Boston, ich muss dich lassen / Arrivederci, Boston

Last day in Boston before heading home to Copenhagen.

So leaving the cool Comparative Media Studies at MIT in favor of the cool Center for Computer Games Research Copenhagen. It’s a hard life I’m living, I know.

Random observations:

-I hadn’t really heard U.S. radio since I was a kid, but it turns out to be EXACTLY like the radio stations in Grand Theft Auto: The commercial stations are terrible, the ads are, well, ads, and the public broadcast radio NPR is pretentious and claims to be non-commercial while sporting tons of ads anyway. The first time I turned on NPR, there was an ad for a renaissance fair – just like in GTA3. In other words, reality was a complete mirror of the game and I’ve felt completely at home here for that reason.

-On 4th of July at the Charles River in Boston, 4 jet fighters flew over the crowd just as we finished singing the Star Spangled Banner. It did add some oomph.

-The only reason I could sing along on Yankee Doodle is that I played lots of North & South on the Amiga. See! Games can really help you in your meeting with other cultures!

-People here are much better at introducing themselves and striking up conversation than people in Denmark.

-Recharged my Gameboy batteries and got Warioware, inc and Namco Museum for the trip home.

-Being in Boston and at MIT has been pretty great. 6 months where I got a lot of work done, met interesting people, and generally experienced life as it always is in its own unpredictable ways. It’s 22 degress (74 f), the sun is shining from a blue sky and it is somewhat sad to be leaving.

Sony’s upcoming handheld game machine: Is 3d always the way forward?

More details are emerging about Sony’s upcoming game handheld, the PSP.

There seems to be nothing really new about the device, rather it’s an amalgam of current technology and conventional projections for the future:

Sony is taking a page from Nintendo’s GameCube by introducing a new small disc format (60mm), the “Universal Media Disc” (“Universal” apparently means “Proprietary”.)

It will also feature wireless gaming capabilities like the Nokia N-Gage. (Though Wi-Fi rather than Bluetooth.)

This is nice enough, and lots of tech specs pointing to better 3d. But what I’m less sure about is whether we are really always looking for more 3d capabilities? The Gameboy games I enjoy are all 2d: Chu Chu Rocket, Denki Blocks, Zelda, Advance Wars, but the 3d Super Monkey Ball jr. does nothing for me. I could be wrong, but I feel that 2d is more natural when playing on a small device – especially when in a train, car, or on a plane.
My non-corroborated explanation would be that when your body and what you are interfacing with is fixed on a desk and a chair, you can use your brain’s center for motor control to navigate in a 3d game world, but that when your body or the Gameboy is moving, your brain is preoccupied with controlling the body and can’t really spare that energy on the 3d game world.
So this would be the argument that portable gaming will always be primarily 2d.

Similarly, it appears that 3d games take more time getting used to than 2d – I’ve seen lots of small kids (and older non-gamers) having a really hard time interfacing with a 3d world, moving their bodies instead of using the gamepad etc… Is 3d always less casual than 2d? Is Sony barking up the wrong tree?

The Blame Game: Blame the Game

Here’s a funny one: The new Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life movie is doing not too well at the box office. Paramount pictures have the perfect explanation for this:

“The only thing we can attribute that to is that the gamers were not happy with the latest version of the ‘Tomb Raider’ video game, which is our core audience,” Paramount distribution president Wayne Lewellen said.

More on plagiarism, inspiration, and influence

Thinking about the previous post:
When I initially began working with computer game theory, it was always easier for me when somebody violently criticized me than when they actually agreed. It seemed kind of awkward when somebody had actually been influenced by something I’d written or said. I am not as manically focused on antagonism these days, but there still are some fuzzy boundaries between 1) what should be a clear reference, 2) what is something that has become a common meme, and 3) what is an idea that is so obvious that everybody has come up with it on their own.
I recently reviewed a paper whose main point was essentially identical to a posting I had made on a mailing list – the author was also on the mailing list. I still don’t know whether it was 1) plagiarism, 2) an idea I had launched into the world that sailed of on its own, or 3) me overestimating my own ingenuity. And I still don’t know how to decide.

Game theorists imitates Jorge Luis Borges!

Who says theory is boring? In Jorge Luis Borges’ famous & funny short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, the writer Pierre Menard sets out to write a novel identical to Cervantes’ Don Quixote; not another Don Quixote, but the Don Quixote. He succeeds admirably, actually producing an all-new word-for-word copy of Don Quixote:

It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for examples, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth! – the idea is staggering. Menard, contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.

Now, game studies is finally catching up, compare a quote from this 2002 article:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… with a quote from this new, 2003 article by a different author:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… and draw your own conclusions.