My research lab now has a blog, where I will now be blogging instead. The alt.vg link is now redirected to my author page there instead.
Visit often!
How to shut down a university campus, using simple geocaching equipment.
Some of the most masterful writing is always the "jerk" path. It's just a case of whether you have the fortitude to choose the worst of every conversation.
- Desperation: I thought the speed of the zombies was ridiculous. I was mistaken. The only speed for the zombies is barreling towards the group, looping in wide arches, barreling out of control. The inability to perform any crowd control (outside of limited supply molotov cocktails) turns each firefight into a desperate attempt to keep the zombies at bay. The most desperate moments come when the horde is surrounding you, knocking a teammates health to zero, watching them fire from the ground wildly. It's your decision when to wade in and help them. The player narratives this creates are phenomenal, being involved in a dire rescue just meters from the safe house is one of the great moments in gaming. Result: You have to rely on your team, not just yourself.
- Reward: Left 4 Dead is constantly rewarding you, as if some macabre version of Peggle. Almost every kill results in a message like "Louis protected Zoey." Some achievements are easy to get in just your first play through. Result: You are compelled to save others, if only for the rewards.
- Enforced co-operation: There's no "I" in team, nor is there one in "Left 4 Dead." Leaving your team results in either a hunter killing you (hunters can only be removed by teammates), a tank killing you (tanks can only be killed by all members working together), smokers killing you (once choked by a smoker, you can't save yourself) or your team killing you by voting you out of the game. Result: Those who don't play nice don't last long.
- Headsets: Now, this might only be the case for the 360 game, but L4D pretty much requires a headset. There's no way to communicate what's happening in the event of you becoming separated: you can't call for help without one. While this was initially off-putting for myself, I soon realized it's the binding agent of the team. People without headsets get hurt. A lot. You also need that camaraderie if you're going to be playing an hour long game together. But what this does is also share the scares: "Shit!" and "Oh fuck..." add to the game in a way no canned voice acting ever could. Result: L4D is a bonded, shared experience. Talking and laughing over shared experiences are far more powerful than any individual endeavor.
Yes, I know I'm late to the party.
Who inspired who?
As a graduate student, I consume knowledge like I consume cake: ravenously and without thought to my general well-being. It's supposed to be a useful trait, or so I'm told. However, I am one of the very few people who are like this. It's believed less than 1% of the population gets a PhD, and for good reason. This is a career, and it isn't for everyone. That said, I'm not one of those people that think university is entirely for academic pursuits either.
There is a constant push and pull between academics and students. Academics believe that they're creating the workers of the future. Giving them the building blocks for fundamental understanding is much more important than giving them experience in the vocational tools they'll use in the short-term. Universities create engineers, vocational apprenticeships create car mechanics. There's nothing wrong with creating mechanics. The world needs all types of people. However, the farther up the university quality food-chain you go, the harder it is to convince anyone that a vocational course has a use.
With Computer Science, and video games especially, this tension reaches a breaking point. I've sat in many classes where I've felt the academics have severely impeded my learning... I needed to know the "hows" and not the "whys". I didn't care how the naïve Bayes algorithm was derived, just what it did. Even at graduate level, I run into the same things.
The added difficulty with video games is that game studios are constantly pushing on universities to be a training farm for them: teach undergraduates C++, XNA and 3D Studio Max and get them out (the irony being that game developers then say in Edge that the Computer Science graduates are preferable to those with "lesser" games degrees). This is what the academics rightly push back on, but it seems many go too far. It is important to give undergraduates an idea of what a commercial toolset looks like. Neglecting that for some idealistic wrongheadedness that forces students to always use open-source software, work by themselves (teamwork is hard!) and be damned with the real world is hurting everyone.
A moderate approach is needed: the strong basics that Computer Science has always had, coupled with an idea of what the hard road of video game development is like. A class on XNA can only benefit, an entire curriculum based around it hurts everyone. This sounds obvious (at least to me), but you would be surprised about the number of professors for whom even this is a worrying proposition.
I trawled Google looking for a relevant quote to end with, and found this by Lawrence J Peter: "Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices."
That'll do.
Removing my nose from the grindstone, I'm back. I'm almost ready to break cover on what I've been working on for the past three months, but I await the confirmation of my paper being accepted to a conference before I do. I don't want to be scooped!
On the subject of academia, it's been a time of reflection about the state of gaming scholars, my way of trying to include both games studies and games technology research into one vague statement, and their publication arenas.
For the uninitiated, the phrase often bandied about universities is "publish or perish." Professors and grad students are rated not for their teaching (my apologies to undergraduates who thought otherwise) but their research performance. Research is essentially graded by the quality of conference it is accepted to, a top-tier conference gets you an A, a middling conference a B or C. It's important, then, that you have quality conferences to send papers to in the first place.
Having been a "gaming scholar" myself for the last year or so, I have a fair understanding of the publication avenues available to me. There aren't that many. The problem, as brought up by Walker White at the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference is "silo mentality." I'll publish in my traditional field's conferences, you publish in yours, and we'll make our lives all so much easier. When it comes to academic politics, the traditional conferences are better understood by your Dean than new multi-disciplinary ones, and you're less likely to get hassled.
It's our job, as gaming scholars of all backgrounds and specialities, to fight this as strongly as possible.
I may be in the Computer Science department, but much of my work is not interesting to the wider Computer Science community. It tells them nothing about how their work could be affected. I work on making video games better. That's not something a large number of people in the traditional silos cares about, and many look down upon instead. Any gamer will tell you that the production of a video game is a multi-disciplinary affair, taking into account game design, art design and programming expertise. Our conferences have to reflect that melting pot. We're still struggling to do that, as it seems the "gaming" conferences cater to gaming studies academics, leaving the Computer Scientists in the cold. The exception seems to be FDG, but it was hard to escape the word "technical" prefixing everything. This isn't what we, as gaming scholars, need.
My current work looks at how we can use Computer Science to answer game design questions. But to get those questions, I need to talk to gaming studies academics who understand and vocalize the depths of those game design problems. Without working together, my own research suffers. We need Computer Scientists and game studies scholars on level ground, working 50:50, publishing in the same conferences, shoring up the reputation of those conferences so that they can be used as career-furthering venues. The distinction of technical and non-technical has to disappear.
Video games are a multi-disciplinary venture. The conferences need to be as well.
I didn't like The 1UP Show. It was chintzy, with the faux-conversations of people in offices and corridors. I'm not going to say it deserved to die, but I am going to say I certainly didn't like it.
I did, however, very much enjoy Broken Pixels. Mega64 is wonderful. But why?
Let's take a look at the TV show, Top Gear. It's phenomenally popular in the UK, but it's essentially a geek show. All three are motoring journalists, modding cars, reviewing cars, using cinematography to create car porn. All you need to do is put a beard and scrappy overalls on each one and you've got the bloke down the pub who's been working on his classic car for 35 years (and will never be finished). How can a show so intensely rooted in nerdery be so enjoyable?
The answer is the show is about fun, not cars. The enthusiasm of the presenters and the friendship bond that surrounds them, shines through. Often their "stunts" (such as biking across Vietnam, racing cars through Continental Europe) take the form of buddy movies, joking along with one another, bringing the viewer in tow. The car is but the setting and the cornerstone of the conversations that arise.
Video game shows like Broken Pixels and Mega64 understand this, explicitly or not. Watching SeanBaby drunkenly comment on an awful video game is very much like Top Gear. Mega64 is team of people having fun sending up the silly things about games. They're not presenting the games themselves. 1UP Yours is essentially the same thing in audio form.
Video game shows should not be a retelling of what we find in magazines (in deadtree format or on the web). Yes, there is room for video reviews and such, but this is not the core of a cohesive show. The core are the people and the enthusiasm.
A one true video game show will not a visual critic or reporter, but rather a celebration of a subject, idiosyncrasies and all.
I did, however, very much enjoy Broken Pixels. Mega64 is wonderful. But why?
Let's take a look at the TV show, Top Gear. It's phenomenally popular in the UK, but it's essentially a geek show. All three are motoring journalists, modding cars, reviewing cars, using cinematography to create car porn. All you need to do is put a beard and scrappy overalls on each one and you've got the bloke down the pub who's been working on his classic car for 35 years (and will never be finished). How can a show so intensely rooted in nerdery be so enjoyable?
The answer is the show is about fun, not cars. The enthusiasm of the presenters and the friendship bond that surrounds them, shines through. Often their "stunts" (such as biking across Vietnam, racing cars through Continental Europe) take the form of buddy movies, joking along with one another, bringing the viewer in tow. The car is but the setting and the cornerstone of the conversations that arise.
Video game shows like Broken Pixels and Mega64 understand this, explicitly or not. Watching SeanBaby drunkenly comment on an awful video game is very much like Top Gear. Mega64 is team of people having fun sending up the silly things about games. They're not presenting the games themselves. 1UP Yours is essentially the same thing in audio form.
Video game shows should not be a retelling of what we find in magazines (in deadtree format or on the web). Yes, there is room for video reviews and such, but this is not the core of a cohesive show. The core are the people and the enthusiasm.
A one true video game show will not a visual critic or reporter, but rather a celebration of a subject, idiosyncrasies and all.
Is there a time when Mega64 is not fantastically funny? When are Spike TV/G4 going to give them their own show? You know, actually put something worth watching on their channels. Win/win?
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