Jesper Juul's Blog, page 14

Futures: Journal of Virtual Worlds Research issue 8, 2

For your theory itch: Journal of Virtual Worlds Research issue 8, 2.

This issue presents six papers each reflecting on one angle to the future of virtual worlds: Four concrete views relating to: bots, head mounted displays (HMD), neuroscience and meditation, and eSports; as well as two theoretical views relating to the focus of virtual worlds research, and looking at virtual worlds as a mediator between “technology trends” and the “digital transformation of society and business.”

From the point of view of 2015: the virtual is becoming the real and the real is becoming the virtual.
Table of Contents
Editor In-Chief Corner



Toward the Futures of Real AND Virtual Worlds
PDF


Yesha Y. Sivan





Essays



Three Real Futures for Virtual Worlds
PDF


Tom Boellstorff







Is a Technological Singularity Near Also for Bots in MMOGs?
PDF


Stefano De Paoli







Conceptualizing Factors of Adoption for Head Mounted Displays: Toward an Integrated Multi-Perspective Framework
PDF


Ibrahim Halil Yucel, Robert Anthony Edgell







Being There: Implications of Neuroscience and Meditation for Self-Presence in Virtual Worlds
PDF


Carrie Heeter, Marcel Allbritton







The eSports Trojan Horse: Twitch and Streaming Futures
PDF


Benjamin Burroughs, Paul Rama







The Metaverse as Mediator between Technology, Trends, and the Digital Transformation of Society and Business
PDF


Sven-Volker Rehm, Lakshmi Goel, Mattia Crespi

 

Katherine Isbister: How Games Move Us

Set for launch in February 2016, we are proud to present the fifth book of the Playful Thinking Series. Katherine Isbister’s How games Move Us: Emotion by Design is an examination of how video game design can create strong, positive emotional experiences for players, with examples from popular, indie, and art games.

This is a renaissance moment for video games—in the variety of genres they represent, and the range of emotional territory they cover. But how do games create emotion? In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister takes the reader on a timely and novel exploration of the design techniques that evoke strong emotions for players. She counters arguments that games are creating a generation of isolated, emotionally numb, antisocial loners. Games, Isbister shows us, can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences; they reveal these qualities over time, through the act of playing. She offers a nuanced, systematic examination of exactly how games can influence emotion and social connection, with examples—drawn from popular, indie, and art games—that unpack the gamer’s experience.

Isbister describes choice and flow, two qualities that distinguish games from other media, and explains how game developers build upon these qualities using avatars, non-player characters, and character customization, in both solo and social play. She shows how designers use physical movement to enhance players’ emotional experience, and examines long-distance networked play. She illustrates the use of these design methods with examples that range from Sony’s Little Big Planet to the much-praised indie game Journey to art games like Brenda Romero’s Train.

Isbister’s analysis shows us a new way to think about games, helping us appreciate them as an innovative and powerful medium for doing what film, literature, and other creative media do: helping us to understand ourselves and what it means to be human.

Worst thing you’ve done in The Sims

I am enthralled by the reddit threat on “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done in The Sims series?”

One time I killed a sim by drowning. Then I made everyone show up to his funeral in swimwear.

*

It’s not too sadistic per-se, but it involved a lot of deaths.

I wanted to make a church with a full, complete graveyard. So I built a small, simple structure moved in a family of 8, get them all inside, remove the door, fill with fire. Yay, 8 new tombstones!

Repeat like 9 times, and you’ve got a full graveyard of tombstones. Then I built the church and moved in a priest to live there and tend to the grounds.

*

So, in my most recent Sims playthrough, I found this girl that I really wanted my Sim to marry. Problem is she already had a husband, so rather than just doing the (relatively) normal thing and just increasing the relationship and convincing her to break up with him, I instead became best friends with her husband, convinced him to move in with me, and then drowned him in a pool so I could marry his wife.

Then I moved in with his wife (who lived in a HUGE mansion) and killed the rest of her family because I didn’t feel like taking care of the other Sims that she lived with but I still wanted the house

And much more.

Theoretically, it ties to some of my arguments in my Without a Goal chapter about open and expressive games: anything truly expressive can also express things we find offensive and/or transgressive.

… the reason why goal-less games can easily become steeped in controversy. The wide range of player actions – what makes the game expressive – also makes it likely that the player can express something that offends someone.

Well Played 4.2 – Learning and Games

 

Well Played: volume 4 number 2

Stephen Jacobs and Ira Fay et al. 2015

 

Medulla: A 2D sidescrolling platformer game that teaches basic brain structure and function

Joseph Fanfarelli, Stephanie Vie


Play or science? a study of learning and framing in crowdscience

Andreas Lieberoth, Mads Kock Pedersen, Jacob Friis Sherson

Barriers To Learning About Mental Illness Through Empathy Games – Results Of A User
Study On Perfection

Barbara Harris, Mona Shattell, Doris C. Rusch, Mary J. Zefeldt

Zombie-based critical learning – teaching moral philosophy with The Walking Dead

Tobias Staaby

Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems in Dota 2

Jeffrey B. Holmes

An Analysis of Plague, Inc.: Evolved for Learning

Lorraine A. Jacques

Purchase from Lulu.com, or Download for free

Another day, another Apple rejection of a Game with a Message

Dan Archer’s project Ferguson Firsthand was rejected from the App Store because … as often is the case, Apple is unclear, but they’ll know it when they see it.

You can get it on Google Play instead.

Is Apple Evil, ignorant, or just culturally conservative?

 

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Stats: 68 percent of Australians play video games

Another day, another report about how common video gaming is.

The Digital Australia 2016 report says that 68% of the Australian population plays video games.

Summary here.

Miyamoto and Tezuka on Super Mario Bros World 1-1

It is hard to imagine a conversation more central to video game history than this:  Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka explaining the design of Super Mario Bros world 1-1.

Are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?

Somewhat tangentially (but tied to the type of pan-narrativism that I used to go up against when writing about games), there is an ongoing discussion about whether we constitute our identities through narratives what we make about ourselves, or not.

Galen Strawson covers it well, The Dangerous Idea that Life is a Story. Here is Jeremy Bruner quoted:

In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives”.

Strawson argues that it may well be that many people really do conceive their lives as having narrative form, episodes, arcs, but that this is not universal.

I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.

[…] it does seem that there are some deeply Narrative types among us, where to be Narrative with a capital ‘N’ is (here I offer a definition) to be naturally disposed to experience or conceive of one’s life, one’s existence in time, oneself, in a narrative way, as having the form of a story, or perhaps a collection of stories, and – in some manner – to live in and through this conception. The popularity of the narrativist view is prima facie evidence that there are such people.

Perhaps. But many of us aren’t Narrative in this sense. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative. We’re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution. It’s not just that the deliverances of memory are, for us, hopelessly piecemeal and disordered, even when we’re trying to remember a temporally extended sequence of events. The point is more general. It concerns all parts of life, life’s ‘great shambles’, in the American novelist Henry James’s expression. This seems a much better characterisation of the large-scale structure of human existence as we find it. Life simply never assumes a story-like shape for us. And neither, from a moral point of view, should it.

Are you the narrative type? I am not. I have already been an avid reader of novels, but never conceived my own life that way.

Video Games and Insightful Gameplay: Special Issue of COMPASO

The Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology has a new special issue on Video games and insightful gameplay, guest edited by Doris Rusch.

Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology

ISSN 2068 – 0317

Special issue: Video games and insightful gameplay

Volume 6, Number 1

Guest Editor: Doris C. Rusch

***

Editorial

Doris C. Rusch / Video games and insightful gameplay

[Full text / pdf]

Research articles – Special issue on Video Games and Insightful Gameplay

Matt Bouchard / Playing with progression, immersion, and sociality: Developing a framework for studying meaning in APPMMAGs, a case study

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Ioana Cărtărescu-Petrică / Those who play together stay together. A study of the World of Warcraft community of play and practice

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Joanna Cuttell / Arguing for an immersive method: Reflexive meaning-making, the visible researcher, and moral responses to gameplay

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Daniel de Vasconcelos Guimarães / Apocalyptic souls: the existential (anti) hero metaphor in the Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes games

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Mikhail Fiadotau / Paratext and meaning-making in indie games

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Sonja Gabriel / Serious games – How do they try to make players think about immigration issues? An overview

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Enrico Gandolfi / Once upon a bit: Ludic identities in Italy, from militant nostalgia to frivolous divertissement

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Kishonna Gray & Wanju Huang / More than addiction: Examining the role of anonymity, endless narrative, and socialization in prolonged gaming and instant messaging practices

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Scott Hughes / Get real: Narrative and gameplay in The Last of us

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Youn Jung Huh / Making sense of gender from digital game play in three-year-old children’s everyday lives: An ethnographic case study

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Xeniya Kondrat / Gender and video games: How is female gender generally represented in various genres of video games?

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Alina Petra Marinescu-Nenciu / Collaborative learning through art games. Reflecting on corporate life with ‘Every Day the Same Dream’

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Elisabeta Toma / Self-reflection and morality in critical games. Who is to be blamed for war?

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Max Watson / A medley of meanings: Insights from an instance of gameplay in League of Legends

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

 

Other research articles

Yitzhak Alfasi, Moshe Levy & Yair Galily / Israeli football as an arena for post-colonial struggle: The case of Beitar Jerusalem FC

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Gautam Ghosh / An ‘infiltration’ of time? Hindu Chauvinism and Bangladeshi migration in/to Kolkata, India

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Adediran Daniel Ikuomola / An exploration of life experiences of left behind wives in Edo State, Nigeria

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Andra Jacob / Migrant’s houses as places and objects of cultural consumption and status display

[Abstract]          [Full text / pdf]

Book reviews

Alin Constantin /Book review – Roland Cvetkovski & Alexis Hofmeister, An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR, Central European University Press, Budapest, 2014.

[Full text / pdf]

Amazon: Terrors of the Gamified Workplace

You probably heard about the New York Times exposé on work practices at Amazon, where a constant chatter of metrics monitor employees. Yes, this is gamification in practice.

Many horror stories about a complete disrespect for the life part of the work/life equation.

But there also is a simple design problem inside: The Anytime Feedback Tool apparently allows employees to comment on the performance of colleagues without their own identities being revealed to the target of the comment. Combine this with stack ranking, where every group has to rate somone in the group as lowest performing, with potential for being let go.

As I discuss in The Art of Failure, we have to ask ourselves what the ideal strategy of an employee is in this situation? The simple answer is that it is likely much easier to back stab a colleague with the Anytime Feedback Tool, thus dropping them in the ranking, than it is to genuinely improve your own performance. It is plain game design: is there a degenerate strategy? Yes, there is. It will be used. Water will find a crack.

*

On top of that, Jeff Bezos’ rebuttal is that this “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”

This more or less proves the article right: When managers or CEOs say that they don’t recognize the negative experience of the employees it means either that:

a) the company is organized such that the CEO will never hear about the negative experiences of the employees, or
b) the CEO is unwilling to hear about them.

Most likely both, with a) being the results of b)

The danger of metrics, and gamification, is that it insulates you from what is going on because you only receive the data you have chosen to receive. There is no substitute for listening to people.