No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #161: the science of games

Hello, everyone. I'll start with an article left over from last week, that I couldn't show you because the site was down. Namely, about ephemeral gaming, and not just in the sense of bit rot, but simply the ability to play (for instance) World of Warcraft as it was in 2010, to pick an arbitrary year. Never mind recreating the mindset of players at the time, the mood it brought and the kind of interactions it led to.

Which is all good and well, but, um, you do realize a theatrical play or live music concert is an equally ephemeral experience, and nobody sees it as a problem to be solved, right? We record the performance, write down our thoughts about the cultural context and move on. And as the article points out, people already do that for videogames as well. Not just in the sense of let's plays -- I've seen videos of grand battles in the aforementioned MMORPG, recorded by a designated player, complete with commentary about the who, what and why.

But yeah, the Ancient Egyptians never writing down the rules of Senet because "everyone knew how to play the game"... that was just silly of them.

Still in the realm of scientists tackling games, here's a couple of papers on the communities around game-making tools (it's in French, but one of the papers is in English). I'm still working my way through the first one, but the bit about making imaginary videogames before having the means or skills to do it for real brought back childhood memories. As for the idea that making games is a game in itself... that's our motto here at No Time To Play, so, pretty much?

In related news, we have an article about games that cater to more than the flight-or-fight instinct that's the typical male response to violence. Turns out, another instinct people have is to protect the innocent and make allies, and not nearly enough games address that, leaving much of the potential audience out in the cold. Gee, I wonder why.

Last but not least, Gamasutra tells us about Warren Spector tracing Deus Ex back to a game of D&D, while an acquaintance has been writing a series of articles about development on the ZX81. And I'll leave it at that because I'm way over quota again. See you next week.