Category: Stuff

Post-aesthetics

Back from sunny Bergen, I can report that the Aesthetics of Play conference was most succesful. Presentations were competent and varied and the organizers impressively organized.
One thing that struck me as oddish was the strong focus, in most presentations, of issues related to realism, mimemis, representation (as opposed to, say, rules). Guess I just figured that general interest had veered away from such things, but the conference did of course focus on “aesthetics”.
No-one (else) spoke of games as competitive or of players as optimizers/achievers but that just proves my point that game studies represent a radically different theory of the player than does game design (how’s that for a generalization?).

Tourist pictures on Flickr.

Oh, and this site has been down for a few days due to the server-threatening behaviour of a WordPress plug-in.

Turning Japanese

Had the pleasure today of visiting the Tokyo Game Show to take part in what was a genuinely chaotically entertaining experience. New consoles where everywhere but apart from that, horse racing seems to be the game theme of tomorrow. Saddle up, gentlemen.
Afterwards I met up with Espen, Espen’s friend, and Lisa Galarneau of Social Study Games fame. We were led wisely through the Ginza district to find both beer and raw fish in suitable quaintities.
Tomorrow I’m off to Kobe for the Icec 2005 conference.

The danger of effect studies

I wrote an “analysis” for the newspaper Politiken (4 Sep) on the issue of violent games and aggressive behaviour. The immediate reason was recent press releases from the American Psychological Association purporting strong claims based on absurdly low-powered new recearch (an informal 5 page research review presented at the association’s yearly meeting).

I strongly suggested that there were good reasons to be skeptical of many standard (social psychological) experimental studies into this issue.

The editors, as it happened, made a few additions/changes. One was the headline which they changed to “Video games cause violence – just as children come with the stork, right?”. This was an allusion to the problem of mixing correlation with causation (an increase in storks has, during a certain period, correlated with an increase in child-birth).
The editors also added a sub-heading: “All studies to date which claim to establish a connection between computer games and violent behaviour rest on shaky scientific foundations”. Now, this is somewhat in line with my argument but I would not myself have put it as strongly simply because the problems with the studies are very different and depend upon a great number of assumptions.

Finally, the editors added the “What link?” graph from a recent The Economist article with the caption “The claim that video games cause violence has no basis in reality. On the contrary, the number of violent assault in the US is decreasing while sales of video games are on the rise.”

But of course, while the graph is surely thought-provoking, it does not prove the claim in the caption. In fact, it is interesting but obviously dangerous in such a critical article where any error will, of course, be flung back in the author’s face.

That happened in yesterday’s Politiken when a Bjarne Frandsen felt that the graph indicated either “manipulation” or “an amazing degree of ignorance concerning elementary statistics”.

I just send my objections to be (hopefully) printed as a brief letter to the editor.

It will be interesting to see if there are more reactions, whether to my text or to the additions of the editors.

A rare bird in these parts

The seldom-heard catharsis hypothesis gets aired by Steven Johnson, as a sort of spin-off of his recent book (in which it did not rear its much-criticized head).

I personally doubt if the idea is as dead as some people like to think. Hell, I predict its triumphant return in the near future. Beware.

Of course another interesting explanation for crime decrease has recently been aired.

Psychologists reveal: “violent perpetrators in interactive media go unpunished 73 percent of the time”

The American Psychological Association continues its quest for improved morality in games, interestingly revealing that “violent perpetrators in interactive media go unpunished 73 percent of the time” (Source: MTV).
This is fascinating. It goes to show how unrepresentative I am- when I played Vice City I never completed the game, and was consequently punished for my in-game crimes 100% of the time. But we now have proof that most (perhaps all!!) other players must have completed the game at first try.

Here’s APA’s press release and official Resolution on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media.

Copenhagen, come in Copenhagen

Showing my combined gaming effort of the near past, present and future here’s my state-of-the-art Axis submarine as Captain Schmidt glides gently through the narrow strait between Zealand and Amager only to find… a surprising mass of land (crippling my forward torpedo tubes) and no trace of Copenhagen.
Other than being geographically challenged, Silent Hunter III seems quite promising. But then again, I’m biased towards all things submarinian.
Online submarine battle, anyone?

Counter-Strike, chess, the brain

Computerworld.dk has published an article in which Lars Konzack and I comment on the claims of Kjeld Fredens.

I agree entirely with Lars that speaking of video games as one shapeless mass is quite unfruitful (Fredens’ claim mostly makes sense in connection with action games).

But my main point was that, cutting Fredens a little slack, the proposed hypothesis is not unreasonable – it is just undocumented. Like so many other claims about games & brains.

Also, I’m qouted for saying that video games are different from board games in the sense that the former sometimes allow single-player play but that people making”games are anti-social” claims should consider the fact that books are far more anti-social. My point here was not that “books are bad” but that the “X is anti-social” charge is uninteresting.