The Play Research Group, UWE, Bristol
studying the technologies and cultures of games and play
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Place: East Lansing, MI, USA
Date: 9th-11th October 2008
Information online: here
Full papers deadline: 15th August 2008 (Games and Posters)
Themes:
There's an article on pervasive gaming featuring Jon and Pervasive Media Studio on New Scientist online (5 Aug 2008).
Nice!
I have attended some interesting events and played great games lately. So, shotly about them.
A Bristol-based ARG developer and artist Hazel Grian launched an alternate reality game The Sky Remains some time ago, and I have been playing the game for five weeks now. The game is online free to join. Aleks Krotoski interviewed Hazel last week. I just tried out the mscape element of the game yesterday. GPS didn't work perfectly yet, but the pervasive element of the game supported well the overall mystery story and the idea of 'sixth dimension'.
Last Tuesday iglab presented Rod Dickinson's The Game of War. Rod's handmade pieces and board look amazing and the game was challenging. We played in teams and I think the game lasted for about three hours. Playing a game like this for the first time is just about learning the rules and possibilities, we were not really able to make big strategies. Someone should design a paper-folding version of the game so that it would be easy to make one's own game.
The Game of War: final state
On Friday last week, I went to the Second Life v World of Wacraft event at London Knowledge Lab. Diane Carr, Andrew Burn and Martin Oliver presented their recently finished project on learning and teaching in virtual worlds. Tanya Krzywinska and Aleks Krotoski were invited to speak about World of Warcraft and Second Life as learning environments. Knowing very little about teaching, I would like to summarise that the day's themes divided into two categories: learning/teaching IN virtual worlds and learning/taching ABOUT virtual worlds.
Something interesting online: Media Commons, a digital scholarly network presents a toys-themed week from In Media Res starting today.
Line-up (as mentioned on the site) is as follows:
Monday
Raiford Guins: Mint on Card (MOC)
Tuesday
Caryn Murphy: Parents, Parent Companies, and the Princess Movement
Wednesday
Henry Jenkins: 'Sometimes My Kids Seem Like a Bunch of Kangaroos!'
Thursday
Derek Johnson: 'The Legend of G.I. Joe...New from Marvel Comics!': The Toy as Comic Book on Television
Friday
Avi Santo: 'Save Me Captain Stubing! Skeletor and The Lone Ranger have joined forces and are attacking the General Lee': The place of play in building story-worlds
A recent report Byron Reviw - Children and New Technology discusses the risks of children's computer game play. The report seems to assume that adults (who are the concerned parent in the report) do not play games or know games. However, a study by BBC from 2005 showed that more than half of adults between 25 and 50 in the UK play video games. In my opinion, a common hobby in which children are the masters is one of the greatest things digital games have to offer to our society. Unfortunately this is not discussed in Byron's report.
The report includes many troubling issues, but it may be worth reading.
There is also a BBC Radio 4 documentary "Am I normal" by Ms. Byron that discusses addiction and games (available for 4 more days only). According to World of Warcraft fan forums, the idea of comparing games to heroin is not very popular among gamers. What can I add: Do not play Wii, it is a gateway to more dangerous games and soon you find yourself playing WoW!
I wrote here about the Miss Bimbo game some time ago. It is a game designed to criticize beauty expectations. Similarly, a game by the University of the West of Scotland, ThinknDrinkn? aims to teach children about the dangers of drinking alcohol. In ThinksDrinkn?, writes Compute Scotland, "the players have to find and help a friend who has been drinking and whose condition is constantly deteriorating. Game players will have to provide fluids and food to a drunk friend and either take them home or to hospital, avoiding obstacles including youth gangs along the way. They will also have to answer various questions related to alcohol misuse and can use links to useful websites to find relevant information".
Both games have good intentions behind them, but have been judged as irresponsible (see Daily Record). There is a threat that the games may be played 'wrong' or not fully understood as intended. After playing ThinknDrinkn? for a while, I cannot say how the game could possibly be taken as something supporting heavy alcohol abuse. What do you think?
BBC article about the game here.
Oh, and yes, there is a recent announcement on the Miss Bimbo website: "As a result of this rather surprising media attention we have decided to remove the option of purchasing diet pills from the game. We apologise to any players whom this may inconvenience but we feel in light of this weeks proceedings it is the correct action to take". So, let's all pretend again there are no diet pills in the World and thus there is absolutely no reason to discuss about them. ;)
Organiser: University of Warwick, UK
Date: 10th-12th September 2008
Information online: here
Full papers deadline: 31st May 2008
Themes: Women in games design and development
Journal: The online journal MedienPädagogik (www.medienpaed.com) vol. 14 (2008), “Computer and Video Games in Formal and Informal Educational Contexts”, edited by Prof. Johannes Fromme and Prof. Dominik Petko
Information online: here
Full papers deadline: 15th July 2008
Themes:
Organiser: The Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Date: 24th-26th September 2008
Information online: here
Full papers deadline: 11th April 2008
Themes:
Media has totally prejudged Miss Bimbo during the last weeks. It is accused not only of causing huge mobile phone bills to teenage users but including a "disorted world view" (Iltalehti 27/3/2008) and being "condemned as lethal" (TimesOnline 25/3/2008). Miss Bimbo is an online game for girls between 9 and 16 concenrating on creating a perfect bimbo character. In Guardian, Aleks Krotoski writes that "the first thing I was struck by when logging into the service was that my bimbo, a looker kitted out only in her white knickers, was already almost a stone overweight. How to cope? By popping diet pills or checking into the plastic surgery clinic, of course".
Goal: to create the coolest, richest and most famous girl
- Is it much worse than to create the most succesfull killer (hurdreds of games) or the best warlord?
Surroundings: a disorted world view
- Are there games with something else?
- Is it really so disorted - isn't the world actually as crazy as the game suggests?
It is really difficult to evaluate the game as I could neither log into it nor reach the site - because, I suppose, it is way too popular at the moment. But as the developers say, it is meant to be ironical. I agree that not all the kids understand the irony, but it may be that a game is an easy way to live through some of the extremely difficult social expectations young girls (and adult women) face.
I am in Denmark at the moment, examining the work of my student at the IT University of Copenhagen tomorrow morning. Her game, Prince$$ of the Hood is about fashion and addresses very similar issues as Miss Bimbo. But, ultimately, the goal of the game is to teach young girls to understand how unimportant looks actually are. This becomes clear through the gameplay as in the end, when a player has reached all the best clothes for her character, her friends do not accept her as such because she is too similar to the others and has "lost her self-respect". So, after the game tells you "Congratulations you now look exactly like everyone else!" - you have already lost the game.
Therefore, I think we should give Miss Bimbo a possibility at least. Based on the supposed goal and some tasks in the game (take plastic surgeries / use diet pills), it is impossible to predict how the actual gameplay will be or how the girls use the game in order to make sense of the expectations they face in their everyday life. In his PhD dissertation Miguel Sicart has written about the games that let the players to choose how to act and to make their own moral choices instead of offering only 'right' possibilities as the most ethical ones.
"Players are moral agents, and they do play a significant role in the moral construction of the game as an ethical experience. This means that players are no more the victims of systems designed to conditioned them and turn them into mindless zombies; players have an ethical understanding of the game, which implies increasing their responsibility in the moral landscape of computer games. Because players are moral agents and do behave as such, games have to take that into consideration, allowing for players to develop their moral judgment in the game experience and through the game community."
If there is a possibility, even a more difficult one to reach, in Miss Bimbo to become succesful and beautiful without plastic surgeries and diet pills, it is the player who may decide between the possibilities. And what are the consequences of being the coolest and most beautiful Miss Bimbo? If it means that you can sit on the backseat of a nice car and shop clothes every day when other people are working in interesting jobs, little girls aren't so stupid that they wouldn't understand which choice may be better in their actual lives.
The bad connotations related to being a bimbo are also quite obvious. Maybe it is only good that it is made clear that cutting your body and aiming to Barbie-like 'beauty' belongs to bimbos interested in sexual appeal, not to people who respect themselves and their bodies. To be honest, during my first weeks in Bristol I was very surprised after seeing the incredible amount of pink girly and soap+gossip magasines available in Britain. I am sure a game like Miss Bimbo does not add much on the overall input girls get from all the media. In addition, I think that it is better to see ultra-sexy game characters in games in which they act like bimbos than in games where thay are superheroes or world savers (compare Lara Croft).
Finally, I think we are much more worried about girls than boys as players. Most little boys play war games, fight with sticks and play with toy guns and many parents find nothing disturbing in it. At least Miss Bimbo is honest and clear: it is far from the cute Playboy Bunny logos in children's clothes, pencils and toys that you can buy in every second bookstore.
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