Matt Forbeck mentioned Evoke in a comment on my previous post about didacticism, and it occurred to me that we haven’t really talked about it on the site, yet. Aside from the actual website for the game — www.UrgentEvoke.com — most of my opinion on it was formed by an interview with designer Jane McGonical on Wired‘s site:

Games support happiness … by giving us more satisfying work or concrete tasks that we can accomplish…. Studies have shown that playing a short game — having something concrete that you can accomplish — actually gives you the motivation, energy and optimism to go back and tackle real work.

[Read More at Wired ]

It’s a crash course in how to start a venture, a business, that can tackle these problems [of poverty, disease, hunger] at a local level…. By the end of the game you have developed a real-world pitch for a venture [and] have acquired mentors to help you make it real. If you play the game you’re connected to somebody in the real world who has entrepreneurial experience to mentor you; you’ve also developed skills to make you a better problem solver.

[Read More at Wired ]

Here’s something I wrote about games as art, eons ago, when somebody on the Internet made me all mad. Someday I may finish it, and update its bunch of busted links, but for now I offer it up in rough form, in honor of the Art History of Games (#AHoG), happening this week here in Atlanta. Please consider this a work in progress.

Who said games can’t be art?

Famously, Roger Ebert did. Back in 2007, in a response to comments decrying his earlier opinion that video games are not art, Ebert wrote, “Games may not be Shakespeare quite yet, but I have the prejudice that they never will be, and some gamers are prejudiced that they will.”

Last week, film critic Devin Faraci of CHUD.com published an editorial adding his arguments to the ongoing debate. Faraci’s editorial came after his comments in a news item on a possible Shadow of the Colossus film triggered a debate (on Twitter) about whether or not video games are an art form. Faraci says video games aren’t art, and the Internet is full of people who disagree with him.

I disagree with him, too, but I was more interested in understanding his argument. Aside from Ebert’s opinion, I’d never read a serious argument for why video games shouldn’t be considered art. Ebert’s argument is concerned with both form and quality—he says games do things art shouldn’t and that they aren’t much good, besides. Faraci’s argument is completely categorical—he says games are not an art form because they do not do what he says art does.

Chuck Wendig, who’s both a brilliant writer and a clever game designer, wrote his response to Faraci’s editorial right away, but I’m not completely on board with it. Chuck’s written a host of short stories (one was even published at CHUD, I think) and designed Hunter: The Vigil, so you know he has some experience with games and the arts. But in his response Chuck merely disagrees with Faraci and Ebert.

Here, I’m going to make my case for why some games are art.

(more…)

In the comments on my post “The Point of Levels and Experience,” Helmsman ended his insightful comment with this: “So I guess my question is, what is it you’re really after in an MMO?”

First, a disclaimer: As a distinct type of game, I’m about as far from an expert in MMO play and design as it would be possible to be.

However, my reaction to reading about The Secret World on Kotaku (that I couldn’t be less interested) was so completely different from my recent experience watching BioWare’s trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic (that I was excited to the point that I may well invest extremely precious time in playing it) that I think it’s worthwhile to compare and contrast the marketing, and what it reveals about what the creators are trying to sell.

// Cool, let’s do that…

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article at Kotaku about forthcoming MMO The Secret World. According to the article:

[The Secret World] is a game that takes place in the real world of today, only everything is true. Aliens and demons exist. The world is hollow. There are monsters under your bed.

The portion of the article that got my attention was this:

And what of progression? The Secret World is a game without levels and experience, so how do you show the rest of the game how good you are?

This paragraph blew my mind twice.

// Really? How’s that?