Various media (e.g. The Herald) report how a German study has shown racing game players to be prone to reckless real-world driving.
Crucially, the researchers seem to have found a correlation between self-reported racing game use and self-reported accident frequency.
That is not a causal link.
There might exist such a causal link but the importance of the study is being overestimated.
I am in excellent company on the 07 GDC Game Studies Download Top 10, as covered by Raph Koster. Here are the slides. The esteemed scholars are referring to my dissertation.
In the LA Times article Virtual loses its virtues, Alana Semuels makes interesting observations on social tension in Second Life. In particular she notes how old-timers feel a loss of control in the face of the massive influx of commercial interest. Early residents who have expressed their discomfort via virtual weaponry say that they
…don’t necessarily mind the new residents, but they want more influence in deciding the future of the virtual world. Most important, they want Linden Lab to allow voting on issues affecting their in-world experience.
Now, the tension between “original” inhabitants and new-comers is a common virtual world issue (and a first life one as well). It often results in an exodus of groups of discontents. But the tension is also interesting in terms of how future virtual world rivals will approach the issue of commercial use. Will SL competitors choose far less economically focused models or will they simply copy the SL format with improved features and graphics?
BTW, I reflected on social development in virtual worlds in my master thesis on The Architectures of Trust (chapter 2). Slightly dated in terms of virtual worlds, but perhaps not in terms of human nature :-)
Via Secondlife.dk
Recently, I’ve been talking to a good number of journalists about Second Life.
I know about virtual worlds, but I always try to point out that I have no particular SL expertise. I haven’t spent enough time in that world to fully grasp its mechanics and particular features. Anyway, that disclaimer rarely makes it into the articles, which may be fair enough.
The most common question I’m asked is this: Why are all these companies/institutions/libraries establishing themselves in Second Life? To this my reply is always: I don’t know, you should ask them, but if you want my guess a part of the reason is that many are eager to become experienced with a possibly important platform for marketing/interaction, are afraid to miss out on an important development and are attracted by the chance for publicity.
Now, this “answer” puts me in the “critical” camp. And indeed I am critical about the potential of SL (and 3D virtual worlds). But only in relation to widespread claims of their world-transforming effects. 3D virtual worlds have their uses but they are not, IMO, universally fantastic. An example: It makes sense to sell clothes and cars in such places but it makes no particular sense to sell books and CDs in there. Also, it makes immediate sense for an international company to use SL for conferences (if the alternative is developing one’s own expensive and inferior system) but it makes no immediate sense for a public library to establish an unstaffed house in SL offering visitors virtual ice cream.
In terms of revolutionary capabilities, I think that SL is comparable to chat rooms and MUDs of the nineties. For sure, it has potential but a large part of the enthusiasm can only be explained with reference to over-enthusiastic hype. To recycle an old cliché: The challenge is figuring out which part.
More
I’ve been quoted for saying that Second Life is unlikely to last for more than 5-7 years. What I mean, of course, is that while 3D worlds will prevail, Second Life itself is unlikely to. This is nothing but a historical observation, neither MUD1, Active Worlds, LambdaMoo, Ultima Online nor EverQuest are market leaders today. Second Life may last forever (depending to a large degree on specifics of its core design) but all I’m saying is, I’d be surprised.
The implications of this is that Second Life specific investments are unlikely to pay off forever – experience gained on use of virtual worlds, of course, will not be lost if SL loses steam one day.
My dissertation has arrived in printed form. If you’d like a copy, come by the office or drop me a line.
Not often is the game scholar mailing list GAMESNETWORK the scene of passionate outbursts.
But in the proud tradition of this blog of posting digital snippets without commentary, here’s two interesting methodological recommendations for intrepid young scholars in the field:
Scholar 1:
And for that matter too many of you are studying WoW. Stop it. You’re boring the crap out of me.
Quickly followed by Scholar 2:
…nobody but academics and corporate marketers care about Second Life. This should be a sign to all involved. The only people I’ve met in there are researchers, academics trying to stalk other academics (me included), people selling their badly designed t-shirts, and corporate salesmen. Its my idea of hell, and research on it is my idea of a journey therein.
I’ve now uploaded the final version of my dissertation Plans and Purposes: How videogame goals shape player behaviour (4.5MB PDF).
It differs from the previously uploaded draft by having fewer obvious typos. Nothing of substance was changed, I assure you. More info is available at the PhD page.
Some time ago the Danish minister of culture initiated an effort to establish a series of cultural “canons”, listing the most important works in a range of genre/media.
This initiative, of course, spurred on all kinds of ignored forms of expression to publish their own lists. And so, along with colleagues from the Danish game researcher network spilforskning.dk and at the suggestion of Multimedieforeningen (the Danish game business association), I have been involved in picking out the 20-something most important videogames ever. In our humble opinion, of course.
And the listed are… (with links to descriptions in Danish):
Our initiative has recieved some attention. For instance:
The Christmas issue of Game Studies has hit the streets. This implies that my own article The Games Economists Play – Implications of Economic Game Theory for the Study of Computer Games has now been revealed.
Here’s the abstract:
It is a source of confusion that economists for decades have worked on “game theory” while studying economic behaviour. However, while not focused on games in the recreational sense this perspective does provide a highly meticulous complementary framework for the understanding of computer game structure and player behaviour. This article attempts to extract useful analytic concepts and insights from economic game theory and to give suggestions for how these might be put to concrete use in the study of computer games. A non-technical introduction is given, the framework is applied to computer games, a brief case study is performed and finally ideas for future research are presented.
What more can you ask for?
And hey, merry Christmas out there.
The good people at Digiplay have wikified their game bibliography.
I can’t say that I like the interface much, but I love the BibTex integration and the RSS feed (in good Web 2.0 spirit we show the latest additions on the front page of Game Research).
2074 references entered, and counting.
