While reading chapter four, I was particularly struck by Koster’s assertion that, after a point, certain types of games just recycle old material instead of coming up with something original. I believed him, but I thought he wasn’t giving those games enough credit. Sure, they might be following the same old formula, but they’re still fun. After thinking this, I stored the chapter away in the back of my mind– until I played one of the assigned games for Thursday’s class: Asteroids. It seemed oddly familiar, even though I’d never played it before. After poking around on the Internet for awhile, I realized why. It was exactly like Geometry Wars! Except, you know, less pretty.

Geometry Wars is a game (or series of games, really) for mainly the Xbox 360, but also for Wii and Nintendo DS. It’s simple, but as you can see, completely over-the-top with its graphics. There are explosions of light, pulsing neon colors, and often catchy techno background music. But underneath all of that, it is almost the exact same game as Asteroids.

You can play the significantly less visually astounding flash version on Newgrounds here, and see for yourself the similarity between it and Asteroids. This is an example of how videogames are just reusing the same old formulas instead of being innovative– do they think that if we get distracted by all of the pretty colors and explosions, we won’t notice the recycled material?

(The braver of you folk can download a more-authentic-but-still-knockoff version of Geometry Wars, called Grid Wars, here. The links are down at the bottom.)

We’ve read a lot about how play and games affect development of the brain and learning.  This article offered a slightly different perspective on how inherent brain biology and structure can effect how games are played. When it comes to gaming ‘experts’ it seems there may be a fundamental biological difference setting them apart from ‘casual’ or ‘novice’ gamers.  Since the brain is not a static object, and is constantly changing and growing as we learn and respond to the world around us, I wonder if these biological differences stem from the amount of hours played, or if the amount of hours played stems from the biology. It seems like an interesting “chicken or the egg” scenario.

For social networks, it’s game on – by Jon Swartz

Though I haven’t played FarmVille or Cafe World, I can certainly see how big of a craze these games have become. It seems that every day, at least one of my Facebook friends has found a lost animal on their farm or “tossed a few too many pizzas in Cafe World.” Why have these games become so popular, what do we learn from them? Koster might say that these games teach “tools for being the top monkey.” (page 52) However, not only are my peers learning to be top monkeys, but so are my aunts and uncles that have (for whatever reason) joined Facebook. As Dani mentioned earlier, how do adults fit in to our discussion of games? Marketing contractor Laura Phillips plays FarmVille in order to escape from the real world and relax, but is she learning or gaining anything new by playing this game?

Additionally, what role, if any, does the social networking aspect of games (both online games and videogames) have? Would FarmVille be as popular as it is today if it were not an online game, but instead a videogame made for a console such as Playstation 3? Perhaps popularity would decrease, since Laura Phillips and other adults are not always as drawn to those consoles as they are to computers. Would my peers still be drawn to FarmVille if it were made for Playstation 3 or another game console?

In my searching on the internet, I recently came upon an article surrounding the recent recall of Baby Einstein videos by Disney. The core of the case of against the video series relies on two real cornerstones: they don’t actually teach babies anything, and they foster social problems in children.

http://www.businesspundit.com/after-controversy-dinsey-issues-baby-einstein-recall/

I’ll spare you a boring summary of the article, but this serves to elaborate on our discussion about the essential nature of play. Play provides a “dress rehearsal” for real life and the social situations it entails. Plunking a kid in front of a TV for hours a day, especially at a young age, deprives them of this necessary “social tuning”  and has potential to result in severe social retardation. Video’s and games may be educational, but they will never be a substitute for human interaction. So, not only was baby Einstein useless, but it may have been damaging to the tens of thousands of kids forced to watch it.

As college students, most of us are probably familiar with a variety of drinking games, whether we’ve played them ourselves or seen them at parties.  Raph Koster presented some academic definitions of games that described them as ‘make-believe,’ ‘outside ordinary life,’ and in class we mentioned that games aren’t supposed to have a tangible outcome.  Drinking games fall outside of these definitions, since a few games of beer pong or flip cup with some buddies can effectively determine the course of an entire evening, impair judgment, and lead to some unfortunate real-world outcomes.

Because of this, beer pong typically has a bad reputation, at least among professionals and parents.  It’s looked down upon as a silly game played mostly by college students trying to get drunk off of cheap beer they bought with their parents’ money.   However, adults have created their own variations of drinking games, which don’t have mature goals, exist solely to get the players intoxicated, and don’t even have a clear winner.  Although adults condone their own twist on drinking games, they still condemn the way college students choose to play.

I was intrigued by the game “1000 Blank White Cards” we played in class this past Thursday – what it was like to play a game where the rules could change halfway through, how few materials it took to create a completely original, never-been-seen-before game, and whether a game like that could actually be fun. After a little bit of research, I found “1000 Blank White Cards” can be considered a nomic, or a game in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules (definition from Wikipedia). The original game Nomic was created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber and you can read the complete rules and description here. After a little more research, I came across Jacob Davenport’s blog post on Nomic, where he talks about trying to create a nomic with his friend Elliot. After a while they start to argue about how many rules they really need to begin a nomic, which begs the larger question “how many (or few) rules do you need in order for what you’re doing to be considered a game?”

Our discussions in class and the reading made me look at the definition of a game much closer.  We use the word ‘game’ so frequently and in so many contexts, that the definition can be quite broad.  Academics in the reading assigned the adjectives ‘voluntary’, ‘unproductive’, and ‘outside ordinary life’ to games.  However, I find that we often use the term ‘game’ to describe situations that contradict these descriptors.  We play games with others’ minds, we use games (and bribery) to elicit tangible outcomes from children, and we study games (game theory) in which the players have not necessarily voluntarily entered.

The concept that games require voluntary play made me think of a popular movie series in which game players have not voluntarily agreed to play, let alone have fun.  Want to play a game?

I found this article, and I think it sounded relevant to our class discussion and to the reading concerning play. The article is from a journal that focuses on a Marxist approach to psychology, so it definitely talks about play from a different approach than we took in class on Tuesday. I found the most interesting portion of this article to be the section in which the author explains how a child’s greatest display of self-control occurs in play, because the child abides by the rules by his/her own choice, and not because someone else told him/her to. The author talks at length about the definition of play and argues that play is necessary to the fulfillment of children’s needs.

http://compsci.duq.edu/~packer/Courses/PSI3962/Lectura%209%20Vygotsky.pdf

Vygotsky, Lev. “Play and its role in the Mental Development of the Child.” Trans. Catherine Mulholland. Voprosy psikhologii 6 (1966): 1-18.