ReBlog: Patanoir

Patanoir

HTLit

Patanoir, Simon Christiansen's brilliantly clever IF piece, introduced me to the concept of pataphor—and by extension pataphysics, a concept of "physics beyond metaphysics" or "the science of imaginary solutions." Patanoir opens with the definition of a pataphor:

Pataphor (noun):

  1. An extended metaphor that creates its own context.

  2. That which occurs when a lizard's tail has grown so long it breaks off and grows a new lizard.

- Pablo Lopez 

This definition, and understanding of the concepts behind it, allow for interesting play between language, concepts, and the imaginary. If John controls a chain of events, feeling constricted and even suffocated by it, Mary might stumble in upon John's actual dead body, tragically choked to death by the chain.

Patanoir explores this idea through the lens of the protagonist, you, a private detective who has come off your medication against your doctor's advice. Anytime the text uses a simile and something is like something else, you can interact with the metaphorical object because, well, you're crazy.

>x baron

Thin, as though his skin had been draped over his skeleton with nothing in between. Dark blue eyes, like deep lakes carved into his face. His hair is grey.

> dive into lake

You dive. The surface of the lake approaches quickly, until it fills your entire field of vision. Then the cool water surrounds you.

 

This structure leads to interesting puzzles and creative solutions. While at first it seemed to make the puzzles too easy—most can be solved by examining everything in a room, with similes being huge flailing pointers toward clues—the character implication for these strategies became more interesting than the puzzles themselves. Sure, you can enter the room, skim the text and scan for the keyword "like," but such a reading suggests that you're more a part of the protagonists delusions than the reader's detached and objective reality, interesting implications for reader-protagonist identification.

Sent with Reeder

Hanli Geyser

ReBlog: Techland apologises for “feminist whore” code found in Dead Island

Things like this are a problem because they demonstrate a deep seated misogynism on the part of the company responsible. While I wish I could laugh it off and say their issues are their own problem and the game should be judged only as a final product the bitter taste it leaves won't just go away.

The games industry has struggled with issues of representation for many years, and a disturbing attitude towards women still remains. I hate having to define myself by my gender, I feel like I am still fighting battles that should have been dismissed in the 70s. But every time I visit a 'gaming' site filled with half naked women and 'hot-t lesbians' I am reminded that in this small subset of society those battles still need to be fought.
Then, whenever I feel progress is being made, something like this surfaces and I am reminded that it is not the attitude only of a few trolls but something systemic throughout the genre.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother...

Techland apologises for “feminist whore” code found in Dead Island:

Reblog: Fallout: The Board Game Lets you Play Monopoly After the Apocalypse [Fallout]

From Kotako,Games of games in games:

Fallout: The Board Game Lets you Play Monopoly After the Apocalypse [Fallout]:

This custom version of Monopoly, crafted by PinkAxolotl, really has to be seen to be believed. It's not like it's just a regular board with a few Fallout references made here and there. It's as Fallout-themed as it could possibly hope for. More »

WITS to offer degree in Game Design, starting 2012

An interview with me about the Game Design degrees.

WITS to offer degree in Game Design, starting 2012

First person photographs

Some interesting “first person” photos. The first few are far more successful than the later ones, but it's interesting how the inclusion of a body part signals the first person perspective. While the viewer of a photograph is always aware that it is created through a first person point of view due to the very nature of the camera, in photography point of view is largely obscured, even effaced. Traditionally the role of the photographer as creative agent is masked. This is amplified by the frame and screen which, echoing painting and echoed in film, makes the photo seem removed, as if coming from an omniscient narrator. Some photographers do reinsert themselves into the frame through the inclusion of shadows and reflections. But here that experiential, embodied element is brought through by the fps convention of the fragmented limb. The 'first person' title alludes to both game and narrative techniques. All in all, one or two great images, and an interesting concept.

Cool First Person Photo Project

Cool First Person Photo Project: Andrea Di Gioia is a great photographer from Italy. Here is a set he's been working on of "first person" photos, but make sure you go check out the rest of his stuff a...

Reblog: Could You "Finish" World Of Warcraft Without Killing Anything? [Make Lore, Not War]

from Kotaku by Luke Plunkett

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Here's an exercise in patience: a World of Warcraft player has managed to reach the maximum level 85 without killing a single thing. For a game built around the idea of, well, killing things, that's quite the achievement! More »

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New Game Design Lecturer appointed in Digital Arts

Vanity post: 

Here is an article about me published on the Wits School of Arts website in the news section of March 2011.

Written by Christo Doherty.

Photo Christo Doherty. 
Related post also on www.atjoburg.net
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New Game Design Lecturer appointed in Digital Arts

Hanli Geyser has  been appointed as  the first Game Design Lecturer in Digital Arts.  As both an avid gamer and an academic researcher into popular cultural production, Hanli has the background necessary to develop the exciting new Games Design courses which will be launched by Digital Arts, in collaboration with the Wits School of Electrical Engineering,  in 2012.

Hanli’s research and teaching interests are diverse, spanning many areas of popular cultural production. She is primarily fascinated by the conjunction between visual arts and narrative texts found in video games, hypertext fiction, comic books and film.  She graduated with an MA in History of Art from Wits in 2008 with a dissertation entitled Surface Tension - Examining the implications of intentional disruption of the Photographic Surface.  . Extending her interest in disruptions to the surface into the digital realm her PhD, provisionally titled An Investigation of the Hyperlink as both Mark and Rupture on the Imagined Hypertextual Surface, focuses on the use of the hyperlink in visual arts. Areas of research in which she is actively involved include Interactive Narrative as well as Adaptation Studies.  Interactive narrative covers a vast range of practices that involve some degree of user participation to drive the narrative structure.  Her interest here is in both literary and visual story telling forms, and extends from ‘text adventures’ through hypertext fiction to video games.  In adaptation studies, the study of transition between media in narrative texts, she is primarily interested in the impact of medium on the narrative structure and the effect it generates.  Her investigation in this area has centered on transitions between comic, film, and video game formats.

Hanli has always been an avid gamer, actively playing a wide range of games.  Her enjoyment of games stems both from narrative satisfaction as well as a keen interest in ludology and game mechanics. She is currently writing a paper on the post-colonial representation of the African landscape in the popular commercial title Far cry 2 (2008).

While she plays many commercial titles (her current favourites include The Witcher, Fall Out, Machinarium, and Braid) she has a keen interest in games as a form of artistic expression.  She therefore actively engages with independent, experimental, and art games.

Hanli is an energetic researcher but she is also equally committed to her students and to teaching.  She is passionate about education as an ideal and there is nothing she enjoys more than being able to teach and engage with students. "

Reblog: Video game in your browser's location bar

Cory Doctorow at boingboing points to this amazing little game:

URL Hunter: http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

Video game in your browser's location bar:
  

Probably Corey's (sic. Should read Probably Interactive's) HTML 5 video-game 'URL Hunter' takes place entirely in the URL bar of your browser, in which you must chase down rogue 'a's with your mighty 'O' and clobber them with the spacebar. I keep running into croggling demos of HTML5's capabilities -- last week in Toronto, Mozilla.org's Brett Gaylor showed me a WebGL demo that left me with my jaw on the floor. It's going to be a cool couple of Web-years, most surely.
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Reblog: Browser Game Pick: RIZK (Playerthree)

An truly fantastic game reflecting on the environmental impacts of resource gathering. Well worth a play.

Found thanks to IndiGames.com. 
Article below by Cassandra Khaw.
 "

Back in the early nineties, long before the gaming industry became obsessed with sex and other drivel, edutainment-related material was everywhere. Sadly, only a handful were brilliant; the rest were mostly boring or, at times, borderline preachy. Granted, that's how my nine year old self remembers it - your mileage might vary. Thus, when I first heard of RIZK, a part of the Science Museum's three-year series entitled 'Climate Changing..', I was extremely skeptical about its production values. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised.
RIZK is, essentially, a 2D tower defense-like game that requires you to nurture and safeguard an alien plant that serves as your only means of escaping to the next level. In order to accomplish this, you'll have to carefully budget a somewhat meagre stash of coins in order to create your strangely ameobic-like minions. There isn't any violence in the game, though. Your enemies here are not hungry herbivores but indigenous vegetation that release spores capable of hurting your plant; your own critters won't do anything outside of generate protective shields of varying strength and range.
According to the press release that popped up in my mail today, RIZK's visual presentation is apparently greatly influenced by the sci-fi posters of the 50's and 60's and honestly, there's something quaintly charming about the game's looks. Most of the terrain is nothing but silhouettes framed against a stary, pastel-flooded sky. The placid outlook, however, bellies the surprisingly intricate gameplay; it rapidly becomes less a question of resource management and more a case of you attempting not to agitate the planet's residents too much.
It took a little while for the message to sink in but once it did, I was impressed with the work put into the game by its developers. RIZK, without sounding overtly 'in your face', rather neatly encapsulates the antagonistic relationship man's technological progress has with Mother Nature. I'm not going to explain exactly how it all works out simply because it'd detract from the message but I can assure you that it'd at least trigger a brief 'Huh' when the epiphany finally strikes.
Play the game now at the Science Museum's official website.
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Reblog: Mateas on Agency

This post by HTLit points to a very interesting and helpful article by Michael Mateas. Isn't it fantastic how we find things?

 "

Recent interest around Eastgate in the role of agency in narrative immersion has led me to a fascinating essay by Michael Mateas, co-author of Façade. Using Aristotle’s theory of drama as a starting point, Mateas diagrams the role of agency in interactive drama, adding an additional model of choice and causation atop Aristotle’s diagram of narrative causation. This addition results in the proposition that “a player will experience agency when there is a balance between material and formal constraints.”Leaning heavily on previous work by Murray and others, the essay provides and interesting perspective for anyone interested in agency and its relation to interactive narrative."

Reblog: Fear of an App Planet

This is a brief look at the ideas of censorship that are implied by the move to app stores in obtaining cultural content. Interestingly, in a similar move of random censorship to that which Juul describes below, Amazon today removed an e-book on pedophilia from sale due to public pressure while many others on the same topic remained available on the shopping giant.

From The Ludologist by Jesper Juul:

"
With Apple announcing an App store for the Mac following the App Store for iPhones and iPads, it’s worth pondering what this means for video games.

1. It’s a great way to allow the distribution of games of different scope, so why is this the first major commercial internet-based software store for a major operating system? Seems so obvious. (Though Linux users have long had similar systems, though only for non-commercial software.)
2. The Mac App store will have similarly strict and semi-random policies as the iOS app store. As I have argued before, I think the app store policies are ambiguous and inconsistently enforced by design: this has the desired chilling effects of self-censorship among developers, while Apple can claim that it intended no such thing.
3. It has historically been the case that console games were heavily controlled and censored, while PC and Mac games allowed for freedom of expression. Assuming that more software sales move from boxed and regular web to the Mac App Store, we are going to see the Mac becoming less of a platform for edgy and experimental content. You can still get your software elsewhere, but convenience matters.
4. And again: there would be an uproar if a major bookstore censored books according to Apple guidelines, so why do we accept censorship for games?
5. Which means that the potential future in which all games on all platforms are distributed through app store-like channels … that is a potential nightmare."

Reblog: Escaping the fridge

This is an excellent, if brief, discussion of the use of 'women in refrigerator's' in Dragon Age Origins. 'Women in refrigerators' is a term used in comics to describe the all to common use of a female characters trauma to add emotional drive to the hero's quest. In this piece Kateri looks at how this trope is subverted in a single moment in 'Dragon Age - Origins'


Original article by Kateri at falling awkwardly


Escaping the fridge:

"A quick break from srs metaphysical bsns to talk about ladies and kitchen appliances.

When is a woman in a refrigerator not in a refrigerator?

Dragon Age: Origins offers the player several ways of beginning the game, several “origins”. Each one provides your character with a home, a history, and a reason for joining the elite fighting force of the Grey Wardens, thus setting up the rest of the game’s story. This about one of them. Trigger warning for rape and violence; spoiler warning for the City Elf origin.


I have to say, when I first played through the City Elf origin story, I wasn’t wildly impressed. The lowdown: after a series of unfortunate events, the cousin of the PC, a young female elf named Shianni, is raped and beaten, and you, the protagonist, arrive too late to prevent it. This leads into a revenge opportunity against the men responsible and other assorted chaos that culminates in the PC being recruited into the Grey Wardens to avoid the long arm of the law.
While I didn’t think the (offscreen) rape was handled tastelessly or implausibly, I considered the whole situation rather a cheap narrative device. Specifically, I suspected they were falling into the “Women in Refrigerators” trope. For the uninitiated, this is a narrative device common to all media, but especially prevalent in comics (from where the name originates) and video games. It can be identified when a supporting character is killed, raped or otherwise traumatized horribly for the sole purpose of providing the main character with an ‘I WILL AVENGE YOOOU’ emotional motivation and related Dramatic Angst.
It’s not the presence of death/rape/trauma that is problematic, so much as the fact that the victim of this trauma seems to exist solely as a vehicle for said trauma rather than as an actual character. Once the desired Angst has been shovelled onto the – usually male – main character, the – usually female – victim, having served their purpose, is often forgotten about entirely. Surviving victims, in the unlikely event that the plot still bothers to involve them, will generally show no memory or ill-effects of their experience. The trope is cheap, frequently sexist and an insult to people with experience of actual trauma. Hence my lack of enthusiasm when I seemed to recognise it. Oh lovely, I thought, this Shianni character’s getting ’fridged in an attempt to provoke an emotional reaction in the player. Whatever. I left the starter area, got into the game proper, and didn’t think much more about it.
Then later, much later, I met Shianni* again. This was after my PC had been adventuring it up across the land, exploring new places, meeting new people and killing them. Shianni congratulated him on his accomplishments, in tones laced with sarcasm. Then she turned it around on him, accusing him of having forgotten, in his glorious crusade, where he had come from, and why it all started: “You don’t even feel much anymore when you remember it, do you?” she said, bitterly. “You’ve moved on, past the horror of that night. I envy you. You’ve gone on to other things, things I can only dream of.”**
I felt it like a punch in the stomach. It helped that the voice acting was a masterpiece of subtle emotion, but more than that – it was all true. She had been a plot device, her pain mere emotional leverage to set my protagonist on his journey. I had barely given her a second thought since the game proper began, focusing on my “important” quests, my “real” party members. But in that moment, she refused to let me do that. Screw you, hero boy, she seemed to be saying to my PC, you were the lucky one. I was raped, and you got to use it to your own advantage and then forget about it. I have never had the luxury of forgetting about it. Every day that you were triumphing over evil and hunting for treasure, I had to remember it, and live with it, and carry on anyway.

Judged and found wanting.

Shianni subverts the “women in refrigerators” trope not just because she survives, but because she, and her trauma, do not suddenly stop mattering once their narrative usefulness is spent. She carries on – we later find her pouring her considerable energies into activism and the defense of her people – but her experiences remain part of her. She insists on being a character, not just a plot device, and she doesn’t let the player get away with treating her like one.
When is a woman in a refrigerator not in a refrigerator? When she kicks open the door and breaks it over your head.

*OK, so technically, it’s a spirit, and it’s unclear if it’s actually representing Shianni, or (more probably) a manifestation of the protagonist’s unconscious mind. For the purposes of Shianni’s character development and role from the player’s point of view, however, it doesn’t actually matter which she is!
**It’s worth noting that Shianni doesn’t have this conversation with all City Elf PCs, as I later discovered, just the ones who deserve it. A friend roleplayed a city elf plagued by guilt about what happened, and met with a Shianni who, while still haunted by the memory of what happened, gently tried to assuage the PC’s self-blame. File this under “BioWare are Impressively Sneaky”."

Reblog: Gamer Dreams

Interesting if contentious research highlighted by Jamie Madigan at psychology of games:


Gamer Dreams: "
Do hardcore gamers have more bizarre but less threatening dreams than non-gamers? One of the things I love about academics is that if you chain a million of them to a million graduate students, then one of them –by pure chance alone– will study a question like that. For example, I’ve been reading about a research program by psychologists Jayne Gackenbach and Beena Kuruvilla about the ways in which the dreams of hardcore gamers differ from non-gamers.
Curious as this is, it’s actually not that off the wall if you do some digging. Research suggests that people, especially adolescents, use violent and/or scary media as a way to practice dealing with life’s comparatively mundane but nonetheless stressful situations. The theory goes that games (and other media like comics, movies, or books) give us a safe place to either become a little desensitized to anxiety-provoking ideas, or to develop cognitive strategies for coping with them. It’s like play fighting, but for your brain.
In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing that one of the studies by Gakenbach and Kuruvilla¹ looked at, except that they examined how our mind may do this mental preparation for real-world threats during our dreams. Termed “threat simulation theory” the idea is that our minds create dreams to simulate aspects of those threats so that we can practice dealing with them and be better prepared for the real deal in real life. So if we’re worried about crime, we may dream about our house getting broken into.

A typical gamer at rest.

Gakenbach and Kuruvilla figured that like dreams, video games, are fake realities into which we project ourselves. This is particularly true with highly immersive games where players start to feel like they are spatially present in the game world. The researchers hypothesized that intense gaming sessions can fill the role traditionally handled by scary and threatening dreams, and with lowered needs to practice dealing with real-life anxiety, there will be fewer threat simulation dreams.
And, lo and behold, when they studied the data from surveys asking participants to recount their dreams and game playing habits, Gackenback and Kuruvilla found that this was generally true. With regards to people’s dreams, the survey measured whether or not there was a threatening event, what it was like, who the target of the threat was, how severe it was, whether or not the dreamer was participating in the threat, and the dreamer’s reaction. In short, hardcore gamers² still had violent and threatening dreams –no surprise, since we often dream about what we encounter while waking, and for hardcore gamers that often includes video game violence– but they reported being less frightened by the dreams and were much less likely to characterize them as “nightmares.” Even more interestingly, this was especially true of those who played lots of first-person shooters.
But is that the only way that gamers dream differently? Nope. In a subsequent study,³ the same researchers also looked at how likely hardcore gamers were to have really bizarre dreams. And honestly, what I found most fascinating about this study was how they conceptualized bizarreness as consisting of three factors:

• Incongruity or mismatching features of dream images
• Uncertain or explicit vagueness of dream images
• Discontinuity or sudden appearance, disappearance, or transformation of dream images

Anyway, the researchers figured that since we see so many really weird things in our video games during our waking hours, that weirdness must seep through into our dreams. Turns out they were right. Upon analyzing more data from surveys asking participants to describe their dreams and gaming habits, the Gackenback et al. found that gamers tended to have dreams with more vague and incongruent content, especially as it related to people and places.
Again, maybe not surprising, but the authors have some interesting theories as to why this is the case, beyond the obvious explanation that we tend to dream about what we see while awake the day before. For example, the more bizarre dreams may happen because gamers’ minds may be conditioned to be open to and even expect unorthodox relationships between concepts and things. This jives with other research showing that playing video games may enhance nonverbal problem solving, especially as it relates to spatial reasoning. Additionally, greater creativity (which also requires one to “get” unorthodox relationships among different things) has been shown to greater dream bizarreness. So hardcore gamers, as a group, may be conditioned to be more creative and better at certain types of problem solving relative to casual gamers or non-gamers. Because …we have really weird dreams. Or rather, we have the weird dreams because of those other things.
At any rate, it’s an interesting line of research, if a little niche.⁴ Now, go to bed –you’ve got some really weird but strangely non-threatening dreams to get to.
Footnotes:

1. Gackenbach, J. & Kuruvilla, B. (2008). The Relationship Between Video Game Play and Threat Simulation Dreams. Dreaming, 18 (4), 236-256.
2. The researchers actually called them “High End Gamers” but that label seems weird to me, like we’re luxury goods.
3. Gackenback, J., Kuruvilla, B. & Dopko, R. (2009). Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness. Dreaming, 19 (4), 218-231.
4. Says the guy who has a blog about the psychology of video games.

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