Month: April 2005

Bristol, Oxford

Going to Bristol tomorrow to speak at University of West England.

I can’t make it to the bigger event in Bristol, Playful Subjects on May 13th/14th.

Also not going to the Board Game Studies colloquium in Oxford April 27th-30th. The latter is one of those things – we video game people do like to pretend that we made up everything about studying games, but there is another older and parallel field of game studies that we should get more in touch with.
David Parlett will be talking about What are the rules of a game and who authorises them? What sorts of rules are there, how can they best be expressed, and how do they get to be changed? A core question, indeed.
How do we enable more cooperation and communication with the non-digital games people?

Virtual Goods for Real Money from the Actual Company

Somewhat surprising, Sony is starting their own virtual goods for real money service as Station Exchange. It’s only for EverQuest II for the time being.

Wired writeup.

PS. As an aside, this site has auctions for H?jhuset, the children’s avatar chat I have been working on/for during the past few years. The currency for auctions are “monetter”, the in-game currency unit, but another price list values all objects in the world in the number of plant objects that they are worth. There are a lot of plants in the world.
Plant
This is the kind of stuff that the users are just excellent at figuring out, I would certainly never have come up with it.

Competition: The New Games and Culture Journal

At Game Studies, we now have competition: The Games & Culture journal:

Games & Culture is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due March 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking and germinal work in the field of game studies.

My first reaction was that this might as well be an introduction on the Game Studies web site. So how are they going to position the new journal? Reading further, Games & Culture seems to be positioned as belonging to the American cultural/critical studies tradition.

This leads to the problem is also that it is currently not very clear how we are positioning Game Studies: In 2001, it was brand new to do an academic peer-reviewed journal on video games, but now that everybody and their aunt are doing game studies, I think we lack a more specific profile.
If Games & Culture take on the “political” things, are we then doing “aesthetics, ontology, and design”, is this a ridiculous distinction, or are we / shouldn’t we / should we be doing both, or something else entirely?

Do we need a stronger profile for Game Studies?