Computerspil

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.

List of things that are poorly named

Some things are just poorly-to-exceptionally badly named:

1) Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species had almost incomparably important things to say about a wide range of phenonemena, but it said next to nothing about speciacation (the origin of species, that is)

2) Reeves and Nash’ Media Equation is pretty much the idea that people treat things as if they were people. It’s not an equation and it’s not about media.

3) (Economic) Game Theory is not really about games (although sometimes it is) and it’s not a theory.

Should we award special consideration to things that seem to succeed despite being so uninformatively named?
(Other examples?)

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.