A few years ago E Wesp and I published an essay in Postmodern Culture that attempted to think through the sociocultural structure of the online virtual world of Norrath, best known for being the home of EverQuest. One of the things we were very interested in at the time was the way in which the gameworld organized relationships among players, about which we made two major points:

At the end of March, I’ll be giving a public talk on “Alienation and Online Worlds,” and today’s post is a first go at trying to rein in my thinking on the subject and find a path to take. Like late-night patrons at an obscure comedy club at which a famous comedian unexpectedly appears to try out new material, pessimists among our readers will wonder why they’re subjected to something half-baked. Optimists will feel like they’ve been magica...

Once again my Printculture deadline has caught me unawares, and so in lieu of somethng more thoughtful (I have been in my head writing a long screed about people who voted for Ralph Nader, prompted in part by my otherwise likeable brother-in-law, who did, and who remains unrepentant), I will simply post a brief section from an interview with Chris Lena, the current producer of the online role-playing game EverQuest. The full interview will app...

In the movie Police Academy: Mission to Moscow--the seventh installment of the Police Academy series, which, for shame, I haven't gotten around to seeing but I imagine went straight into the dustbin of C-movie history--the Russian mafia attempts to hypnotize the entire world (and particularly Americans) with a highly addictive puzzle videogame. While the actual sounds of the game--nerd trivia stolen from imdb--come from the Atari 2600 version ...

Having spent the better part of yesterday playing a fantastically designed new bicycle racing game (and, let it be known, for those of you who are waiting for it, the lesser part of yesterday working on an essay that's due tomorrow), I find myself awake at midnight but knowing that the discretion of sleeping so I can write my essay tomorrow (after waking up at 6:30 to watch the amazing second mountain stage of the Tour de France) is the bette...

Debate on the objectionable content of video games played by children has been simmering (or has at least been raised to the temperature of hot coffee) for some time. A variety of ordinances at a variety of governmental levels have attempted to restrict the sale of Mature-rated video games to minors. This rating is part of the system devised by the games industry to police itself and avoid external regulation.

When I had the good fortune to teach a course last year on Video Games and Comparative Media, I think the class and I both felt some surprise at the degree to which television presented itself as the more intriguing point of comparison than its big sibling Film. The more established critical tradition around film has given it an early lead in the scholarship that considers the connections between video games and other media, but our discussio...

In the spirit of E Hayot’s short but bitter posting on Friday, I offer a few scattered reflections and factoids. Deconstruction Aids in the War on Terror Something for the file of the travels of the word “deconstruct” and its kin. Kai Ryssdal of the NPR finance show “Marketplace” reported last week on the political fallout of “the deconstruction of the Dubai ports deal.”

I didn't pay any attention to Super Bowl ads this year. After the lousy and apparently entirely forgettable ads of Super Bowl XXXIX, I didn't even bother with XL. If the Jessica Simpson Pizza Hut ad is any indicator of the general pool, I’m grateful. (I'm not convinced a television ad has been worth a look since Arnold Worldwide created VW's "Bubble Teaser" and "Pink Moon.") But this time of year my fancy ever turns to thoughts of advertis...

Following E Wesp's review last week of Lionhead Studio's new game, The Movies, I picked the game up over the weekend. As a game, it's not especially interesting--fairly fun, but also a fairly generic rendering of the "tycoon" genre. But the game comes with--and I'm not sure this was completely clear in E Wesp's piece--a program that effectively allows players to make their own films which is in and of itself far more interesting and--I believe...

If you have any experience with games that have Sim or Tycoon in their title, you’d feel at home starting out with the PC game The Movies. The basic premise of the most game-like part of The Movies puts you in charge of building up a movie studio. This means hiring employees, building sets and managing the attractiveness of the studio lot by laying down grass, fountains and other decorations – in short by the book Sim/Tycoon gaming, but pret...

It’s probably a little late to be getting around to writing about the Harry Potter books, but I’m a little late in reading them. I did get out to see the movies adapted from the first 3 books before reading any of them – a sequence I imagine most Potter fans would find lamentable – but only cracked the cover of the first book last month. One of the things that struck me about the films was the utter blankness of Harry’s character, and I was s...

I was thinking today about how you would go about making an interesting video game out of the current geopolitical situation. A useful game might start immediately after the "successful" U.S. invasion of Iraq, right before the end of the war. I imagine a player being given, at that moment, the choice of a few different sides: U.S., Kurdish, Shiite, or Sunni. The game would run through an established time frame, and presumably would involve org...

One of the first "puzzles" in Half Life 2 involves taking advantage of a see-saw: in a room with no apparent way out, piling bricks on one end of a board balanced on a pile of something or other lifts the opposite end enough to allow you to run off it and into the rest of the game world. The puzzle, which is fairly simple, of course, comes early in the game partly because the game needs to teach its players about the game's physical modeling. ...

I used to play the online role-playing game EverQuest a lot. By "a lot," I mean probably fifteen to twenty hours a week on average, and on weeks where I didn't have to work, as many as thirty or forty hours. In the world of online gaming, my behavior wasn't that unusual; lots of people I knew in the game played EQ that much. And I have to say that though sometimes EQ felt like work (performing repetitive, carpal tunnel syndrome-inducing tasks...

Over at Slate, Clive Thompson has an article on why video games shouldn't have cut scenes. The argument Thompson makes--that the "more video games become like movies, the worse they are as games," borrows (whether he knows it or not) from the longstanding narratology vs. ludology debate in game studies. That debate is, to be sure, focused on how to read games rather than how to make them. But the ludologists' insistence on the need for game s...