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Each of the five academics interviewed added a unique flavor to these questions of how players move, where single player fits into the picture, and the kinds of games that we’ll be migrating to in the future. While ‘gamer tribes’ weren’t the only thing seen as dragging along gamers, many of these scholars agreed on the importance of people.
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So, there I was: old enough to remember Voltron, beer in hand, sitting with my laptop, surrounded by (presumed) preteens. Club Penguin plopped me in the town center. Forty or so birds were milling about. Some were dancing, others throwing snowballs. As I gazed upon this scene, I remembered something that I had once read: If your body could stay the same as it was at 12, you would live for hundreds of years. But what about your mind? What if it stayed locked at 12? Club Penguin offers that deeply trippy experience.
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To educate myself—and to find out what the target audience for these sites really thinks of them—I organized a focus group of five sixth-graders, all 11 years old. I set up two laptops and let the kids show me their favorites. At times the project seemed like a demonstration for a gender studies class with the boys at one computer, the girls at another. Anna, a budding sociologist, explained, "Most sites for girls are an online world—it's socializing. For boys, it's gaming."
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HJ on his contributions to game studies and a useful list of gaming blogs, books, conferences.
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This article, ostensibly about how Indian users are discovering the joys of SL, made me think about how the default avatars you get to choose at first login are all light-skinned, even the furries. Sure, it doesn't take long to change that, even without having to pay for it, but for non-white races it's a reminder at the ethnocentricity typically seen in many MMOs.
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But as games have grown in complexity, so has cheating. Massive online games such as EverQuest and Final Fantasy involve thousands of strangers playing simultaneously, striving to obtain virtual assets that have real-world value (by some estimates several billion dollars' worth). Cheating in these games can be at once harder to identify and more troubling.
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A group of Los Angeles high school students recently created a version of Pacman that is based on people that they have interacted with in their Pico-Union and Koreatown neighborhoods. (See the games here). This fact alone - that is, their choice of characters - suggests that the games will be quite different than any games these kids have ever played.
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Virtual world "City of Heroes," where members can design superhero versions of themselves, hosted its first LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, & transgendered) prom, according to Game|Life.
About 200 showed up for the Rainbow Prom, which one attendee described as "a Gay Pride celebration online."
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Blizzard Entertainment announced today that World of Warcraft, its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), is now played by more than 9 million gamers around the world.
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via BoingBOIng: Last month's Wired had an excellent article on Luis von Ahn, inventor of the CAPTCHA, who has devoted himself to designing games that get people to do useful work. These are the digital cousins of the African merry-go-rounds that dig wells: projects that get people to have fun while adding metadata to photos, train an AI, decipher scanned books, and spot bomb-components on airport
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Each of the five academics interviewed added a unique flavor to these questions of how players move, where single player fits into the picture, and the kinds of games that we’ll be migrating to in the future. While ‘gamer tribes’ weren’t the only thing seen as dragging along gamers, many of these scholars agreed on the importance of people.
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