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Michael Chui
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I was playing board games in a bar when it came over the TV. Some people came in from across the street to watch the news. My group and I sort of shrugged it off and kept playing.
Where were you when OBL was reported dead?
Apparently the major media outlets were the last to let us know. While they scrambled to put on their ties and do their hair, the metaverse was spreading the information we cared about. I'd bet a quarter that most people got the news first from a descendent of UO: Twitter, FB, or an online game....
Hm... short on time at the moment, but I will point out one thing. Conservative values, however Chris wants to define them, tend to be well-studied and universally acknowledged. Moreover, they agree with a historical pessimism in humanity: the rational man, nature red in tooth and claw, social Darwinism, etc. These things aren't necessarily true, but more interestingly, they tend to be easier to simulate.
The appeal of combat, to take the obvious one, isn't entirely to our baser instincts: it's also an appeal to stupidity. Combat is the most mindless and one dimensional form of interaction a person can have.
Potts points out that a lot of the liberal ideals depicted in The Sims are done so idyllically (is that even a word? Well, it is now). This is also the simplest implementation possible. That's not a slight--if that's not your design goal then okay--but it also points out that none of the values represented in games are fleshed out thoughtfully.
Incidentally, I should note that I never bother with a Domination victory when playing Civilization. This is partly because I'm just not good at it, but also because it's simply more satisfying for me to win by other means. When I played The Guild 2, I found myself utterly disinterested in blackmailing, torturing, or wiping out other dynasties; I simply achieved my goals without harming them and that was okay.
Moral Combat
Monica Potts argues in the American Prospect (for those of who who don't know, it's a left-of-center magazine) that liberals who play video games go along with the conservative modes of play within them. (For the purposes of this discussion, the word "liberal" will refer to everything from so...
You're asking this in a language derived primarily from Germanic with significant French and Latin influences and an odd assortment of borrowings from a hundred other world languages, every word of which is a symbol indicating some particular collection of concepts, the juxtaposition of which carry strange meanings that make puns possible, and when brought together can create even more concepts with only distant relation to their constituent parts?
Sure. It will be possible. Will you be learning Quenya or Klingon first?
Symbols in Virtual Worlds
Commenter Dave wrote to say that he's interested in a discussion about Call of Duty's policies toward user-created images. Quoth Dave: Recently a gamer asked a CoD developer if using a swastika as an emblem ingame would be ok. The developer said no and it would result in a ban. Original quest...
Haven't read the dissertation yet, but I've guessed that prehistoric economic processes arose as a reaction to the inability to keep up with absolutely everyone's reputation: eventually you just have to trust the stamp on the coin. It makes sense that the causal action can go in the opposite direction, where the abstraction of a number makes a friendship go cold.
In an era of data traces, numbered friend counts, and performance evaluations, there is a lot less room (often intentionally so) for people to connect on a personal level. One of the reasons I dislike combat-oriented games is that multiplayer combat beyond about four players tends towards hierarchy, and hierarchy makes intimacy difficult.
A dissertation distilled into a single blog post /cry
Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to share my research with you. Hopefully, this post isn’t a tl;dr moment for you. I recently defended my dissertation at the University of Washington College of Education, and, as you can guess from this post on Terra Nova, it was on learning in MMOGs. S...
I wrote something on the difference between craft and art a while back that seems relevant: http://raccaldin36.livejournal.com/2102319.html
Game Design: The Art of the Human?
I can't get it out of my head or understand it when it is in there. Please discuss, share. Artists :: Art as Game Designers :: People.
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