Tag: ITU

As we may watch

Ex-co-PhD student Martin Sønderlev Christensen (of nowuseit fame) defends his thesis masterpiece at ITU tomorrow (14:00, Auditorium 4 or 2).

The thesis is here (draft version).

Update:



By stilleben [‘stelle:bƏn] http://www.flickr.com/people/stilleben/

The abstract reads:

Abstract
This dissertation offers a cultural theoretical interpretation of the emergence of personal affective mobile media [PAMM]. By interpreting the apparent cultural changes and representation of mobile devices, the dissertation provides a description that emphasizes a conceptual shift from understanding technology as efficiency to using it affectively.

Continue reading As we may watch

The psychology of dough-nut salesmen

Sometimes – rarely – a book manages to forcefully alter the way you view your surroundings. For me, such books are almost always of the popular science variety. I recently, based on Thomas‘ sage advice, enjoyed Cialdini’s Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion in which the author entertainingly describes salesman’s (in the broadest sense) techniques to bend you to their will. I promise that this book will make you enjoy meeting salespeople more – even if understanding the principles (one of the interesting points of the book) does not make one immune to their dark powers.

I experienced the latter quite clearly in a recent trip to Tunesia. On our first day, a dough-nut salesman walked up to me and my 3-year old daughter offering his sugary wonders. I told him no thanks, but he was persistent and finally put a dough-nut in the hand of my daughter who promptly took a bite. He then asked for payment. To put it in terms suitable for this blog I instantly developed somewhat negative feelings towards our dough-nut friend. I told him that he had given away his dough-nut – and I didn’t pay him. He walked off and my daughter threw away the thing quite quickly. And at this point, the situation was: My daughter had had a bite of dough-nut and nobody had suffered any damage. So why did I still feel extremely annoyed: Because he had disregarded my clearly stated interest and used my daughter as part of the bargain, but also because he had made me violate the extremely strong reciprocity principle in human interaction. See Cialdini’s Chapter 2.

In a larger perspective the best of such books does the reader a great service by tying together phenomena that the brain formerly had to process individually. It collapses seemingly separate categories and thus makes room for more. They make you smart.

Sing, O goddess

All good things – and apparently also the barely bearable ones – must come to an end.

As implied, my dissertation was sent on its merry way through the labyrinthine ways of the Danish PhD system, beyond human interference. That is well and good.

In recent weeks I’ve been in recovery spending much-appreciated (by me, at least) quality time with the family. Venturing a premature diagnosis, I’d say I’ve come through with only curable wounds (but the dreams! the dreams!!!).

The old “What now?” question rears its head. From now on I’ll focus on embedded gender values in late modernity leisure practices in a strictly hermeneutic pperspective. No seriously, here’s what: From 1 Sep I’ll return to the ITU to co-teach the “Digital Media” course and to head (in practice from October-November or so) the Digital Design and Communication study line. Formally, I’ll be a member of the Innovative Communication research group but I will of course stay closely in touch with the illustrious Game Center.

I guess all these changes makes this a good time to take stock. This blog, I believe, has suffered from a lack of focus. Rest assured this will only get worse. I will be finger-thinking about new topics and generally allow myself the luxury of constraintlessness. On the other hand, I will be more systematic with entry categorization so it will be possible to RSS-read more specifically.

And so, I need only say welcome back to TDSoT – it’s not new, but it’s not very old either.

(I’ll be uploading the dissertation here as soon as I can create a web-friendly PDF).

Methodological commandments

Finishing up my dissertation I am naturally curious about methodological requirements in game studies. A general meme seems to be that the field is multi-disciplinary and no clear guidelines can be given and yet, I’ve stumbled upon a few. The following, arguably, are claims about how game studies should be conducted. Make of it what you will…

“Ultimately, the player’s perspective (Jenkins 1999) and understanding of play
must be included in any meaningful discussion of FPS games and, indeed, of
all video games.”

Wright, T., Boria, E., & Breidenbach, P. (2002). Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games. Game Studies, 2(2).

–

“Gamers’ own thinking about styles of play and the identities they underwrite are a conflation of design characteristics and emergent culture of the context of the MMOG they inhabit, situated within the myriad of contexts they
themselves encounter with others, with some configurations of constructs evoked for sense-making in some social/material contexts, other configurations evoked in order to explain others. They are therefore complicated and necessarily messy. Our analyses of them ought to be a testament to this fact.”

and

“Indeed, indepth investigation into the ‘worlds of meaning’ created, maintained, and displayed by so-called ‘end users’ may very well be the only solid foundation on which to theorize a culture so definitively constructivist, heteroglossic, and hermeneutic
(Steinkuehler, Black & Clinton, 2005) as that of games.”

Steinkuehler, C. (2005). Cognition & Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach. University of Wisconsin-Madison.

–

“In general, any methodological approach which does not take participants as the primary actors produces flawed results.”

Jakobsson, M., & Taylor, T. L. (2003, 19-23 May). The Sopranos Meets EverQuest: Social Networking in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Paper presented at DAC2003, Melbourne, Australia.

–

“…the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there is no game without a player. The act of playing game is where the rules embedded into game’s structure start operating, and its program code starts having an effect on cultural and social, as well as artistic and commercial realities. If we want to understand what a game is, we need to understand what happens in the act of playing, and we need to understand the player and the experience
of gameplay.”

Ermi, L., & Mäyrä, F. (2005, 16-20 June). Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion. Paper presented at DIGRA 2005: Changing Views: Worlds in Play, Vancouver, Canada.

Soccer players are excellent game theorists

Turns out that penalty kick behaviour conforms beautifully with game theoretical predictions.

Economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta of Brown University has studied thousands of penalty kicks. Penalty kicks are theoretically wonderful since they constitute 2-player zero-sum games where players have very few available strategies and where the outcome is decided immediately after the initial action.

Palacios-Huerta found that no strategy is inherently better. And that soccer players (as opposed to the typical lab subjects of behavioural game theory) manage to play truly randomly (the way they ought to if they are following basic game theory assumptions):

…professional players are found to be capable of behaving perfectly randomly. Their sequences neither exhibit negative or positive autocorrelation, and choices do not depend on one’s own previous play, on the opponent’s previous plays or on past outcomes.

According to the author, these results are close to unique, i.e. the observed behaviour (supporting the model) has not been seen in other experimental contexts.

The article is a fascinating example of how games (in our sense) and game theory (in the economist’s sense) may be reciprocally fruitful. Which was the larger point of Edward Castronova’s recent article Castronova, E. (2006). The Research Value of Large Games: Natural Experiments in Norrath and Camelot. Games and Culture, 1(2), 163-186.