game, rather than the game itself. I think part of this emerges from the strong role of meta-gaming in game culture, but the bulk of it is that the challenge of deconstructing or subverting the game is often far more challenging than any predefined game task. Although there is creativity to be found in pushing in-game boundaries as well.
Anyway, Talmadge Wright (et al.) have a great quote in Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games - Playing Counter-Strike:
Playing with a game's technical features also marks the development of creative responses to the rules created by the developer. There are many examples of players and server administrators altering the features of the game to change the way the game is played (for example, altering gravity). Playing is not simply mindless movement through a virtual landscape, but rather movement with a reflexive awareness of the game's features and their possible modifications.
Consider you can get so immersed in a game at some points, and be so entirely cognizant of its constructs the next.
Posted by cloo @ 05:21 PM EST [Link]
Friday, March 28, 2003Malcolm Levy, the executive director of the 2003 New Forms Festival, and the festival itself are featured in the spring issue of REALM magazine.
In other news, I think I may have the conference schedule worked out...whew.
Posted by cloo @ 06:35 PM EST [Link]
Tiffany Holmes, Art games and Breakout: New media meets the American arcade (Computer Games and Digital Cultures 2002)
Posted by cloo @ 04:48 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, March 16, 2003Albert Boulanger's Art and Technology Weblog is so cool, you will weep that the archives only go back to December.
Posted by cloo @ 04:09 PM EST [Link]
Friday, March 7, 2003I'm currently looking into Parasitic/Tactical (in the deCerteau sense) expression, so this is really interesting: Marc Davis has created a tool that allows you to "remix" TV shows and commercials.
I love the implication ("culture jamming") that this is always somehow contestational (or do they mean "culture jamming" as in the music sense, more like a conversation and "playing-off"). I suppose it has to do with culture and accesibility. Very few of us will ever have any opportunity to use television as a creative tool (hell, or even view the content we'd like)-- and that a given, do we even think about it? So I suppose giving people the tools to manipulate their TV experience is a reasonable statement of subversion. Contrast this with gaming cultures, where its much easier to manipulate the digital content (of a single player game, in any event), and further, this may be encouraged or even facilitated. How contestational is the average game hack? It would seem more of a "culture jam" in the latter sense...
Posted by cloo @ 01:36 PM EST [Link]
Ivory Tower: new DiGRA column on IGDA.
Posted by cloo @ 01:25 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, March 4, 2003Jill Walker comments on a variety of political Flash games and (in comments) interactivity and openness (wish I knew how to track back-- apologies!). Non-interactive game components really draw attention to themselves, and as such provide nice examples of the rhetoric of the gameplay itself, rather than solely on a narrative level. One of my advisors, Jim Bizzocchi, is currently looking at some of the ways the game interface itself affects meaning in the game: he's done a lot of work with Ceremony of Innocence and the subversion of the cursor function. We talked about this briefly with 4th year students in Jim's Game Production class, and some of the other games that came up were GTA 3: Vice City, Redneck Rampage, Eternal Darkness: all involving some manner of altering of player control to enhance narrative/context. Although, to be honest, I think some of these political games may just be suffering from an excess of political zeal, but an unfortunate lack of design talent...
BTW, Jim's in San Jose right now-- lucky bastard!
Posted by cloo @ 02:29 PM EST [Link]
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