News24.com fears rapid increases in video game addiction.
“There are few long-term scientific studies on video game addiction… But the reach of the video obsession is borne out by the popularity of one online game Halo 2. By early 2005, one million players, had staggeringly clocked up nearly 100 million hours on the game, according to industry figures. ”
Each Halo 2 player doing 100 hours of game time? Must be a really good game.
Many communication studies casually mention the “say/do conflict” i.e. the fact that interviewed people do not always respond in a way compatible with the empirical truth (even if not lying in a techincal sense).
We know that to be the case. It is commonplace.
But what are the most thoughtful/precise references/books/studies which try to explain and/or document the extent of the conflict in different contexts?
Said senator Deanna Demuzio recently: “Video games are not art or media… They are simulations, not all that different from the simulations used by the U.S. military in preparation for war.”
There you have it. No more “What is a game?” papers needed, then.
The opposite of fun is not boredom: Videogames, art and communication
Sure, videogames are fun but is that enough? If television had focused solely on fun, we wouldn’t have news programs, documentaries, commercials or drama. Fun is just one element in the equation of making games, especially when you have a different agenda than just entertaining your players. This talk will review the artistic and communicational potential of videogames by exploring different examples of political, educational and non-traditional games. The language of cinema owes a lot to early art and political films (Griffith, Eisenstein, Riefenstahl): could a similar trend happen in videogames?
Thursday May 26
9.15am to 11.00am
Room 8.3.32 (KUA)
Gonzalo Frasca works at the Center for Computer Game Research at the IT University. He edits Ludology.org and co-edits Game Studies and WaterCoolerGames.org. He is the co-founder of Powerful Robot Games studio, leads the Newsgaming.com project and co-designed the first official videogame ever commissioned for a US Presidential campaign. He is also a former head of game production at Cartoon Network LA.
Okay, I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a research blog of sorts. Not fully kidding, anyway.
Elsewhere on this site I have claimed to be researching the issue of social order/control in multiplayer gamespaces. That’s still an interesting topic, of course.
But recently I have drifted towards another main issue: How can analytical game theory help us analyze video games? What predictions as to player behaviour does such a perspective entail? And how do these prediction fare when confronted with empirically real players?
I approach the latter part by analyzing the behaviour of players who play a small series of multiplayer console games. The players are videotaped while playing (as hinted at here) and their behaviour/communication is then analyzed (for more details send me an email).
One thing quite interesting about this approach is that my study seems to be fairly unique. Of course, whenever people say that no-one else has done X one may follow the rule of thumb that they haven’t looked properly. But at least I’m working with the hypothesis that no-one has done really micro analyses of the interaction between video game players on a small scale (that is non-ethnographic) working with questions like: “What do players say to each other?”, “Do players play to win or to make sure everybody has fun?” etc.
Prove my hypothesis wrong and I’ll buy you a beer.
Update: Unrelated to this post both Jesper and Bryan have actually alerted me to XEODesign’s report “Why We Play Games” (11mb download) which in fact reports a very interesting (and ambitious) study of player behaviour – even if targeted at “why?” and not “how?”. Not sure what the rules are exactly, but I might owe both of you a beer.