on thee cultural significance ov gaming

the cultural significance of games is WILDLY overstated. massive revenue =/= relevance.

― you penis-curling she-devils (jamescobo), Thursday, 19 May 2011 17:52 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

in fact I would argue that games were more culturally significant back in the NES days even if we didn't realize it at the time! I have a hard time imagining the Hot Topic of the 2030s is going to be stuffed with Master Chief shirts or hipster galleries hosting an endless series of exhibitions of BLOPS-themed art.

― you penis-curling she-devils (jamescobo), Thursday, 19 May 2011 17:57 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

do we have a thread about THEE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF GAMING? i am tempted to start one because otherwise i will probably just shit this thread up

― thomp, Friday, 20 May 2011 08:13 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i. this took me ages to get around to, huh

ii. i just got told i should consider posting this in five different pashmina threads because they all used 'thee' and 'ov'

is it boring to ask for a definition of cultural significance at the outset? think we can think about the uses of gameracy at the same time but still i think the phrase is a bit "Cultural Studies 4 U" in an unhelpful way - which isn't to knock this as a thread, just some opening observations. they don't sell crockery in Hot Topic afaik but i would say crockery had cultural significance.

iii. i have excised zora's (probably meaningful) complaint that the core-as-in-hardcore gaming industry has been developing a more and more pronounced and disgusting slant towards pandering towards immature white dudes. actually i sit on the fence with that one viz. duke nukem

iv. broad issue no. 1: is the rise of casual gaming more important than any big title at e3 this week, i.e. is farmville the most culturally significant game of our time?? (no.)

v. broad issue no. 2: the grauniad ran a couple of pieces on l.a. noire (which is the thread the above is from) going migod, is this the turning point where games are now 'more intelligent' and 'more adult' than film?? (no.)

xpost: oh i'm not convinced the phrase is meaningful or helpful at all! but trying to start with a definition of it seems like a bad way to go about it.

vi. i've been reading jim rossignol's this gaming life. it is not a very good book. one interesting thing about it is that it starts by arguing that gaming is an argument for its own value -- that we shouldn't look for outside factors by which we argue that gaming is good -- a lot of arguments about 'art and games' are hung up here -- but that we should accept that giving first world people with too much leisure time something to do is itself a valuable thing. (on the other hand you could say the same about the hitler youth amirite) -- rossignol sort of backtracks from that almost immediately and starts trying to find other arguments for it.

vii. one of the worst of these arguments is that people have made actual-gallery-type-art using nintendo iconography, which is like the inverse of the no-pots-in-hot-topic thing. (a jeff koons sculpture featuring the pink panther isn't an argument for the goodness of the pink panther.)

this is neither here nor there, but near the end of Red Dead Redemption i managed to stage a few devastating scenes of family dysfunction. as those who have played the game will recall, John Marsten is reunited with his wife and son after narrowly cheating death for almost the entirety of the game. he then has to deal with the quotidian realities of a small ranch - driving cattle out to pasture, scaring away crows, etc. Inbetween these activities, John (you) is free to relax in the homestead. He wanders into the kitchen. There's his wife, dutifully stirring the pot. He approaches. She emits some forgettable greeting and goes back to the stove. He stands nearer to her. She gets annoyed and carries on cooking. He tries to speak.. but no words come. Why can't he talk to her? It's been weeks - maybe months - since Marsten was shanghaied into service for corrupt city officials, with his wife and son held hostage. Has he been scarred by the experience? Has his wife? She keeps stirring. John stares at her ear. He turns stiffly around in a circle and stares at the opposite wall. He stretches. When will dinner ever be ready? John wanders out into the living room and sees his son leaning against a piece of furniture, staring into space. He approaches. His son says nothing, just keeps staring, shifting slightly from one foot to another. John also says nothing. Surely there is lots to say? Lots to catch up on? Laughs to be had? Questions that need answering? But again, no words come. John stares at his son. His son ignores him. The clock ticks.

(distinction between 'cultural significance' and 'cultural value'.)

viii. a lot of rossignol's better arguments hinge on the notion that gaming helps facilitate valuable interpersonal connections, either person-to-person in the real world or in more atomised online communities. a lot of his examples from the former come from spending a couple of weeks in korea, where (as we all know, i guess? -- ) competitive gaming is more mainstream than it is in the western world, and where people go to hang out or have date nights in gaming cafes, rather than owning games. i think a lot of why i didn't like the book comes from rossignol thinking that korea doesn't have a drinking culture, and going well wouldn't it be better if us westerners did this gaming thing for socialising instead of getting drunk all the time

(xpost.)

whereas: actually, no one wanted to drink with you, nerd

tracer i think that's interesting! it reminds me of (maybe is an argument against) steven poole's thing about the game that let him drink coffee

I'm pretty sure I disagree strongly here! I teach kids ages 9-12 and gaming is honestly the only media they consume - they barely watch TV! It's easy to think of CoD servers as a terrible cesspit on which nothing can grow but they are also where an entire generation are for serious - I can't think of any other type of media at all, right now, where design decisions have more formative weight.

Like, when these kids are 14, the weird ones won't listen to Nirvana, they'll play Braid.

fahrenheit? i think there's a coffee drinking scene in there. in the same scene you're not allowed to leave until you remember to kiss your girlfriend.

xpost

i think the concept of "cultural significance" itself depends on a model of pan-social imagined community that may have been nichified out of existence?

Tracer I think that's exactly why games are virtually the only thing it still applies to!

gravel when i was 9-12 we had lots of conversations about gaming and when i was 13 we all got into music instead?

tracer it was an animal crossing game -- http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/working-for-the-man/

i think 'what is the cultural role of gaming' is a more accurate or helpful question than 'what is the cultural significance' of gaming, maybe

haha yeah - for me, it's all about interacting with as few real people as possible

sadly i can't work out how to post a link to the search results for user or display name Tracer Hand on board I Love Games

lol

well

you guys are different

one interesting thing about it is that it starts by arguing that gaming is an argument for its own value -- that we shouldn't look for outside factors by which we argue that gaming is good

im reasonably convinced he stole this argument from me, or at least parts of it

i feel like have a lot to say abt the relationship btw 'videogame aesthetics' & its influence & translation into various film, design & visual arts movements/trends particularly in how we see/relate to three dimensional space (but also re: things like pov, 'visual text' a bunch of other garbage) but then this is the sort of thing i think abt really intensely (& seems so persuasive) while swimming laps & then have no real form or heft to when im sitting at my desk idk

ha well good morning

yeah no coffee yet but this is better than grading papers lol...

like i hate breaking into this grand david brooksian mode where its all abt 'how games are altering how we interface with media & radicalizing our understanding of the difference btw participant & creator & blah blah blah here's a so-so study on cognition someone described to me over dinner last week' but i kinda do believe that stuff? a little?

maybe - being glib & a little obtuse - the biggest 'cultural' impact that current-ish games have had is in how a consumer views her relationship to fictional space & how gaming fosters a kind of distanced immersion in those spaces? this is not very good formulation but yknow

I kind of agree with NV that we ought to (try to) define 'cultural significance' before we really get started! I feel like there is one definition by with, say, romcom-Hugh-Grant-vehicles have lots of it and an alternate definition (centred more on some pan-historic capital-A-art ish) in which they have none at all. I'm happy to argue about the place of video games either way but I think it'd probably save a lot of misunderstanding?

i think we can think about both things as we go along - i don't think there's a really useful definition of "cultural significance" and we can keep it vague if we know what it's generally pointing at. one of the failings of a lot of esp. literary history for me is that it doesn't pay much mind to works that were huge in their day. because games move relatively quickly in terms of fashion, design ideals etc, it doesn't seem likely to me that there will be much of a market for constructing a Canon, even tho we all cd name a bunch of Canonical games now - they're not things that new generations really wanna return to and experience. like people still get a lot from reading say Middlemarch but v. few people will argue that a kid today is missing out if they haven't played Space Invaders.

sorry this is rambly, I am still thinking about what Lamp said because this is v. interesting in terms of the way "entertainment" will be "consumed" in future. but for now I think there are many concentric circles of initiation into gamerdom and most game issues probly haven't made it v. far out from the centre. except ironically stuff like Farmville which i don't think we shd underestimate significance-wise.

feel like there is one definition by with, say, romcom-Hugh-Grant-vehicles have lots of it and an alternate definition (centred more on some pan-historic capital-A-art ish) in which they have none at all.

i. i guess its not really an argument any longer that games no longer occupy some kindof minor subcultural niche. like games have a long enough established history and enough cultural currency that say 'family guy' could as easily use super mario bros. as a lazy joke reference as 'three's company' or 'pretty woman'. but its maybe worth pointing out that they probably still dont have they same broad audience that sports or popular movies or television do. also that none of those things (except sports) have the same kind of shared cultural currency they did 10 years ago?

ii. the gatekeeper argument is probably more about 'importance' than 'significance' i.e. how much does capital a art even exist in the world?

gaming is kinda like masturbation with regard to IRL culture: nearly everyone does it, hardly anyone over the age of 14 talks about it. And on the very odd occasion people talk about games in the pub - even gamer to gamer - there's something uncomfortable about the conversation, it's just not cool.

ichlugebullets Dom
"True artistic innovation these days isn't in film or music but rather video games. Just look at LA Noire." - a man with a neckbeard.
14 hours ago

gotta admit i find the majority of gaming conversations horribly boring but that might just be when our Joel is going on and on about some shit I don't care about

am loving LA Noire btw but it certainly don't feel like the great leap forward to me, unless faintly undercooked but convoluted 40s thrillers are gonna be the next big box office thing. which they aren't, obv.

i don't know where people find the time time -- on top of ilx and having jobs, social lives, etc

yep, but think how odd that sounds if you transplant it to reading books

ah i don't spend so much time on ilx lately and i just pop in and out while i'm playing Football Manager, apart from that i'm a slacker and my social life involves a lot of hanging round the house hungover. Dom once pointed out if you can get yr nightly sleep down to the 5 hour mark you can fit in a lot of gaming

lets do some mephisto runs

yep, but think how odd that sounds if you transplant it to reading books

― sometimes all it takes is a healthy dose of continental indiepop (tomofthenest), Wednesday, June 8, 2011 9:48 AM (22 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah but ... ah im not going there

what would you guys say is the best written video game

xp, :D I was just going to say the one game it is socially acceptable to talk about ( in groups of men usually) is football manager. FOOTBALL is the trump card which makes it ok.

xp are you talking about code quality there

optic blast optic blast optic blast berserker barrage does have a pretty ring to it

the best written video game is still like a third rate movie/TV show imo in terms of writing, but then movie crit didn't take off until critics stopped treating movies as recorded plays, and game crit has to stop thinking about games like movies no matter how much some idiot designers wanna go there

well-"written" games: Monkey Island I and II, GTA III and onwards. Satire and humour seem to work out pretty well but god help the game script writer who tries to get all portentous on us. Some games are pretty well plotted but the writing is frequently adolescent at best.

sorry for all my posts thus far in this thread but here is something I was thinking about irl yesterday. I was eating a sandwich and thinking about the word "imp" or rather, about the word "impish" I forget why. But I realized that after living as long as I have I still visualize that badly rendered creature from doom when I hear the word, and when I really thought about it I couldn't seem to think of any other game, or rather, an image from a game, I immediately reference when I hear a word.

that is, a non made up word

lived in Lincoln for 4 years, "the" imp is always this feller:-
http://data6.blog.de/media/383/5574383_c5a5c95bc0_l.jpeg

Pocket Lint from Leisure Suit Larry :-)
Also the way that any circle ( pizza, whatever) with a 15-90 degree segment cut out of it is Pac-Man
Must be loads more.

sector, not segment. damn.

what would you guys say is the best written video game

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, June 8, 2011 4:49 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

deus ex

i'm uneasy about the notion of 'writing' in games. took me a (far too) long time to realise i enjoyed RPGs for the odd obsessive-compulsive battle-system stuff and the FUN WITH MATH! aspect more than i did the writing. well, i think so. anyway i'm not sure that 'WHITHER THE WELL-WRITTEN GAME' is the key thing in terms of '(mario coin sound effect)! (street fighter roundhouse kick sound effect!) video games aren't just for kids anymore!' -- more like 'when will we accept that games do a couple things pretty well'

i would probably be more enthusiastic about talking about games to (all but about two) people i know in the real world than i would talking about books! most people know shit-all about books frankly whereas people who play videogames at least know enough about videogames to play a videogame

when will we accept that games do a couple things pretty well

i mean it's a well-worn argt. at this point that 'tetris' or 'super mario bros.' or whatever is more purely ludic than is final fantasy xiii (which is probably undeniable) and is thus 'better art' (which eh)

and more and more people are comfortable with the investments of time and energy in the former, or in games which require a similar level of input, investment of time (peggle or farmville or wii sports -- note that these all function socially on v different levels)

whereas hiding in a room and playing demon's souls or persona 4 or yakuza 3 (yes, all my examples are 18-36 months out of date) is still (a little) stigmatized, mb -- that said all the smartest people i know play games. no, all the smartest dudes i know play games

which is weird: in some ways it's like a world in which airport fiction and superhero movies are acceptable diversions and art cinemas and high lit are for creeps -- obviously in some ways it's not, e.g. it takes me exactly as much time to watch gerard depardieu as it does to watch robert downey do shit, but hardcore! gaming! requires me to spend 20+ hours hunched over masturbatorily in a darkened room

i don't know whether it's 'relevant' (or whether it 'matters') that peggle and farmville and wii sports are all less 'good' than tetris

Quickly because I should be in bed (not gonna crack that 5 hr thing any time soon): when I threw out the words 'cultural significance' w/r/t why anyone should worry about repulsive social attitudes getting encoded into games, I was def. talking about depth and breadth of social impact, or social currency, rather than value, whether you judge value in terms of artistic merit, degree of creative influence or whut. I think the latter has been discussed to some extent on the 'games ~ art' thread.

Yr actual straight white male hegemony debate (trending up or otherwise) also belongs on another thread, which I was going to start but work is... ugh...

I'm after digging into some of what Lamp said about the consumer / fiction relationship b/c alongside the increase in consumption of games & widening of the audience, there are major differences in the impact - on the individual - of games vs. other media and I suspect also between different games depending on the degree of realism and immersion.

xxp Jules et Jim le Ver de Terre

(I just wanted to say "ver de terre")

La Metier de Guerre des Mondes

(I can't think of any wif real French films, someone do one for Diva)

got nothing for Diva but i have got Seul Calibuerre

:))) xp to spacecadet

want to shoehorn diva into "Diva: Road to World Cup 98" but it doesn't really work

ix. did anyone else read jane mcgonigal's book, 'reality is broken', yet?

"The truth is this: in today's society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in a way that reality is not."

-- which is no kind of Utopian thing, for McGonigal; the book (which er I only just started so don't press me on any of this) is all about trying to hack life so it can take on some of the features of games.

jane mcgarnagle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDtdCxGosUQ

why u sabotage thread (>-_-)>

sorry, it was the first thing i thought of

:I

i second the mcgarnigalism and give her a lot of maybe undeserved slack for her name reminding me of something cool.
like i look more favorably on nixon's misdeeds because his middle name is Milhouse.
but yeah the book is kind of terrible. but all of the gaming books are kind of terrible.
Maybe it's not possible to write a non-terrible book of that kind on gaming.
I mean has anyone written a book with a similar approach to pro-wrestling, or competitive eating?

an 'oral history of gaming' book that dished tons of dirt is the kind of thing i'd read the shit out of

there's some good stuff like that in retrogaming magazine, but descriptive oral history stuff
doesn't seem to be what the "what does gaming mean for culture" books are going for.

do you think it's terrible? i don't think it's terrible. tendentious, maybe; terrible, no.

the best long-form thing i've read on videogames was a phd thesis about how games -- using text-adventures as a kind of degree-zero -- constructed player agency. that had actual thoughts in it, and everything.

for mcgonigal the 'genuine human needs' that games address are do to with work -- the feeling of having productive, meaningful work, which most people are taken as not having. the first section of the book is a tour of various neurological effects playing games has been found to have via various psych studies.

i'm not sure it's entirely honest. the last chapter of the first part goes from the feeling of being part of something epic via playing halo to a study that showed that games requiring people to help each other out led to people being more likely to help others out in real life: however, the implication that massive games such as halo are doing this is one i distrust -- like, is there a study on whether obsessive deathmatchers are likely to push in front of a queue and yell 'fag' while doing so? i want that study

anyway -- because it wouldn't be relevant to her thesis, i guess -- the idea that synthesising the experience of having meaningful + productive work when one does not might actually be narcotic and bad -- this idea isn't really dealt with a lot. it's a complaint that i hear from musician friends a lot -- that mastering a game is mastering something meaningless, that the feedback-rewards of games are phoney and bad. because the true nature of the fun when it comes to music isn't just complacently 'getting good'; it's that once you have the ability to do a thing you can do all kinds of other things with it, like create.

there's two pieces by carrie brownstein (shush) on slate, about rock band and the wii music game, which argue the latter is more like music because it allows some room for creative interpretation, improvisation -- i think so, anyway, i'm not rereading them right now and it's been a while --

http://www.slate.com/id/2177432/
http://www.slate.com/id/2204766/

anyway, this argument isn't just true of rock band, i think; it's something i complained about during my brief foray into playing first-person-shooters a while back that your scope for improvisation was massively limited and dependant entirely upon boring work-paradigms. ('learn the maps', no i do not want to learn the maps)

also that thing of steven poole's i linked upthread is relevant, where he argues that animal crossing giving him the opportunity to goof off ingame instead of working is a profound aesthetic choice

http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/working-for-the-man/

anyway, it's not mcgonigal's thesis that videogames' ability to give us the illusion of productive work is A Good Thing in and of itself; i just want to register my distrust of certain assumptions here before i get into the body of it, about the applications of this to life. -- it's not really surprising to me that the people who are most keen to take her up on her ideas are advertising executives.

anyway this is all going into my book, videogames after auschwitz

o_O

〠 〠 〠 〠

had half a thought that a national achievement website might work as a motivator for kids - "Help 100 grannies across the road" - you would get into all sorts of fucked up social engineering issues but its not much different in concept than scout badges.

http://www.chorewars.com/ does a similar thing, only at the scale of a group of people.

pp. 119-24, 125, 126, 142, 359

I have attempted to get my housemate to post here, who works for BIGGAME CO and has a lot to say about this stuff, v eloquently. But he said "wtf is even going on in that thread" so I dont hold out much hope of him popping in :(

that's a shame. c'mon, trayce's housemate.

ILX is a hard nut to crack, I suppose.

In English class, Raj isn't trying to earn a good grade today. Instead, she's trying to level up. She's working her way through a storytelling unit, and she already has five points ... She's hoping to add another point to her total today by completing a storytelling mission. (...)

Levelling up is a much more egalitarian model of success than a traditional level grading system based on the bell curve. Everyone can level up, as long as they keep working hard.

I don't really understand this -- it's a fancy NY school. It's unclear from the text whether one has to actually get any better to level up, or whether one just gets there via persistence and/or attrition.

Because the idea of 'levelling up' in games is meant to be an imperfect representation of extra-ludic ideas of skill and ability: exporting it as a useful idea to the outside world is just ... sort of backwards. The guys in the football team in my high school wouldn't have been more motivated to play football by being Lvl.99 Footballeers.

Which is the same problem I cited with the work-model of gaming in general. You're good at a thing if you're good at a thing, and that's where you get to have the fun of being good at a thing. There are values in life beyond positive feedback and/or happiness.

this thread is my blog, my blog is this thread

"do you think it's terrible? i don't think it's terrible. tendentious, maybe; terrible, no."

I flipped through it mostly, but all throughout I got the sense that I was being sold something that the author herself needed convincing,
which is the same sort of feeling I get when reading any material that tries to speak about gaming and the culture at large.

Maybe terrible isn't the right word, but I feel like books like these in the absence of anything else will end up shaping discourse
about how we relate to games, and maybe in ways that are more thwarting of gaming potential than if nobody had written anything at all.

Someone should write a book about that.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/3167-Gamifying-Education

xp Unfortunately I also kind of agree with you, but in the sense that there aren't enough viewpoints getting out there, and definitely not enough with positive self-esteem about it.

In a local bar, Raj isn't trying to get wasted today. Instead, she's trying to level up. She's working her way through a shot of Jack, and she already has five points ... She's hoping to add another point to her total today by completing a whole bottle. (...)

Levelling up is a much more egalitarian model of inebriation than a traditional level grading system based on the bell curve. Everyone can level up, as long as they keep drinking hard.

ha

okay i sold this book

wish i'd gotten around to it some months prior so i was reminded of the existence of the interesting games festival in bristol, that would have been fun

the last third bugged me. mcgonigal is all for suggesting gamification is the solution to massive real-world climatic or economic problems but she seems kind of out-of-touch-with-the-world when thinking about the actual financial barriers to the sort of thing she's talking about. like, nike+ is not a cheap way of motivating yourself to run. "an inexpensive sensor which plugs into your nike trainer and sends a signal to your ipod" = "first, catch your hare"

i was going to read tom chatfield's 'fun inc.' but i might be good to myself and not read it instead

BOOLLOOOOKS I can't beleive I missed that Bristol thing! Just looked it up and it looks (looked) awes.

http://kotaku.com/5516355/the-life-of-game-why-i-live-in-japan

(warning: tim rogers)

largely not relevant to the thing i am choosing to waffle on about, but there is a subsection called running: the videogame

To get into running, you have to start by running a minute, then walking a minute, then running a minute, et cetera. You repeat this for a half an hour. Eventually you're running three minutes and walking one minute, and later running three minutes and walking thirty seconds, and later just running thirty minutes straight through. Then a whole tree of choices opens before you. You can try to run longer. You can try to run farther. You can try to run faster. You can't do all three at once, though you can try to do two at once. You can fail a lot, or you can set yourself up mentally so that failure is impossible, that as long as you meet a specific quota, you've succeeded. Nike and Apple have this pedometer that tells you how far you've run. These days, you can even have it automatically Tweet your run statistics to Twitter. As a person who prefers no heads-up displays in videogames, I would rather judge the success of my run by how I feel when I'm finished.

(warning: tim rogers)

hah, thank you

haha same

(warning: tim rogers)

largely not relevant

this should appear on his tombstone

tim rogers is like one of three people i think could write an actually good book on What Games Mean

that said it's not exactly hard to see why people find him obnoxious

its not exactly hard to see why even an 'actually good book on What Games Mean' wld be p obnoxious

tim rogers is like one of three people i think could write an actually good book on What Games Mean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RUI6qqUXUw

there is zero chance of the person in that video ever writing a compelling book

ive been replaying final fantasy 5 lately & one of the things that ive been thinking about is the way that the game rewards 'efficiency' + how clearly the player benefits from things like pattern recognition + cost-benefit analysis. i should probably think more about this but its interesting to me how close to lots of engineering or finance problem sets 'solving' the job system is.

i dont know how well this really even fits into 'cultural significance' since jrpgs are increasingly a niche genre but i do like to think about the way that games (unconsciously) elide the differences btw 'work' and 'play'. like all those stupid "ppl will eat vegetables if they get points for it" stuff seems to misunderstand the relationship, or at least presents a really one-sided view. to what extent do games mimic the thought-processes & challenges of our primary concerns, & what does that say about our relationship to play?

"to what extent do games mimic the thought-processes & challenges of our primary concerns, & what does that say about our relationship to play?" is kind of the question the mcgonical book is addressing! it just addresses it from a kind of lame angle, eventually, possibly because her background is in performance studies (ew)

there's a section about how financial rewards put people off doing things, & games are a counterexample, as always, and i have forgotten what her examples of a good system are already; her example of a bad system people won't participate in is amazon's 'mechanical turk', which i had never heard of, which when i read about it i immediately went to the website and spent seven hours putting quote marks in german people's google search queries for porn at one cent a time

so you know

-

it is a long time since i did any economics or engineering so i probably have to take your word on ffv being like those things, also i have never played ffv

butttttttttt there's probably a whole other thing in, like, games which are mimicking white collar job skills vs games which are mimicking the way you feel when sitting in front of a conveyor belt and putting lids on tubs of moisturiser for eight hours before emerging blinking into the sunlight

man i read something so good on repetition and tedium recently but its just out of grasp. this is really annoying me.

as to your last point: yeah, sure, idk, yes.

i should just leave this until i have 'more to say' but one related thing that i think abt a lot is the relationship btw competitive playing of fighting games and casual play & the way the former has 'professionalized' the latter. the way ppl thought abt their street fighter games was p similar to how i approached my tennis game when i was playing seriously, the idea of separating 'playing' and 'practicing' of a videogame (is super mario bros. all play or all practice?), idk this is all jumbled atm but you get what i mean.

blah blah blah: my point really is that i think im as much fascinated by the way in which games/gaming cultures/gamers seek out preexisting models of thought/behavior and incorporate them into their approach to video games than in how video game models can be grafted onto other things.

xp Mechanical Turk's been around for several years--I did transcription work through them for a while a few years ago. It's basically designed and priced for outsourcing--the workers are about 99% Indian, IIRC.

i wonder how much more popular mturk would be if amazon repackaged it as a game...

Tangential, but - I read a p. interesting piece in a mostly-not-v-interesting book abt child development called Nurture Shock today, suggesting that kids who are praised and rewarded every time they succeed at something and rarely allowed to really fail, get addicted to the reward and thus their persistence skills disappear, and they will refuse to put any effort into difficult, not-immediately rewarding tasks.

It reminded me that I have read elsewhere a criticism of games suggesting that by offering a canny reward schedule, not only are games made addictive but that game addicts lose their ability to focus on long-term goals requiring effort and discipline.

I really don't know about this. I think if anything, games - at least the ones that are geared towards those gamers who get a lot out of overcoming challenges - are much more likely to train you to keep trying and trying, because a well-designed game is (can be) one that makes it possible to see what you're doing wrong, and feel like you can fix it if only you hit z just a fraction sooner.

that didn't come out as interesting as I thought it would.

the flipside of that is "games are training our youth to be middle management resource optimization dorks" but for a lot of kids
that's a paygrade up from their folks!

i wonder how good mitt romney is at starcraft

Zora i thought that was very interesting, actually

This seems like a cool event:

http://moma.org/poprally/upcoming

Because I'm not sure I dare start a thread about the male gaze in gaming, this goes here http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/the-big-picture/4719-Gender-Games

I disagree with Bob to the extent that I *do* think skimpy outfits are problematic but this is a somewhat interesting and pleasantly brief take on the issue.