gaming – Climb to the Stars

Bon alors, Ingress? [fr]

[en] A brief introduction to Ingress. Join the Enlightened!

Cela fait un peu plus de deux mois que je bassine mon entourage avec Ingress. C’est quoi, ce jeu?

Ingress, c’est un jeu multi-joueurs sur smartphone (Android/iOS) en espace réel.

C’est la partie “espace réel” qui m’a fait tilter, et crocher.

Ce que vous voyez ici c’est le “scanner” d’Ingress. En gros, imaginez Google Maps (c’est vraiment Google Maps, les routes que vous voyez). Ça c’est l’espace réel. Et au-dessus, comme en superposition, il y a une “couche” du jeu, ce que vous voyez en vert, bleu, et même gris: des “portails”. Le jeu consiste à interagir avec ces portails (j’explique tout de suite comment) mais le truc c’est que pour faire quelque chose à un portail on doit se déplacer physiquement avec son téléphone pour arriver au lieu où il est implanté. Le portail doit être dans le petit cercle jaune que vous voyez (une quarantaine de mètres) sur l’image.

Donc oui, faut s’habiller (en hiver) et aller marcher dehors. Et ça fait marcher des kilomètres, je rigole pas. On se prend vite au jeu.

Ce qu’on fait avec ces portails c’est en prendre possession et les relier entre eux. Ils nous fournissent aussi du matériel utile à les “déployer” (= en prendre possession et les préparer), à les connecter, et à les détruire quand ils appartiennent à la faction adverse (les deux portails bleus que vous voyez au fond).

Quand on relie trois portails entre eux, ça fait un “champ” (le coloriage vert que vous voyez), et la zone enfermée dans ce champ est sous le contrôle de votre équipe: verte ou bleue.

Vert ou bleu? La faction que vous rejoignez ne change pas grand-chose au jeu pour vous, une fois sur le terrain. Ce à quoi il faut prendre garde avant de choisir, cependant:

dans quelle faction jouent vos amis? (c’est mieux d’être dans la même, vraiment, sinon on ne peut pas jouer ensemble)
quelle est la faction dominante dans votre région? (suivant que vous aimez être en position de force ou non pour commencer)

Le choix de la faction est définitif, attention! Si vous jouez en Suisse Romande, vous devez impérativement choisir la faction verte. On a besoin de vous!

J’ai commencé à jouer mi-novembre. Depuis, j’ai rencontré plein de gens sympa (assez vite on comprend qu’il faut jouer à plusieurs), gravi 10 niveaux (presque 11), marché plus de 500km à pieds et trainé ma vieille voiture jusqu’au Locle pour une grande opération impliquant une trentaine de personnes.

Chronophage? Disons que mon temps à marcher dehors en jouant à Ingress, seule ou accompagnée, est du temps que je ne passe pas vissée devant ma télé, par exemple. Tout est relatif!

Lift12 Open Stage, Gaming: Niklaus Moor, José Luis de Vicente [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of the open stage talks — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Niklaus Moor: Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in gamification.

Call of Duty 3. Massively successful launch.

What changed besides the graphics, since version 1?

From level as chapter to level as progress of the character. More motivating!

Gamified the game. Measure my usage of the game. I get medals.

The core is a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The key is in the right balance between the two.

Danger! you can kill intrinsic motivation by having the wrong extrinsic motivation.

steph-note: I wrote about that recently!

Stopped kids from stealing by rewarding them for it. Also, kids in school.

José Luis de Vicente: On the Mythologies of Play

Not about how videogames are going to change the world, but in how they have already changed it. 3 stories.

Fold it. Solve puzzles for science. Figure out enzyme structure.

Gold farmers in China. Exploit the game to accumulate in-game currency or virtual goods which they sell to western gamers.

Aram Bartoll‘s model of Dust made of concrete (2011).

Lift12: Tom Armitage. Games: Systemic Media for a Digital Age [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Tom Armitage’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

What is the toy I give a child to teach it about algorithmic trading?

Video games.

What are games?

Greg Costikyan: games change with the players actions, have interactions, have goals, are non-linear, demand participation…

Eric Zimmerman: games = “systemic media”

The building block of systems is rules. Rules cluster in mechanics. Friction between mechanics — this is where the player intervenes.

Systems: bedrock of games design.

How do you read a game? The first thing you do with a game is play with it. Figure out what space there is inside it. (// “play” in the wheels of a car).

Between us and the game: we exert an action (play), there is an outcome, and somewhere in the middle is meaning. “Understanding” the game. Play also exists inside the feedback loop.

Games only work with a player. So a game must be designed with space for player agency.

Being literate in systems = being able to read them.

But what do we mean by literacy? The ability to read and write a medium (Alan Kay). You need both.

We make games through play, just as we understand them through play.

Make sure the game reveals how it needs to be played, hints at how its systems work. Game design is interaction design. Making games is a step into the unknown.

Games are everywhere. The systems we encounter the earliest in our lives.

Games give us tools to understand other things. Take the models we’ve learned by playing and apply them outside.

Go back to the first definition of “games”: isn’t that what society is like now?

Systems literacy may be the literacy for the 21st century. Doesn’t mean everything is a game! But games are the training ground for the literacies we need.

Lift12, the New Face of Gaming: Kars Alfrink [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces prochains jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Kars Alfrink’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

What future games can do for networked publics.

Networked publics.

Four things constrain what we can do in public: law, architecture, market norms, social norms.

Online, architecture is code. The internet is not a separate place, there is nothing virtual about it.

We have a tendency to willfully self-separate — “people like us”. Choose schools they send their kids to.

Lack of appreciation, influence, access to networks. New lower-class.

What do you do to stay sane in the office? You play pranks. Reclaim agency. The same thing happens in the world at large.

“You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?” (rioter to journalist)

There must be more productive ways/rituals to prank our way into a sense of agency.

Ritual. Games can function as ritual in the 21st century.

Games are systemic. Made of rules. Constrain behaviour. Also autonomous. Space set apart from everyday life. Experiment with behaviours which are otherwise impossible or undesirable.

Not all games are like the event they model. More like mirrors.

False idea that we can reliably simulate reality (ref. The Black Swan).

Simulation fever. Gap between simulated reality in the game and reality.

Performative. How speech changes the state of the world. “I declare you husband and wife” is speech that changes the world. Example: Cruel 2 B Kind. Acts of kindness.

Playingwithpigs.nl — both simulation fever and performative. Change the way the two species relate to each other. Give the pigs an active role. And pigs entertained by humans. Real-life issue: EU regulation, farmers must provide pigs with play material.

Games can transform the world in a way that doesn’t instrumentalise games.

Instead, we can make games that empower people, player-centered.

Trust.

This is what Kars thinks games can do for our networked publics.

Massive games providing social good.

LIFT08: Paul Barnett [en]

Creative director. Between the creative vision and the huge raft of people who do all the work.

Is going to try and strip the gibberish away.

“Lots of people online doing things.”

Bother, too large to talk about! One of the things you can do online with lots of people: you can socialize. Social networking is massively popular and theoretically worth billions and billions!

Lets of people are making things and showing them off. “User generated” 🙂

“My cat was sick all over my grandma, and I videoed it. Wanna see it?”

*steph-note: this guy is really fun and I like his accent!*

Strange word: “entertainment games that make old-fashioned… something (money?)”

Objective: they do this really well, I want to give them money!!

Profit! Something his mum understands. Virtual making real money. Not sure why!

Decided to talk about two things:

– history of cinema
– ?? *steph-note: missed that*

Just like mainstream movies, games have:

– too many people working on them, cost way too much, miss their deadlines, and when people experience them, they go “I can do better!”

History of cinema: color… weren’t sure it would catch on. TV came, and they were convinced TV was dead. DVD. And yet, movies flourish.

They don’t have 5 changes in 50 years, but 50 changes in 5 years. They don’t have the generational thinking. People who are successful in this business build rockets to the moon and never come back. Technology keeps changing and they don’t know how to use it. They don’t have a clue about what’s going to be “the platform of the future”. They don’t know how to monetize it either. Problem: all the games that appear to make money online were built years ago. Problem in a moving market.

The online space is fun and draws new speakers.

Designers who design for designers cost a lot of money, speak gibberish, and you just have to believe them. Paul is the middleman, between various players in the industry who have different languages.

Casinos: like movies and games (cost a lot, not ready on time, and when you walk in “I can do this?”) Subscription model. Community management.

American system: if something works for somebody, build it bigger, better, faster… But that doesn’t work in the long run.

New design and thinking is happening online. Take your game design people, and put them online — fight insular thinking. Need to embrace the online industry.

LIFT08: Guy Vardi (Casual Games) [en]

*steph-note: live blogged notes, may be incomplete, etc.*

Casual games?

– “silly, stupid games”
– “games for the housewife”

*steph-note: video went way too fast for me.*

If a hardcore game is a full meal, a casual game is a snack.

Snacks are not dinner, say the WoW fans.

People play 2-3 hours a month, 3-15 times a month. (*steph-note: not sure I got that right.*)

Second largest money waster in the US after the subprime crisis 😉

Stats: rising phenomenon. People spend more time playing online games than watching clips on YouTube or interacting in social networking sites like Facebook.

Bite-side episodes. People want short stuff (video clips, TV episodes, music).

LIFT08: Robin Hunicke (Game Design) [en]

*steph-note: live blogged notes, may be incomplete, etc.*

Computers aren’t really fun. Frustrating. Games and AI, on the other hand, are.

Building and sharing is better than just building by your self.

A little bit of vocabulary to think about how games work, now.

Fun is a problematic word. Means different things to different people.

System: MDA

– Mechanics = rules as system, any game has rules
– Dynamics = what happens when the player interacts with the rules, without a player a game is just a set of rules
– Aesthetics = resulting experience, what comes from all these things together

Why kill books to make digital books? Why kill games to make digital games?

Games we played:

– dolls
– fort/army
– charades
– tag
– spin the bottle
– 4 square
– soccer

What is true about all these is that they involve groups of people. People are fun. Competition, mock violence, lies, hidden information, misinformation, love, family…

Power is hard to simulate. Magic circle.

What about digital games? Here’s what you might do in a game.

Start somewhere, do an activity, and when you’re good enough at it, you get a star. Progress! You get to upgrade: more weapons, cooler pants, more friends. Over and over again. (Scary!)

Not unlike going to work every day until you get a promotion, or going on dates until you get engaged.

Some popular aesthetics:

– I am a surgeon in a soap opera emergency room (Trauma Center)
– I am a girl discovering her past, which is strangely haunted (Trace Memory)
– I am an attorney solving odd crimes and protecting the innocent (Phoenix Wright – Ace Attorney)
– I am a warrior in a war-torn land (…)

There is a reason these aesthetics get explored in games.

What are we learning?

Making things we get out of games seem more and more real: hard work! The aesthetics can override the mechanics: ex, the Wii.

Take the power of something that’s pretty complex, simplify it into a smaller form, you get something magical. The market is saying they want more of that.

Facebook is a game. One of the most compelling social applications out there.

– chatty
– social
– automatic
– selective
– fast
– repetitive
– rewarding

Adding friends, chatting, adding, chatting, adding, chatting…

It’s a huge franchise from a games perspective.

Stars?

– more friends
– graffiti
– gifts
– hugs
– laughter
– wins
– pictures

Work and rewards

It lets me decide how to use it. Lets me decide what the game is about. I don’t have to have the hugs application. Facebook is about me the human being, about the people who use it.

Aesthetic on Facebook: I am a person living a fun life… 🙂 I am loved.

Do you give hugs?

Flickr, Dopplr. Not giving people actual points, but giving them space to create and play.

– I vote
– I invest
– …

Small steps: mobile, creative, communicative, always almost now.

House of the future. Aesthetics that are available to me. Game design is literacy. All apps can do this. Smile more.