Archive for September 2010

Games are a part of Life

September 27, 2010 Videogames Comments Off on Games are a part of Life

“Gamification”is going to be the next big thing.  It’s not a particularly new thing, but technology and games are reaching a level of sophistication that will allow games to move beyond the confines of consoles and computers and into broader, everyday life.  

There is a common misperception that gamification equals trivialization.  That, for some reason, applying game principles and concepts to the form and function of life turns it into something lesser.  As if, by taking the tedium or seriousness out of tasks somehow makes the end result worth less.  As if the ditch you dug while silent was somehow a lesser product than the ditch you dug while singing.  

Let me ask you this, how many times have you played “license  plate bingo” or “yellow car” while on a long drive? How many times have you tried to sing your way through 100 bottles of beer on the wall to relieve the boredom of a week-long road-trip?  When was the last time you tried to shoot a wadded up ball of paper into the trashcan from the far end of the office cubicle?  

It is the nature of man and woman to make games.  To take a tedious task, to take something you would rather not do, and give yourself a reason to do it.  It can be through reward motivations (i.e. I can have a slice of cake if I eat all the overcooked broccoli) or through some sort of punishment to be avoided (putting a quarter into the cookie jar every time you swear in front of your kids).   

This has all been tried before, you see.  Educators, or would-be educators, have been trying for decades to find a way to cross the streams, to make products that will be entertaining and teach skills like reading and arithmetic.  In so many of these “edutainment” instances, however, the focus is so heavy on the learning, and specifically on making the learning visible to the parents who are buying these products, that the gamification, the attention to the psychology and structure of just what makes a game “fun” goes by the wayside.  It’s the same perceptual problem yet again, if it’s too fun, if the lessons are too subtle, then the product becomes trivialized, no matter how effective it might be in the long run.  

One of the questions that this whole train of thought brought to mind, was just how much *can* you learn from video games? When you think back, are there any things you do differently, ways you think differently, situations you might have approached differently because of time spent in games? For me, I know the Blair Witch movie was ruined because of many many sessions playing DnD (really, playing with all the stick figures in the woods, guys? Thats RPG survival 101, right up there next to “if it’s shiny, it’s a trap”) and I suspect it has affected my thought process elsewhere, in the way I look for and define solutions to problems of all sorts.

I’ve been asked this question more than once, what do you learn from playing “non-educational” games. It’s a hard question to answer (and probably the reason the “edutainment” games tend to approach the topic so obviously). Games as a class can teach without teaching, the same way your kids learn how to open the door to the refrigerator, or how to take off their pants by themselves, you learn thought processes, how logic trees work, basic math skills get reinforced, hand eye coordination, any number of different skills might be reinforced or advanced depending on the games style of play. The real trick is in the *quantification* of those learned skills.

So I am curious as to how this new trend of turning everything into a game (of sorts) is going to affect these larger ideas. Is it actually, number one, going to change the way people think about games and ramification in general (ideally towards the more positive, but you never know what people will do) but number two, will it change the way people think about edutainment, about learning games in general. Are they going to get less obvious and more “fun” (ie something that you might pick up for yourself instead of just imposing it on your kids) or is the status quo going to remain the same until the current generation gets into positions where these changes in attitude can ultimately be reflected.

Emotional Baggage

September 6, 2010 Uncategorized Comments Off on Emotional Baggage
I have to admit, Silent Hill scares the crap out of me.
Which is kind of a strange thing, when i think about it. I’m a big fan of the game, in fact, the whole silent Hill series remains one of my favorite survival-horror games of all time.
So why does the movie, a 2hr, linear horror experience, freak me out much worse than a 40 hour monster fest? In fact, one might argue that the horror movie experience is somewhat “safer” simply because it is not as interactive an experience, that there is an element of passivity, that elements in the film are not directly within my control, therefore, I should just be able to go along for the ride.
But see, therein lies the rub. That right there is a core difference between a gamer and a viewer. We can’t stand it. We can’t stand the idea that there is nothing that we can do, that theres no way to change the story, save the girl or the puppy or the horrible green mutant. Within the confines of the game, these is always the perception of opportunity. That if you can just find the right combination of actions and ins actions, you can beat the story and make it all come out all right. And even if you do lose, or if the ending of the game is not something you would have chosen, you at the least have the satisfaction of knowing you beat it, of knowing you did everything right, that you stepped into every perilous situation, that the horrible ending came about anyway, but dammit, you fought that bitch to the end.
So that, of all things, brings me to that ever pervasive idea about how the player makes a connection to the game. There’s a lot of noise these days about the ability of games to make you “feel”, about whether or a game can give you the same sort of emotional tie in you might get with a piece of literature, or with a piece of film. More specifically, can a game make you feel the subtler emotions, not just fear or anger or the adrenaline rush of gunning down a million semi-dismembered zombies.
The fact that I am notably more affected by a film than a game, particularly in the case of a strong emotion, like terror, might suggest that the game might be affecting me *less* deeply than the film might be.
Right?
But games, as a class, allow you to do the one thing that film and literature *do not* allow you to do. They allow you to act. They allow you to do that one thing that has been proven, time and time again, to allow you to “counter” your fear through action, rather than sitting on your hands for a few hours. You can turn off a film, you can put down a book, but those avenues do not empower the reader or the audience the same way that games do.
So at the end of the day, despite the numerous comparisons out there, games are a different animal than films or books, and comparing them, comparing the experiences of the player/reader/viewer very rapidly becomes an apples to oranges type of situation. The way in which the different media interact with their audiences is so different that the content, even the same content translated into each of those different media, is ultimately going to be affected by the nature of that interaction and empowerment given through that interaction.