Just got back from this year's Game Summit in Montreal. I gave a talk there based upon my recent edited book: Game Usability: Advice from the Experts for Advancing the Player Experience, and also hosted a roundtable on the theme of usability and games. The conference was well attended and there were some terrific talks--Jason Della Rocca has photos and a bit of a summary up on his website.
During some downtime in the speakers lounge, I ended up talking with a fellow speaker, a notable game developer who I guess I'll protect by not naming, and we were discussing how fun it would be to play a game in which you could pit sumo wrestlers against one another who had the personalities and fighting styles of large corporations. You know, a head-to-head of say, Disney versus Verizon? Or maybe Microsoft versus Google? Where each is a personified, bouncing, ducking and weaving, maybe even 'diaper' wearing character. It could be cathartic to win an epic battle against a company who has frustrated you day in and day out. And fun to see the qualities that you've experienced in the corporate atmosphere of a place where you work, wrought into human form.
Maybe I should try to convince Ian Bogost to mock such a thing up. Who knows, maybe he already has?
I guess this is the opposite of empathy, in a way, but it certainly speaks to strong emotional experience through characters.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Videogames and your soul
Now that I'm settled in at NYU-Poly, I'm going to renew my efforts to post regularly on this blog. At the moment I've been doing a lot of reading about games and learning, because I'm part of the newly formed NYU Games for Learning Institute (visit here for a description by the Institute's funders, Microsoft).
So far my favorite book about the topic, is James Gee's book Why Video Games are Good for your Soul. It came out in 2005. In it he really is able to put his finger on what makes gaming such a compelling experience for the player. I particularly like how he brings empathy into the picture. He talks about how physicists and other specialists learn to project themselves bodily into a complex model or system, in order to really get a feel for it and make progress in their ideas. He calls this 'embodied empathy for a complex system'. He feels that fusing with a game character through playing that character, is the same kind of process. He points out that good games always do this for players, and often end up teaching them complex things as a result (e.g. he has a rant on Deus Ex: Invisible War and how it allows the player to explore what it might mean to have a world in which abilities can be purchased systemically--e.g. parents buying smarts for their kids).
Gee does a great job expressing the general feel of this kind of empathy, and its power, through tracking on several particular games and examples from them.
I'm excited to use this book to ground some of my own design-based explorations of how specific choices impact player experience and empathy!
So far my favorite book about the topic, is James Gee's book Why Video Games are Good for your Soul. It came out in 2005. In it he really is able to put his finger on what makes gaming such a compelling experience for the player. I particularly like how he brings empathy into the picture. He talks about how physicists and other specialists learn to project themselves bodily into a complex model or system, in order to really get a feel for it and make progress in their ideas. He calls this 'embodied empathy for a complex system'. He feels that fusing with a game character through playing that character, is the same kind of process. He points out that good games always do this for players, and often end up teaching them complex things as a result (e.g. he has a rant on Deus Ex: Invisible War and how it allows the player to explore what it might mean to have a world in which abilities can be purchased systemically--e.g. parents buying smarts for their kids).
Gee does a great job expressing the general feel of this kind of empathy, and its power, through tracking on several particular games and examples from them.
I'm excited to use this book to ground some of my own design-based explorations of how specific choices impact player experience and empathy!
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