… You take away his credit card. (Har har har.)

But no, really: the World of Warcraft Visa rewards you for purchases by crediting your WoW account with gametime. (Link via Boing Boing via the in-between via makezine via Joi Ito.) Make‘s take on this is particularly interesting, particularly seeing as how they saw this coming awhile ago.

Arguably, this is a blending of economies right before our eyes, but I’d be really interested to see real-world credit cards that reward you with gold pieces in-game. Now that I think about that, though, such a move would probably make people upset about game balance issues—so how about an in-game credit card that rewards players with points redeemable for real-world purchases? As we see games increasingly blur the boundaries between work and play, it would be fascinating to see game world actually designed to take advantage of these shifts.

Linked to because I focus disproportionately on digital games: Board Game Geek has a feature on famous critics dissecting board games.

A friend recently told me an anecdote about a game involving space travel.¹ There wasn’t much of a story to the game overall, but there was a narrative element insofar as your actions were supposed to have moral consequences. Basically, do bad things and you’ll go to the dark side. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that players determined that the best way to start this game was to throw a guy out an airlock.

This action wasn’t for humorous value or to demonstrate right off the bat how badass your character was: it was a strategy. The extent to which an evil act affected your morality was relative to everything you had done before it. Start the game with the most evil action possible, and you have nowhere to go but up. Only the good guys could eventually acquire the best ship in the game, and this strategy made that goal more easily attainable. This is just one of many examples of how games fail at emotional engagement because they are more about winning than about feeling.

Continue reading “Trauma and Consequences in Narrative Games” →

It’s taken me awhile to get around to posting this, but Joystiq posted a synopsis of an interesting talk about game mechanics by Tracy Fullerton. You’re getting the talk through the filter of someone else’s notes, of course, but interesting food for thought on whether the game industry is stuck on the same old mechanics.

As a follow-up to the earlier post on entertainment advocacy and activism, consider this pledge offered by Joystiq, which young gamers can sign to show their parents that they won’t cross the line between fake and real violence. As one of the bloggers explains in the comments,

Keep in mind as you read this that it was created as a positive way to counter Jack Thompson. Instead of cursing the darkness, you can talk to someone you love who doesn’t understand games. It’s our own little counter-information campaign, and we’d love any feedback you can provide.

Part of the reason he’s explaining this, perhaps, is that Joystiq commenters can be critical of such an effort’s effectiveness. The negative attitude some gamers might have toward such campaigns may be why I haven’t seen much of a grassroots gamer movement to speak of yet. Comments on the previously-linked Game Politics article also indicate some sense of how gamers feel about such a movement:

Terminator44 Says:
“This is a very unprecedented move. Perhaps efforts to create a gamer grassroots movement are working after all.”

GameClucks Says:
“Still, good on them for the grassroots effort to make a better name for the gaming community. Also, I applaud them for their work in organizing competitive gaming tournaments, which is no simple task.”

Jonathan Brown Says:
“Can we take any grassroots effort seriously when its led by a man who legally changed his name to ‘Triforce’?”