Archive for September, 2007
September 21, 2007 at 2:08 am · Filed under games
Thinking about conventions for board games caused me to check out the Wikipedia entry for them. There they are defined as games “played with counters or pieces that are placed on, removed from, or moved across a “board” (a premarked surface, usually specific to that game).” It goes on to define games as either simulating aspects of real life (e.g. Monopoly, Clue, Risk) or not simulating any real life event (e.g. Chess, Checkers, and Scrabble). It’s interesting that this distinction doesn’t take into account the player’s relationship to the board or the relationship of the pieces to each other. I would like to develop a language that addresses the formal relationships of players to the tokens, as well as tokens to each other, in the space of gameplay. For example, what does it mean when a game allows two or more tokens to occupy the same space? Often the narrative of the game forces players to keep one piece on each designated space, but sometimes there is only physical room for one piece in a space. How are these different? How does the narrative enforce the physical design of the board?
September 19, 2007 at 10:41 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been asked to create a multimedia presentation that answers the question: what is your meme? I’ve already stated that my focus is on games, but that designation becomes limited fairly quickly. There are several media that come together to make an electronic game. A game played on paper requires fewer. A cultural or learning game requires only visual language and an implicit understanding of the rules. What I’m really after in my studies and creative output is an understanding of why people play games in general, why certain people play certain games in particular, and how to create games that question those things and bring this sort of understanding of games to the cultural fore. Rather than a knee-jerk reaction from violence in games, let’s make a game that attempts to understand violence and the role that videogames have in the overall culture of violence. Of the many angles from which we experience violence, videogames surely play a small role but are big news.
If distilled from my interests, my meme really has to do with the feedback between critical and cultural reception of games as rhetoric and the creation of intentionally rhetorical (through the rules of their systems) games. These rules are not only effective on paper; the social and environmental conditions, interface, and the mindset of players all influence the way that the message is received. I’m not sure how to distill this into a meme.
September 16, 2007 at 2:48 am · Filed under games
The Monopoly board game is pretty iconic and commonplace at this point, but I gave it a reworking for DU that is coming along. I haven’t made changes to the board since last year, but I’ve been readying it for a board game exhibition that has apparently been cancelled. Oh well…the work goes on.
I met with Ryan Johnston, the campus energy manager at DU, on Friday to get accurate historical power usage data for all of the buildings on my game board (which you can see below). The next steps are redefining the rules, creating some cards and play pieces, and printing out a copy to begin playtesting. I am not sure what the appropriate venue is for this project when it’s done, but that’s partially what I’m in the eMAD program to learn. My hope for the game is that it plays like a reverse Monopoly in which players manage their buildings and gain ground in the game by conserving more power (and thus have more “money” to spend).
September 16, 2007 at 2:25 am · Filed under thesis
I’ve yet to find a consistent place to record ideas for my projects, thesis, and throwaway stuff. I’m not even sure if this will be that place, but hopefully the combination of accountability and publicity will be good motivation to keep it up. To start, I’ll share a couple ideas for topics I’d like to explore this quarter and through the winter in order to complete my thesis for the Digital Media Studies program.
- Depersonalization of US military conflict and the corresponding changes in military recruiting through digital and interactive media
- Gender identification in videogames (would obviously need some focus/refinement)
- Acoustic media schemas applied cross-medially in multimedia objects (videogames or others…)
Unfortunately, I’m not dedicating a lot of time to thesis research right now, but that needs to change FAST. In other news, I’m taking an independent study with Prof. Timothy Weaver that is ambiguously centered on hacking Wii remotes. This will probably change, but right now I’m working on reviving my audio project from last year: a live scoring of Metroid gameplay footage using distorted game sounds, triggered by the Wii remote.
