Re: [-empyre-] Games versus Play and other thoughts

[ben syverson <ben@bensyverson.com>]

On Jun 20, 2004, at 8:17 PM, Andy Polaine wrote:

> I always found it irritating that if I was to spend the day playing  
> games (or getting my students to) that this would be frowned upon, but  
> if I spent the afternoon watching Goddard films that would be okay.

I agree, but to play devil's advocate, wouldn't you say that left to  
their own devices, your students are probably much more likely to play  
video games than rent a Goddard film? On the other hand, most students  
are more likely to have seen a Goddard film than an artworld video  
game.


> I'm wondering whether we are all still doing the classic "new media"  
> thing of being impressed by the newness of it all.

It is a dangerous trap, considering innovation in the gaming industry  
occurs only along economically profitable lines now. The R&D used to  
happen in universities with military funding, but these days private  
companies like nVidia play a much larger role...


> What will an under-ten of the 2000s make in twenty-five years time?  
> It's not just the technology that will have changed.

There will be an explosion in gaming artware (and more interesting  
commercial games) when the tools become easier to use. The video game  
industry is first and foremost an industry, and with most commercial  
games costing millions to make and taking months to put together,  
profit will always win over experimentation. But when the technology is  
easy enough for tinkerers, Sunday developers and artists to use, then  
we'll see a huge influx of work.


>  Things like the Eye-Toy camera and Sing Start microphone are showing  
> a real shift in the kinds of things these consoles are being used for.  
> A shift to more playful games/toys that have, essentially, no physical  
> interface.

Well, that is Sony's stated intention. They'd like to move to a  
Minority Report-style interface, according to Vice President Phil  
Harrison: "EyeToy was a signpost for things in the future... If you can  
attach very high-resolution, low-cost video cameras you can deduce some  
quite interesting things about their users. We'll be able to  
extrapolate eye movement and gestural recognition, more complicated  
finger movement, and the logical next step of that is to deduce from a  
person's facial expression and demeanour what their emotion state is."

Of course, maybe we will see a simultaneous move to more physical  
interfaces. Our current controllers are physical in the most  
impoverished way imaginable -- solid plastic, inflexible, with buttons  
and mini-joysticks. Perhaps games of the future will come with their  
own unique physical interfaces in order to entice people to buy the  
games (rather than fileshare them) -- we have plastic gun controllers,  
but the possibilities are endless. One game which explored alternative  
interfaces (both physical and electronic) was Rez, which shipped with a  
"Trance Vibrator," which was immortalized in this Game Girl Advance  
blog entry:
http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2002/10/26/ 
sex_in_games_rezvibrator.html

As the author of the entry notes, the device "seems to have no other  
purpose than to act as a masturbatory aid." While this is a pretty  
extreme example, surely there's some happy medium that engages the body  
slightly more than a lump of hard plastic...

- ben