Humane Games: Archive

I commend SF MOMA on their new initiative to create game-related programming. I hope they livestream this!

Feb 20, 20123 notes

“But the entry he often (still) comes back to is No. 60: Pistol Pete Maravich. Isaac will never understand why he’s ranked so low. He sees those YouTube clips and can’t fathom that someone wouldn’t think Pistol is one of the top ten NBA players ever. I don’t feel like spraying graffiti over the portrait of Maravich he’s painted in his head. He’s a budding basketball scholar, but he’s still seven. He believes in Santa, and he believes in Pistol Pete.” —My Son, the Pistol | The Classical

Feb 18, 2012

“In the rush to gamify enterprise websites, a number of SaaS companies have sprung up almost overnight, including BadgeFarm, Bunchball, and the self-proclaimed leader in gamification, Badgeville. Their business model is to enhance enterprise websites with “social loyalty” platforms that turn content, commerce, and community branding into a self-directed experience that exploits the psychology of gaming to keep users coming back for hours at a time. These are the same characteristics that get users to spend hours on end in massive multi-player online games like “World of Warcraft.” —

For the record, the way this is discussed is exactly the mistake, precisely the error. You rarely see it spelled out in such specific language, but there it is.

Gamification Boosting Enterprise Websites - Social Business

(via slavin)

Feb 16, 201210 notes

rafaelfajardo:

My collaborator has suggested that the cultural semiotics of nerd is not an effective lure, not an attractor, for young latino males (in the US) who might otherwise explore STEM fields. Bill Gates’ financial success is an insufficient model. The age group we are looking at is ten years old. These…

Feb 15, 20124 notes

“

A passionate kiss acts like a drug, causing us to crave the other person thanks to a neurotransmitter called dopamine. This is the same substance involved in taking illegal substances such as cocaine, which is why the novelty of a new romance can feel so addictive. Dopamine is involved in sensations of reward, making us feel intense desire that can lead to feelings of euphoria, insomnia, and loss of appetite, and it is only one actor in the great chemical ballet happening in our bodies.

And then there are physical changes. A kiss can cause our blood vessels to dilate, our pulse to quicken and cheeks to flush. Our pupils grow wide, which is likely one reason that so many of us are apt to close our eyes. In other words, the body’s response mirrors many of the same symptoms frequently associated with falling in love.

” —Sheril Kirshenbaum on the science of kissing. Her book of the same title is absolutely fascinating. (via curiositycounts) (video)games are said to be dopamine delivery vehicles. (via rafaelfajardo)

Feb 14, 2012205 notes

Feb 14, 201211 notes

thenewinquiry:

It often happens that, by accident of consanguinity or some other connection, people who don’t get along must spend a few after-dinner hours together. This happens mostly at holidays. Once the jellied cranberry and candied yams have been dispatched, these ill-sorted fellows, having swallowed…

Feb 14, 201216 notes

“From the sport’s beginning in the late 1960s, Ultimate has struggled to be taken seriously. Ultimate can’t seem to shake the perception (fair or not) that it’s a game people ought to play in Birkenstocks rather than cleats. In reality, Ultimate is one of the fastest growing competitive sports in the United States.[1] As it grows in popularity, its perceived legitimacy grows too. Adding refs would ostensibly make the on-field “product” more uniform, among other things, leading to more perceived legitimacy and, in this feedback loop, further growth. The problem is that refs (along with coaches, to a certain degree) would remove “the responsibility for fair play” from the player, undercutting the importance of Spirit. In other words, the sport’s continued march toward seriousness would undermine its defining principles.” —The Pains of Being Pure at Heart | The Classical

Feb 14, 2012

“For all we know, this fantastic match—along with his very similar semifinal against Murray, which deserves its own lengthy column—might have been an outlier during a string of historic accomplishments. We can hope, though, that it’s not the case. Similar to Federer’s status several years ago, Djokovic’s increasingly clear establishment as the sport’s top dog could inspire his closest competitors to step up their games in order to present any sort of challenge. For the sake of the sport, and Djokovic’s development into a transcendent superstar, it might be necessary. This isn’t about the excitement of a rivalry, but the joy of witnessing a great athlete become something more.” —The Limits of Control | The Classical

Feb 13, 2012

“Take, for example, the McNuggets Saucy Challenge, a Flash game on McDonald’s public website. The challenge in question is to dip your McNugget into six different sauces mirroring a pattern that increments by one sauce for every successful cycle (like Simon). When your memory inevitably falters, you’re invited to post your score—with McAdvertising—to Facebook as a prerequisite to being ranked on a leaderboard. This design is impoverished because it doesn’t offer meaningful play, only a simplistic retread of a game we’ve all seen before. It is cynical because it shows no regard for the legitimacy of play as a human endeavor. It is exploitative because it pursues self-serving ends that are disproportionate to the value of the gameplay experience it offers in return. I wish I could say that this example is an exception, but today it’s much closer to being the norm. It reflects a broader cultural bias that regards games as inherently trite and frivolous.” —Messification: Why Games Should Be Designed to Be Games First | UX Magazine found via Towerofsleep, I think.

Feb 13, 2012

Feb 11, 20122 notes

“Some game developers — the digital-era equivalent of songwriters and authors, in many ways — have also come to see piracy as being a necessary evil, and in many cases a positive force. Markus Persson, the Swedish developer of the massively popular game Minecraft, has said that he came to see piracy of his game as a form of marketing. And at a recent music-industry conference in Europe, the CEO of superstar game company Rovio (creator of Angry Birds) said that piracy “may not be a bad thing” because it increases demand for the official version of the company’s products.” —Neil Young is right — piracy is the new radio — Tech News and Analysis (via mediafuturist)

Feb 10, 201237 notes

“All of Barthes’ work is an exploration of the histrionic or ludic; in many ingenious modes, a plea for savor, for a festive (rather than dogmatic or credulous) relation to ideas. For Barthes, as for Nietzsche, the point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.” —Susan Sontag, on Barthes’ volition to live differently by writing differently (via lazz)

Feb 6, 201217 notes

“Computer games are no mere extensions of traditional games but, with their core consisting of interactivity and computation technology, have to be interpreted as a unique medium. – Computer games are different: There is no magic circle.” —Michael Liebe (via notgames)

Feb 4, 20122 notes

“The group has also been studying tutorials in videogames, which teach kids how to play without realizing they’re being taught. “We want to add something like that to Scratch Jr,” Bers said. For children ages 3 to 8, social interaction is perhaps the most important part of the learning process. That interaction can be with a teacher, a parent, an older sibling or a neighbor, said Guernsey of The New America Foundation, but young children must be able to study the facial expressions and other reactions of this “social partner.”
“The child needs to feel that what they’re learning is important to this other person,” Guernsey said. “Then it will go into the part of the child’s brain stamped ‘important.’”
When learning moves online, this becomes an issue.
“It can be the most wonderful content in the world,” Guernsey said. “But if it’s just slid into their lives without a social partner, then a lot of learning will be lost.”
The challenge isn’t lost on Bers. “We want to promote social interaction,” she said. “The question is, how do we imbed teacher interaction into Scratch Jr?”
Bers thinks of a playground. A good playground will have swing sets and slides for the kids, as well as benches and tables and chairs for the parents. The designers of Scratch Jr are figuring out how to embed the digital equivalent of those tables and chairs.” —Programming With Scratch Jr: When it Comes to Screen Time and Young Kids, Content and Context | Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

Feb 4, 20128 notes

“In the last few years, a few dedicated mathematicians have begun to study the computational complexity of video games. Their goal is to determine the inherent difficulty of the games and how they might be related to each other and other problems. Today, Giovanni Viglietta at the University if Pisa in Italy reveals a body of Herculean work in this area in which he classifies a large number of games from the 1980s and 90s including Pac-Man, Doom, Tron and many others. Viglietta’s work involves several steps. The first is to determine the class of computational complexity to which the game belongs. Next, he works out whether knowing how to solve the game also allows you to solve many other problems in the same class, a property that complexity theorists call ‘hardness’. Finally, he determines whether the game is complete, meaning that it is one of the ‘hardest’ in its class.” —Pac-Man Proved NP-Hard By Computational Complexity Theory - Technology Review

Feb 3, 2012

Feb 3, 20123 notes

Humane Games

February 2012

17 posts