I’ve talked before about how valuable video games could be as a tool for learning new languages. Well, this interesting article
at Educational Games Research points to some real research on the subject, in particular on MMORPGs and language acquisition. Check it out!
1 comment October 29th, 2007
I admit it: I’m a great big cheater. Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I ran a tabletop RPG session without making up a tremendous portion of “what happens” on the spot. Whether I’ve spend two weeks preparing detailed maps and NPC profiles or scribbled a couple of notes in the bathroom while my players are waiting in the den, I have to lie and cheat to give my players the enjoyable adventures they expect.
I always find it fascinating to hear of GMs who can’t wing it, or who feel that there’s something morally irresponsible about winging it. As Ominus says at Game On :: Aleph Gaming blog in a post on Personal Rules for Narrating, the story isn’t the GM’s, nor is it the players’. A GM who lacks the agility to handle the inevitably unpredictable narrative flow that emerges when a group of people get together to create a collaborative story has no business behind the screen.
The trick, though, is not to let the player’s know when you’re winging it and when you’re not. I suspect my players know (certainly my wife does) that I have had to make up NPCs, locations, and events of whole cloth who go on to be central players in a campaign.
I tread upon the rules, too, when the situation merits. I lie about die rolls all the time, make up special rules situations that my players (who generally don’t know the rules very well) know nothing about, and sometimes fail to keep track of NPC health, letting the opponents die mostly when I feel a combat has gone on long enough to be dramatically entertaining.
And I say this as someone who takes some real pleasure in the simulationist elements of our hobby!
As an amateur magician, I’ve learned that my audience genuinely wants to know how magic is performed but will also be sorry if they do find out. Magicians don’t just keep their secrets in order to prevent others from performing the same tricks. Frankly, most people don’t want to do the tricks anyway. No, magicians keep their secrets because when the audience knows the secret, it’s the magic that vanishes, not the Statue of Liberty.
My players want to believe their characters adventure in a living world, full of vibrant NPCs and events that would happen whether or not they take a hand. They know I use narrative sleight-of-hand, mirrors, and invisible thread. But as long as they don’t know when I’m using it, they’ll have a good time.
Of course, we GM magicians must suffer for our art. This post at the Treasure Tables blog discusses the need to retcon, an inevitable consequence of improvisation.
As Sir Walter Scott states: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
And, that goodness, as J.R. Pope adds: “But when we’ve practiced for a while/How vastly we improve our style!”
Add comment October 26th, 2007
I recently said that asking “what women want” from games is the wrong question.
Sanya Weathers over at Eating Bees says that asking women in the game industry to talk constantly about their role as women instead of gaming professionals is the wrong thing to do to. Go read what she has to say.
Because Soylent Pink is people!
Add comment October 17th, 2007
That wonderful resource and community Board Game Geek is running a board-game Secret Santa program. The rules are simple: You get the contact information of a participant somewhere in the world, and it’s your job to send that person a game, ideally one from his or her wish list, by Christmas. At the same time, someone else will get your name, and you can expect to receive a game-based holiday package of your own.
This sounds grand to me, so I just finished signing up. The only problem: waiting till late November to find out whom I’ll be “spoiling.”
1 comment October 17th, 2007
If we gamers consider ourselves Homo ludens—humans who play—we can’t ignore that we have subspecies. Many call themselves “gamers,” but most mean something more specific. What distinguishes Homo ludens from people who don’t call themselves gamers, what unites us, is the perceived geek-factor of the games we play.
Within our geeky species, though, we’ve got varieties so distinct from one another that they can hardly be considered the same animal.
No taxonomy is perfect. As with life taxonomy, the borders are blurry and subject to change. Unlike life taxonomy, in which separate subspecies rarely mate outside of unusual circumstances, Homo ludens is basically engaged in one enormous, non-stop orgy of crossbreeding. In common with Douglas Adams’s Hagunenonns of Vicissitus Three*, Homo ludens is a super-evolutionary being that morphs from one life form to another several times over lunch.
Despite that, though, most gamers do seem to wind up identifying more as one particular subspecies than any other, at least for a given time. For instance, although many MMO players also play roleplaying games, the vast majority of WoW players seem to be Homo ludens sangoculi, and many have never touched a icosohedron in their lives. A quick survey of gaming blogs supports this hypothesis. There are many video game blogs, many roleplaying game blogs, and so on. But there are very few blogs that embrace both kinds of games.
I enjoy different varieties of games with equal fervor. Surely, I’m not the only Homo ludens ecclecticus, right? Who else is out there? And what other subspecies belong in the taxonomy?
*If you don’t know about the Hagunennons, do get your hands on a copy of the original The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio production. It has quite a few gems that didn’t survive to the many later versions of the property that will absolutely tickle a fan of the setting.
1 comment October 16th, 2007
Still enjoying taking my time in LotRO, I did something about a week ago I’ve done once before but didn’t expect to do again: I re-rolled a character to create almost exactly the same one.
I enjoy a certain brand of roleplaying in MMOs, one that’s compatible with actually playing the game and that favors emergent narrative. As such, I tend to create characters and envision their personalities and histories with a few bold strokes. I choose the character’s class based on what I’d like to play, the character’s race based on what can play my class of choice. If I have a choice of races, I’ll choose the one I haven’t played before, since in most MMOs each race gets to experience some different content, at least at the beginning of the game.
When choosing my character’s sex, I generally alternate between male and female. I like playing characters of both sexes. No, I don’t choose female characters because of the appearance of their posteriors, nor for any prurient reason whatsoever.
But as my female hobbit burglar reached level 17 and I began grouping more and more, I realized I just didn’t want to deal with the reaction to my obviously male voice in voice chat. I know most people don’t have a problem with men playing female characters, and I know people actually expect male voices for female characters. And I even know that hobbits of both sexes actually look pretty much identical in LotRO.
But I didn’t want to add another element to the already immersion-shattering effect of voice chat.
That alone wouldn’t have been enough reason, though. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’m tempted to achieve the “Undying” title available to those who achieve level 20 without once being defeated. With my first burglar, I died rather stupidly in an easily survivable situation at level 13. I got over it pretty quickly, but when I came up with a second reason to re-roll (changing my character’s sex), that was enough justification.
Now I have a bit of a quandary, though. As I said, I enjoy characters of both sexes. Will my concerns about voice chat doom me to creating only male characters henceforth? Will I get over those concerns and freely create female characters in the future? Will I avoid voice chat even when it’s just so useful (such as for dealing with the fellowship maneuvers key to the burglar class)?
Playing cross-sex characters is a big issue in MMOs, an issue that goes way beyond the scope of this blog post. But has anyone out there ever made a similar decision? Has anyone’s choice of character sex—or other character attribute—been influenced by the prospect of voice chat?
1 comment October 10th, 2007
Take a look at this post concerning Ubisoft’s new “Imagine” series of video games targeting girls aged 6 to 14.
Based on Ubisoft’s study, the first games in the line, to be released in October, are “Fashion Designer,” “Master Chef,” “Animal Doctor,” and “Babyz.” [My wife observed that “Babyz” looks a bit like the detestable “Bratz.”] “We did research, and we are studying the market… that’s what the girls actually like, so we should try to fulfill their needs,” Shara Hashemi, Ubisoft’s Brand Manager for the Imagine line, told Multiplayer in an interview last week.
My response: Ugh!
I don’t have special access to the “research” Ubisoft did, but from the descriptions it sounds as if they’ve fallen into the same trap that so much research in general does. However good their data gathering, they’ve asked the wrong question. They claim the main goal of Imagine games is “to have fun.” Then they turn around and say, “The games are built on ideas and concepts that every girl can relate to and they allow girls to expand their creativity while they’re learning real facts and real-life concepts.”
In other words, as with so many girl-targeted products, these games give girls a chance to play at being older girls or women . . . and little else. These games give girls a chance to change diapers, shop for clothes, and cook.
The boy games that the Ubisoft representative said girls aren’t interested in, in contrast, give players a chance to involve themselves in larger-than-life stories and activities. In other words, the results of this “research” confirm industry and cultural expectations that while “boys will be boys,” girls will be women.
The one Imagine game that sounds like it offers something other than a pixelated version of dolls, babysitting, and dress-up is “Figure Skater,” a game in which the player strives for career-life balance in pursuit of an Olympic gold medal. That actually sounds like fun, with a narrative and an opportunity for escapist fantasy.
Okay, Ubisoft just wants to sell games to girls, so they did research that tells them what they can expect will move off the shelves and into girls hands. Unfortunately, such girl-oriented games have performed notoriously poorly, because even though many existing games have elements hostile to female gamers, women wind up playing the fun ones anyway. On the other hand, almost nobody buys the pink boxes.
I bridle at this game line because, as the parent of a two-year-old daughter, I can see the onslaught of cultural expectation coming hard and fast. By the time a girl is “6 to 14,” she’s developed her own tastes, but she’s also been given heavy-handed lessons in what she’s supposed to like.
Remember, Ubisoft began this effort because “A quarter of DS owners are young girls but less than 10% of DS games are aimed specifically at them.”
The point is not that a quarter of DS owners—the girls—are stuck with a toy that doesn’t target them. It’s that a quarter of people who find the DS appealing are girls already! Already, one in four DS owners is female, no doubt mostly playing some of the 90+% games targeted at people.
The most interesting question is: which ones?
Add comment October 2nd, 2007
Last week, I wrote a post about what’s wrong with asking “what women want” from hobby games. Now I’d like to talk a little bit about why I think people keep asking the question.
It’s weird, isn’t it? No one asks: “What can we do to get more women into sports?” Male sports fans grin and talk about how lucky they are to have girlfriends into football, but those whose sweethearts don’t care about sports don’t usually push.
And even though I belong to a “Men Who Crochet” Yahoo! group, I’ve never heard anyone say: “What do men want out of yarn arts?” Knitters expect anyone who knits, male or female, to do it for pretty much the same reasons.
Okay, knitting isn’t as complex as video games. (Oh, there’s just as much complexity about yarn types, equipment, technique, and so on, but knitting is fundamentally about transforming one form of fiber into a useful or decorative fabric.) And sports, though geeky in their own way, have a completely different set of cultural expectations (and even more difficult gender issues).
Obviously, the main reason people try to figure out what women want from games is to attract more women to a hobby in which they’re underrepresented. Existing gamers (of both sexes) do it because they’d like to play games with more women. Game developers and publishers do it because they’d like to make more money, and a bigger audience has more money.
Here’s the heart of the matter, though: the gap may be narrowing, but relatively few women are “gamers.” Oh, more and more women play games. For some games, the player base comprises mostly women.
But hobby gaming—historically the sphere of men, heavily influenced by the male-dominated sf genre, weighed down by the perception that it’s the sphere of children rather than adults—is hostile to the entry of women into the community.
Some women don’t really notice the hostile elements, or even like them. Others get “grandfathered” in by having become interested young enough not to even mind the nastier bits. Many women gamers, though, like games enough that they just overlook the nasty stuff and get on with the fun.
Calling hobby games hostile to women isn’t new, but it does explain why more women don’t game. In a day or two, I’m going to spell out what I see are the elements of the hobby that are unfriendly to women.
Add comment October 2nd, 2007
We kicked off our new Buffy campaign (set in the Spanish colonial town 170 years before the show started) with a character creation session. This was the first time any of the players had experienced Unisystem, and they appreciated the super-graininess, used as they are to GURPS. One player has never, ever played a roleplaying game before, so it was her first time experimenting with the concept of character creation. (Seriously, for the first time ever, she touched a die that had more than six sides.)
She absolutely shined. She’d come up with an interesting background (daughter of an American Protestant missionary family, venturing through unsettled Indian territory to the Spanish town of Valle del Sol), and she’s agreed to play a “potentia” Slayer, partly because not one of my three established players wanted to take the role of Slayer proper.
I did find one problem with the graininess: the players all gravitated toward a heavily overlapping set of Qualities and Shortcomings. The two combat-oriented players appear almost identical (although one is a werewolf). The two non-combat characters (one a potential witch, the other a Watcher who happens to be a man of the cloth) are similarly similar.
With this crew, though (my wife, a couple who’ve been the core of our gaming group for a while, and the new woman), I don’t anticipate this being too much of a problem. Oh, we’ll have two or three people rolling for lots of skill checks, but they’ll come up with different plans and deal with situations differently. With a bit of clever GM manipulation, I think I’ll be able to give everyone good screen time without too much trouble.
That said, I want to hear any suggestions anyone has for fostering “niche protection” in a system that’s mildly hostile to it!
We had a quick play session after character creation was finished. Normally, I have a good idea of everyone’s character a week or more in advance, so I found it quite challenging to place and integrate everyone’s characters into the plot believably. In the end, I felt a bit off.
My wife tells me, though, that if I hadn’t said anything, no one would have noticed. And G— (the woman of the couple) sent me an IM this morning gushing about the game. So I won’t worry.
Instead, I have to figure out how to schedule a follow-up session, along with sessions for the fantasy campaign, the pirate campaign, and the Lost-inspired campaign I’m running. As well as get-togethers for all the great board and card games I want to play.
Add comment October 1st, 2007
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Sep | Nov » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||