As you may know, the Xbox 360 has a system of “achievements”—little goals that you can complete in games to net you points on your “Gamerscore.” When you kill 100 opponents in ranked matches with a chainsaw in Gears of War, for example, a little message pops up to let you know you’ve received the “It’s a Massacre” achievement. (More example Gears achievements here.) It’s basically the single-player high score system from arcades put into an online context.

I think the achievement system is a clever idea, though I wish I could disable it. It can be distracting to have little messages popping up while I’m trying to kill people with a chainsaw. I’m also unclear still on whether gamerscore has any impact on how you get placed in ranked matches of games like Gears, or whether you only get placed based on your previous experience with that specific game (with less chance of being placed with people you’ve rated poorly). As I’ve said here previously, I’d rather be grouped with other players based on preferred play and conversation style (i.e., not so much swearing and racist/homophobic slurs) than based on score-based rankings.

I’m blogging this now, though, because the variety of player reactions toward the achievement system may offer an interesting glimpse into what people see as the purposes and appeals of video gaming. Raphael van Lierop has started up a conversation spanning several web pages about the pros and cons of the achievement system and Gamerscore, which he calls “the new gaming geek bragging rights, the justification to your peers for all those hours you spent playing Oblivion.” I think it’s particularly interesting how he points out that the achievements are typically weighted toward online play, which you need to spend extra to have access to. See the original forum thread here, which I came upon via Joystiq, via GameSetWatch, via Dearest Copernicus, via IGDA executive director Jason Della Rocca.

A couple quick links from Gamasutra look interesting enough to get back to later (I think I found them both on Kotaku): Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking on “exploration,” and game designer/theorist Ian Bogost on why we need more boring games.

Also, Game Politics has had a lot of extensive coverage of legislation that would regulate video games. The latest news out of New York is that the state senate passed a bill in just four days, and the state assembly passed a bill (backed by the governor) in just one day. These would fine or imprison retailers for selling certain games to minors. They’re not the exact same bill, though, so the senate and assembly will be looking to compromise on a bill before the legislative session is up on June 21st.

I was inspired to write about this when I noticed some of the wording of that latter bill, which would make a felony out of selling games to minors which depict “rape, dismemberment, physical torture, mutilation or evisceration of a human being.” Actually, that would include quite a few games; I’ve never seen rape in a game, but you can see (even cartoonish) evisceration and mutilation in a variety of games, I think. What is really worrisome about this, though, is that the only games I can think of offhand which show “physical torture” do so for meaningful purposes, or including to unsettle the player. These include F.E.A.R. (the demo has you coming upon a torture scene which eerily disappears as you get close); Metal Gear Solid (in which your ability to withstand torture determines whether your ally lives or dies); and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (in which you come upon bad guys torturing a scientist to death, and then have the option to lay his body down to offer him some “dignity”).

Note that all of these examples feature torture that you witness or experience, but don’t perpetrate. The bill as written makes no distinction between these. I’d write more about this, but I just sent an entire paper about this sort of thing out for review last night, so I’ll let you know how that goes eventually.

My friend (and Annenberg officemate) Bill Herman has written a post over at Shouting Loudly about a Slate article claiming that games encourage violence. Bill invited me to contribute to Shouting Loudly many months ago, but I only pop in occasionally because I’m on shaky ground in his areas of research. I had actually been planning to write on this same Slate piece, so I just wrote a ludicrously long comment to Bill’s post. Considering how long it was, I figured I might as well repost it here, edited for accuracy, clarity, and a new context. Head over there to follow the conversation going on in the Comments.

As I’ve previously written about here and elsewhere, connecting video game violence to real-world violence is a tricky game. On the one hand, you seem to have a mountain of evidence in the form of academic research; on the other hand, there must be a reason that legislation to regulate games keeps getting overturned in court. Plus, the lack of popular articles covering opposing evidence seems a bit suspect, such as in a recent Slate article boldly titled “Why video games really are linked to violence.” My argument here, then, is that concern about video game violence has less to do with actual media effects than with a surge in fear and misunderstanding surrounding a new medium. Video games are at the center of a moral panic, and their impact has been grossly blown out of proportion.

Continue reading “Why Video Games Really Are Linked to Moral Panic” →

Earlier tonight, a small group of my friends gathered to play games together. I made a comment at dinner about how I should’ve brought Guitar Hero, which I haven’t played in a while, and my friend Caralyn, who is less a gamer than others present, warily asked if we would be playing board games or video games. The plan was to play board games, I said, and she replied, “Oh good, I know how to play those.” Being the huge nerd that I am, I commented that this was a pretty interesting comment to me, considering that video games tend to have only a limited number of input mechanisms—the buttons on the controllers—whereas board games have a theoretically limitless number of input methods. “Whatever,” she said, “I haven’t played video games since Duck Hunt.”

My friend isn’t the only one who thinks of playing modern video games as somewhat akin to reading a foreign language (except that when you butcher a foreign language, at least you don’t have to watch a tiny avatar of yourself being helplessly destroyed). As Ernest Adams suggests in a recent Gamasutra article (link via Kotaku), action games are typically only playable by hardcore gamers, inaccessible to newcomers and disabled players. What is it about some games that makes my friend think she knows how to play them, while others seem impenetrable? I’d like to consider for a moment that these sorts of examples might point to a certain “video game literacy” that players are expected to possess, and which might have fairly unique implications for game design.

Continue reading “Musing on Video Game Literacy” →

Some time ago, I told my friend Jordan that he had to play Shadow of the Colossus to completion, and that I wouldn’t tell him what I thought about the game until he was done with it. He finished it last night, and the brief conversation that resulted made me want to revisit an earlier post on trauma and consequences in narrative games. (Spoiler alert for all that follows, of course…)

Continue reading “The Horse and the Princess” →

By some divine chance, my friend Tom scores himself some geek points for buying a German board game, and the very next day, I find an article (liked to by The Morning News) about how to start your own board gaming group. As the latter article states,

Here we find the dirty little secret of the board game hobby. Unlike going to the movies, watching TV or stopping at the pub for a drink or three, you have to encourage — and sometimes train — others to participate. Some adults haven’t played board games in years, and may dismiss them as “kid’s stuff;” others balk at the prospect of having to learn rules; yet other might equate game playing with overly competitive and interminable sessions of Monopoly, unaware that modern board games fall in an entirely different phylum.

And yet, if you can convince people to join you, they invariably thank you for it afterwards. Playing board games is like exercise: some people are reluctant to do it, but everyone is happy to have done it.

The article offers some practical tips, and also concludes with a warning against trying to “convert” those who just aren’t interested. (People who give advice to geeks often feel compelled to give general tips on avoiding painfully awkward social interaction.) If you have a game group of your own, please feel free to email or comment with your own thoughts on how to make those work. For what it’s worth, the secret trick of my former housemates’ gaming group was to have plenty of cheese, crackers, and root beer for ourselves and guests. It’s important to ply people with delicious foods when you are asking them to do things they might otherwise be hesitant to do, as those who organize events for grad students will surely agree.