Are Old Video Games Still Art?

In a philosophical piece on Joystick Division, freelancer Dennis Scimeca ponders how old literature such as works of Shakespeare can still feel relevant, as can old paintings and even old movies. Yet somehow, old video games seem … old.

Check out his article, The Challenge of Taking Old Games seriously.

Frankenstein was written 166 years before I first cracked the pages of my copy …

Citizen Kane was shot 50 years before I entered Boston University’s film program …

Yet if I try to play Adventure on the Atari 2600 it’s nothing more than a quaint experience that I’m only interested in for about a minute.

This is a worthy entry in the ongoing discussion of video games as art.
 
 

UCF Card Study on Gaming Definitions

One of the ongoing issues with serious games is defining a clear set of definitions on which everyone can agree. Dr. Eduardo Salas over at University of Central Florida’s Institute of Simulation and Training is tackling the issue by performing a card study with serious gamers.

Card studies come from the old days when psychologists performed experiments by giving folks 3×5 cards with different terms written on the back. Participants were asked to organize the cards in groups and come up with a label for each group. Such research helped ferret out thought patterns among disparate individuals. Nowadays such experiments can take place easily on the Web, and the Dr. Salas’ team is using Websort.net.

Research assistant Davin Pavlas over at UCF recently sent out an e-mail on the Serious Games listserv seeking participants for the study. If you’re a serious gamer over age 18, you might be able to help all of us out by participating in this study.

Are Videogames Art? Does it Matter?

Thomas Cross, writing for The Student Life at Pomona College (“The oldest college newspaper in Southern California”), notes the debate between film critic Roger Ebert and movie/game/book creator Clive Barker in a column entitled “Video Games: Works of Art or a Waste of Time?” Ebert opines that videogames can never be art because people have to make choices while playing them. Their eye is not guided, so to speak, as it is in movies, paintings, books and music. Therefore, they are a waste of time. Cross points out that other media in their infancy suffered similar criticisms. Videogames, because of their interactive nature, hold the potential to transcend other art forms.

Ben Wood, a junior at Oklahoma, writes in a November 1 article for BlogCritics Magazine about the games as art controversy. He points out in “Video Games As Art: Does it Matter?” that Mike Musgrove with the Washington Post gave a copy of BioShock to book critic Michael Dirda to play with for a couple weeks. Dirda agreed that BioShock held “artistic value,” but was not a “work of art.” Wood concludes that art currently holds an insufficient definition.

The best thing about this sort of dialogue between opposing sides is the fact the debate is occurring in the first place. As the medium matures, it is starting to gain attention from others outside its circle of influence. Consequently, as with previous media, videogaming continues to grow in stature as a serious medium.

Academic Achievement Through Game Development

I’m on THE Journal’s mailing list, and I noticed a new article today on videogame development for educational purposes. I decided to check it out later and perhaps post about it. Imagine my curiosity when I saw hits coming into this blog from the very same article. It turns out authors Richard Ferdig and Jeff Boyer over at U. Florida listed this blog as a resource in the article.

Dr. Ferdig published a paper of mine in a special edition of the Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia on educational videogames, which he edited. I’m honored that the authors included this blog in their article for THE Journal.

The article, entitled, “Getting Started with Videogame Development,” continues a series the duo started last week. Previously they wrote an article addressing the question of academic achievement through developing videogames. That article, entitled “Can Game Development Impact Academic Achievement?” offers an introduction to theory underlying the notion of using videogame development as a learning tool, and examines some of the research behind the idea.

It’s important to make a distinction between playing a game, which is what most people think of when discussing educational gaming, versus leading students in designing and developing videogames. Developing a videogame is a whole other apple cart, requiring programming skills, logical thinking, and a big dollop of creativity. Fortunately, a variety of tools are available that allow an easy entry point to game development. Like so many other things, while the entry points may be easy, students must still work to produce quality products, and here is where good teaching can flesh out useful pedagogical chunks.

Today’s article continues the series, and the authors point out a variety of tools available that allow teachers to take videogame pedagogy into the classroom. These include such things as Scratch from MIT, Gamemaker from YoYo Games, and RPG Maker XP. They also note that Microsoft has released the XNA Developer Center, offering tools to individuals for creating games that play on the Xbox.

The authors conclude by throwing out a ton of highly useful links for teachers interested in game development as a pedagogical tool. Journals, sites, and software suggestions round out the list of resources. THE Journal has always been one of the highest read and highest quality practitioner periodicals out there, and this article adds to a long history of useful columns.

References
Ferdig, R. E., & Boyer, J. (2007, November 1). Getting started with videogame development. T.H.E. Journal. [Online]. Available: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21510

Ferdig, R. E., & Boyer, J. (2007, October 25). Can game development impact academic achievement? T.H.E. Journal. [Online]. Available: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21483

Corporate Warcraft: How You Might Play Your Way to Your Next Promotion

Imagine a world where you go to work and help your guild players. Corporate has assigned your guild a quest to deliver the best contract terms for a potential client. Since competition seems to bring out the best in people, corporate has also assigned two other guilds in your company with the same quest.

Your guild leader assigns tasks to various members. Since the company is large, one guild member is in Toledo, another in Vancouver, a third in Dallas. The remainder work in your building, but two are on the road on assignment. Meetings run smoothly though, because everyone shows up with a “walking, talking” avatar in an online three-dimensional conference room. Charlie’s avatar has been programmed to appear similar to his 300 pound frame. Susan has taken the liberty of shaving 20 pounds off her virtual self. Regardless, you know immediately who everybody is, because each avatar has a camera focused on the user’s face which transmits their image into the virtual conference room. When Charlie talks, his avatar’s lips move, and you hear the words from Charlie’s “mouth.”

In no time, your team has formed the nucleus of a plan. You are tasked with appropriating resources for the contract proposal. Your team’s bold idea needs to catch the attention of a trio of VPs to have any success. One VP is in Rio; another is in London. The third is in the office but has a secretary who controls access with a vengeance (and she still remembers that inadvertent insult you handed her at the last Christmas party). You appeal for help far and wide, and pool your guild’s e-mail gold. You send the three VPs an e-mail outlining your guild’s proposal and offer an enticement: 100 e-mail gold if they open and respond to your attached proposal in the next hour. All three respond with valuable advice, which is quickly incorporated into your guild’s proposal.

Corporate examines the proposals and chooses your team’s submission! “Congratulations, team!” the guild leader says at your next virtual meeting. “We earned 20,000 gold and we’ve moved up a level.” You cash in your share to upgrade your office. The senior VP drops by to visit “the outstanding player.”

-*-

Seem far-fetched? This melding of the team aspects found in popular online role playing games is gaining increasing credibility among business school professors and others examining corporate culture. Ever since Harvard B-School Press released Got Game? by Beck and Wade, the idea that advanced gaming holds value in the business world has steadily caught fire with academics and business elites.

Mark Ward, technology correspondent for BBC online, wrote a neat article about the convergence of MMORPG teamwork, academia’s interest, and corporate adoption.

All of a sudden, say academics and researchers, companies have realised that all the time employees spend gaming in virtual worlds is changing them.
Ian Hughes, IBM’s metaverse evangelist, said many organisations were considering ways of harnessing the skills and familiarity their employees have with virtual environments.
This familiarity has driven many organisations to consider virtual worlds as places where employees can meet, mix and get on with the job.
“A lot of people are more accepting of that way of working just because of games,” he said.
“It’s about harnessing that ability to play to get work done.”
The formidable organisational skills needed to run a game team or guild, organise raids involving perhaps 40 people and co-ordinate their different abilities to defeat a game’s strongest foes are all relevant to work, said Mr Hughes.

Ward goes on to mention Byron Reeves, an education prof over at Stanford, whose company Seriosity works on gaming elements for businesses-place productivity. One idea from Seriosity is to instill a virtual currency system on e-mail, resulting in a higher valuation of individual messages than the traditional low, normal, or high priorities found within most e-mail systems.

Convinced that games can help them thrive some companies have turned work groups into guilds, rewarded staff with experience points when they complete tasks, giving out titles and badges when a guild finished a project and portraying objectives as quests.
Some were also considering using a virtual currency as a reward system allowing workers to cash in their savings for benefits or extras for their office space. The top performing guilds also get to do the best projects.

Angela Barron, over at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, had a quote regarding the traditional use of face to face gaming in businesses and B-school applications. She is certainly correct about that. I recall a conversation with a certain business professor at Texas A&M who mentioned that business simulations were nothing new; he had gone through several while getting his Ph.D. in the 1960s.

There has been some blogging buzz about this article. A good entry came from Blue’s News. One commenter pointed out this ExtraLife comic strip by Scott Johnson that shows the hilarity that might ensue if gaming concepts were brought into the workplace.

References
Ward, M. (2007, October 22). When work becomes a game. BBC News. [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7030234.stm

Canada Celebrates Videogame Boom

The Entertainment Software Association of Canada released a report recently on Canada’s videogame industry. The PDF of the report is here. Videogames bring in $1.5 billion, topping the domestic box office receipts in Canada by a factor of four. Here’s a neat quote from Vito Pilieci, writing in The Ottawa Citizen:

Based on Statistics Canada’s estimate of 37,591 software developers in Canada, the ESAC study means video game development would account for about 24 per cent of all Canadian software production.

Canada has become a hotbed of high tech development, especially in the videogame industry. I’ve blogged previously about the outstanding research efforts Canadian universities are fielding in the field of educational videogames. According to Pilieci, videogame leviathan Electronic Arts employs 1,600 people in the Great White North. Ubisoft employs 1,500 with plans to double that number within five years. Several Canadian provinces provide tax incentives to encourage high tech growth.

References:
Hickings, Arthur, Low Corporation. (2007, October). Entertainment software: The industry in Canada. Entertainment Software Association of Canada, Toronto, CA. [Online]. Available: http://www.theesa.ca/esa-whitepaper.pdf

Pilieci, V. (2007, October 17). Report confirms growth of game industry. The Ottawa Citizen. [Online]. Available: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/business/
story.html?id=5429abd8-66dc-49e1-9fc2-6d6c22edf0e1

Study Shows Videogames Offer Spatial Skills Improvement for Women

Here’s an interesting comparison of the sexes insofar as video gaming goes. Doctoral student Jing Feng at U. Toronto led a study finding that action videogames can improve spatial skills for women. Men’s skills improved too, but women in the study started with lower spatial skills than men.

Gaming Today quoted Jing Feng from the press release:

“On average, women are not quite as good at rapidly switching attention among different objects and this may be one reason why women do not do as well on spatial tasks. But more important than finding that difference, our second experiment showed that both men and women can improve their spatial skills by playing a video game and that the women catch up to the men,” Feng added. “Moreover, the improved performance of both sexes was maintained when we assessed them again after five months.”

Dr. Ian Spence, director of the engineering psychology lab at Toronto, added this neat quote: “Clearly, something dramatic is happening in the brain when we see marked improvements in spatial skills after only 10 hours of game playing and these improvements are maintained for many months.”

This study is already generating buzz in academia. Here is a link to Dr. Deric Bounds’ (U. Wisconsin) MindBlog. Alas, the full text of the article is a $29 download from Blackwell Publishing. Fortunately, Dr. Bounds has graciously linked to a PDF of the article that is freely available. If Dr. Bounds’ link gets taken down, readers can still access the abstract:

We demonstrate a previously unknown gender difference in the distribution of spatial attention, a basic capacity that supports higher-level spatial cognition. More remarkably, we found that playing an action video game can virtually eliminate this gender difference in spatial attention and simultaneously decrease the gender disparity in mental rotation ability, a higher-level process in spatial cognition. After only 10 hr of training with an action video game, subjects realized substantial gains in both spatial attention and mental rotation, with women benefiting more than men. Control subjects who played a non-action game showed no improvement. Given that superior spatial skills are important in the mathematical and engineering sciences, these findings have practical implications for attracting men and women to these fields.

And finally, here’s the importance of the study, as summed up in the final paragraph of the paper:

Superior spatial ability is related to employment in engineering and science (McGee, 1979), and females, who typically score lower than males on tests of spatial skills, are underrepresented in these fields, with worldwide participation rates as low as one in five. Given that our first experiment and others (e.g., Greenfield & Cocking, 1996; McGillicuddy-De Lisi & De Lisi, 2002) have shown that particular cognitive capacities are associated with educational and career choices, training with appropriately designed action video games could play a significant role as part of a larger strategy designed to interest women in science and engineering careers (Quaiser-Pohl et al., 2006). Non-video-game players in our study realized large gains after only 10 hr of training; we can only imagine the benefits that might be realized after weeks, months, or even years of action-video-gaming experience.

To wit: there is much concern regarding the low numbers of women in STEM fields. This study purports to touch on possible causes for the low numbers, and offers appropriate videogames as a solution. The authors have made an important contribution to the research in this area.

References
Feng, J., Spence, I., & Pratt, J. (2007, October). Playing an action video game reduces gender differences in spatial cognition. Psychological Science 18(10), 850–855.

Study shows playing video games improves women’s spatial skills. (2007, October 3). Gaming Today. [Online]. Available: http://news.filefront.com/study-shows-playing-
video-games-improves-womens-spatial-skills/

EEDAR Offers Stats on Console Data

Props to Ben Kuchera over at Ars Technica for pointing out a research company that offers some profound data on video games. Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) offers research reports for industrial consumption. One of their recent reports, Console Intelligence Briefing 2007: PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, offers some data that can be incorporated into educational papers.

Unfortunately, the complete report is aimed at deep-pocketed gaming corporations, and is consequently expensive (around $10,000). On the bright side, the executive summary is freely available to all, and offers up some interesting data. For instance, the fact that the gaming industry makes more than the movie industry is not a completely accurate comparison. The apples to oranges comparison is usually made with the domestic Hollywood box office take, and ignores the overseas box office take as well as DVD rentals and sales. Meanwhile, the entire gaming industry sales are included in the comparison, from game titles to consoles to joysticks. The Console Intelligence Briefing offers data on retail game titles (for consoles), and offers such nuggets as this: average sales for a retail console title hover at $11.5 million. Also, the console offering the highest quality games according to critics: PlayStation 3. Largest number of console titles released: Nintendo Wii.

And so on. This is good stuff, even if you can’t afford the full report. Kuchera points out the report makes mention of the fact that games with online interactive content do better in the marketplace than strictly stand-alone games:

The study found that by adding online functionality into a game—more specifically the ability to play against or with others—developers can generally double the amount of money your game makes.

Kuchera concludes that delivering a successful game requires more than just knowing what factors contribute to high selling titles. And in this, Kuchera is absolutely correct. Game making remains more art than science.

References:
Kuchera, B. (2007, September 6). Games with strong online components outsell the competition. Ars Technica [Online]. Available: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070906-games-with-strong-
online-components-outsell-the-competition.html

Zatkin, G. (2007). Console intelligence briefing 2007: PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, executive summary. Electronic Entertainment Design and Research. [Online]. Available: http://www.eedar.com/Uploads/Console%20
Intelligence%20Briefing%202007%20Summary.pdf

Positive and Negative Uses of Race in Video Games

There has long been interest among academics in examining things along racial and gender lines. For one thing, race and gender are easy to code: 0 for male, 1 for female or vice versa. The racial characteristics of subjects can likewise be easily coded. Coding leads to data crunching. Once subject characteristics are coded, relationships with other data become more readily apparent.

Much video gaming research we’ve looked at recently has at least given lip service to the differences in gaming habits of boys and girls; such easily coded research will no doubt continue to be published. Social scientists will continue to be interested in investigating race as well as gender, and the relationships both groupings have with media and consumers of media.

Now, The Escapist magazine has an interesting article detailing the history of race in video games. And by race, we don’t mean elf, dwarf, orc, or human; we mean what non-gamers think of when discussing race. Andy Chalk writes a brief history of gaming’s darker side, with a look back at patently offensive games brimming with racial epithets and put-downs. He examines the following games: Prey, Daikatana, Shadow Warrior, and the infamous 1982 title for Atari, Custer’s Revenge.

Chalk ends by pointing out the positive ways many current titles have dealt with race, mostly by presenting minorities in positive roles. The titles he brings up include F.E.A.R., Half Life 2, Deus Ex, and Grand Theft Auto (though some might argue that although the GTA series do show minorities in leading roles, the violent nature of the games do not lend themselves to positive portrayals).

Chalk’s article may be good for academics looking for a primer on race history in video games, as well as a good reference to both good and bad racial presentations within popular games. Foul language alert for those more sensitive to swear words. Chalk also has a brief history of game ratings here.

References
Chalk, A. (2007, August 16). A short history of race in games. The Escapist. [Online.] Available: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/
1353-A-Short-History-of-Race-in-Games

Gaming Industry Looks for Positive Side

David Perry of GameConsultants.com has a nice article in the current issue of BusinessWeek focusing on beneficial aspects of commercial games. Rather than dwell on purely academic benefits, Perry delves into the topic of how popular video games positively impact the audience. The first example he uses to illustrate this point is what a six year old girl learned about trebuchets from playing a video game.

Perry brings up Gee’s first book on the subject, then spends more time discussing Rusel DeMaria’s new book Reset: Changing the Way We Look at Video Games. DeMaria’s much heralded five learning powers of games (motivation, immersion, identification, interactivity, and choice) comprise much of the remainder of the article. Joining in his conversation concerning these matters (via e-mail, apparently), were Chris Taylor, CEO of Gas Powered Games, and Bing Gordon, Chief Creative Office of Electronic Arts.

Perry concludes on a positive note, predicting a strong possibility of future efforts from the major gaming studios that will result in, “games that promote positive values, or that teach or inspire players.” Here’s hoping Perry’s prognostications come true.

References

Perry, D. (2007, August 13). Video games entertain and educate. BusinessWeek. [Online]. Available: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2007/
id20070813_874107.htm