My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
So it happened, Red Sox won the world series.
Again, the idea of winning and losing streaks, curses just always seem to find its way into games.
On my desk is a paper, Heuristics as beliefs and behaviors: The adaptiveness of the ‘hot hand’ (Bruce D. Burns) which discusses the belief in a player having a “hot hand” (likely to score) in a game of basketball.
Update: And at MIT they did their part.
Not to get all political on you, but really: The speed with which the US lost global goodwill and sympathy from 9/11 to the present day may be unparalleled in human history. Nobody has lost that much goodwill so quickly before.
At the same time, Europe is awash in blind anti-Americanism. Go to a dinner party, and for light consensus-building conversation, people discuss either the weather or how much they hate the US and how all Americans are fat and stupid. Nobody lifts an eyebrow. And the US is blamed for everything now. It borders on a mass psychosis.
Nintendo has launched two “misleading” sites leading up to the relase of Metroid Prime 2.
channel51.org and orbislabs.com.
Orbis Labs make lots of cool technology, including a mechanical ball which is suspiciously similar to Samus’ mechanical ball…
Baseball: The Boston Red Sox finally beat the New York Yankees to make it to the World Series.
It’s one of the interesting things around sports, the myth-making, the belief in winning streaks, losing streaks, and curses.
In this case, the Red Sox may have broken “The curse of the Bambino“, which is the idea that the Red Sox were cursed because they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918 – and true enough, Red Sox haven’t won the world series since.
Perhaps all this because it’s hard to understand & predict why one team wins the match, but we humans cannot prevent ourselves from seeing patterns everywhere, curses, magic.
Update: There’s a New York Times piece where the writer explains that the Red Sox always lose if he watches them play. This time they won because he didn’t watch.
You grew tired of the old discussion, so a new one came along: Arrative and videogames.
Your name was starting to feel so normal, so you acquired a new one: Jasper.
Article on our Game Centre at The World. As I recall, I had a “bad soundbite day” when the journalist was visiting, but, well.
Off to Steirischer Herbst in Graz .
Story at BBC News. Le Monde (more fitting).
I am not sure what to say about that – he was a mythological figure when I began my university studies and I suppose I always thought he was interesting and provocative while being unintelligible and plain old wrong half of the time. And clever me always thought that while arguing against logocentrism, he was the biggest logocentrist of them all. And so on.
Perhaps the BBC piece doesn’t quite get what it was all about. When I watched the Derrida movie in Boston, the presenter explained that Derrida had always fought for the oppressed people of the Earth – which is a really far-fetched interpretation. I mean, he was an esoteric intellectual arguably working from a Christian/Jewish tradition of seeing everything as beginning with the word. (I read an article making this connection somewhere – makes sense.)
But I think the perception of Derrida-as-activist is going to stick nevertheless.
(Update: The New York Times obituary is much better and captures the whole range of responses to deconstruction from the accusation of defending Nazism to its contemporary association with progressive causes.)
It was a major revelation when we stumbled upon Richard Bartle’s player type paper a few years ago – imagine being able to discuss such things!
Straightforward copy from Greg Costikyan’s excellent post on the subject. He lists 5 different categorizations of player types:
Ron Edwards: Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist.
Richard Bartle: Categories of achievers, explorers, socialisers, and killers.
Nick Yee: players who desire relationships, immersion, grief play, achievement, and leadership.
Nicole Lazzaro (at GDC 2004): desire for “internal experience,” for “challenge and strategy,” for “immersion,” and for social experiences.
Richard Rouse: Players want either a challenge, to socialize, a dynamic solitaire experience, bragging rights, an emotional experience, or to fantasize.
Game Design Workshop: At least ten player types: competitors, explorers, collectors, achievers, jokers, artists, directors, storytellers, performers, and craftsmen.
As I recall, Nokia also has a categorization somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.
And I think Greg is right in saying that it’s hard to justify any particular categorization. On the other hand, it’s usually pretty productive to do the attempt – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.