Peli-käsitteen määrittely on haaste, jota itse Wittgenstein käytti esimerkkinä siitä, miten käsitteiden määrittely ei loppujen lopuksi ole mahdollista, vaikka onkin pyrkimyksenä hyödyllistä, ellei jopa välttämätöntä. Tämä filosofinen työ oli periaatteessa jatkoa Sokrateen filosofialle.
Second Life -virtuaalimaailmassa (SL) seikkaillessani törmäsin kinasteluun siitä, miten yhdet ihmiset puhuivat siitä pelinä ja toiset olivat ärtyneitä tästä, osoittaen sitä ettei SL:ssä ole pelimekanismeja, ei pisteytystä, eikä etenkään voittotavoitetta. Itse asiassa SL:n sisällä on rakennettu pelattavia pelejä. Jos SL luokiteltaisiin peliksi, pitäisi myös Windows luokitella peliksi – ja periaatteessa koko universumi.
In our book, Handbook on Interactive Storytelling[1], we identify a four level classification of moddability of games: The zeroeth class are the monolithic games that “cannot be modified”. The first class is for games that allow limited customisability, where predefined adjustments to the game play or its sensory stimulus can be made. Second class consists of properly moddable games, where the player community provides new functionalities and other alterations to the game through mods. The third class are things that are more like frameworks than games, relying heavily on the gamer community to something with the system in effort to really make it a game. We mention Unity and Unreal as such programming environments that heavily endorse game programming in their design. Even a better example would actually be STOS/AMOS “Game Creator” applications (1988), which were even by their name intended for nothing else but creating (new) games [2][3].
In this classification we place Tynan Sylvester’s RimWorld into class 2. However, restarting to play the game once again and reading Tynan’s recent tweet, I’ve started wondering about RimWorld being on its way to class 3, or perhaps something that would be class 2.5.
I have the ambition of making RimWorld something worth playing for at least a few people in the 22nd century.
One could see an equivalent of this classification in the traditional western deck of 52 cards, or the pool billiards table: Both of these are essentially built-in with natural game play actions (hitting a ball onto another ball or in a pocket / shuffling and dealing out cards) but not with a fixed set of rules/mechanics to play them. On a pool table, probably the most well known game is the 8-ball pool, but 9-ball pool is quite well known too, and there’s my personal favorite, One Pocket Pool. In card games, the best known might be the wide spectrum of Poker-games, nowadays mostly Texas Hold’em. Both of these platforms have prevailed over the 100 years that Tynan is dreaming of.
Poker is seen as a nice game to play, as well as infamous tool of gambling away one’s life. RimWorld is facing the same challenges. Providing it out for people to use to build their own experiences yields a freedom that be wonderful as well as horrible. Australia recently banned the sale of the game for a while, due to the game play not clearly disapproving the use of drugs. (This is not really even the worst of the dark sides RimWorld has to offer.)
It is interesting to see, how much Tynan is going to be providing a “built-in game and story” within RimWorld. An interesting move would be to just make the core of RimWorld a class 3 moddable “game” and have the developer provided content all within optional DLCs, as well as community provided mods. I think even already now it would be relatively easy to make a mod that turns RimWorld into Sims. This still, however, requires the mod to disable built-in features, such as drugs and fighting. With this still being (most likely) doable, the game is at least class 2.5, if not yet class 3.
I am a big fan of base building games. My earliest crush on this field (after the physical Lego bricks) was Simcity and essentially also Civilization (the first one of the series). After Railroad Tycoon I have enjoyed hours of playing Transport Tycoon, where I am currently having difficulties on how the passenger production of buildings grows much faster than the game facilitates for transportation capacity. I do not like leaving hundreds of passengers unserved on stations.
The most natural way of communication between people is face-to-face. There both participants can fully utilise their natural speech production mechanisms, as well as other communication mechanisms. They also have a shared experience of the communication, including the immediate context it takes place in. A shared space for sharing, considering how Jens Allwood defines[1] communication essentially as the action of sharing.
Although the immediate context during face-to-face communication is shared, the preceding context easily is not (we are coming from different places from different activities) as well as the following context easily is not (our future plans and schedules differ).
As the title of the game suggests, Governor of Poker 3 (GOP3) is one game in a series of Texas Hold’em poker games. I have played one of the previous versions as well, and the concept of the game is basically the same. The player takes a role of a poker player in a game world, where at least as it appears to them, the whole world is all about Texas Hold’em. They travel from town to town, as the buy-ins and bets rise higher and higher. The goal is to become “a VIP poker star.
Modifiability – moddability is an essential part of contemporary games, especially digital games. This is a parallel feature to the concept of mass customisation of products in “more serious business”. It starts from, where in Pokemon Go, the player can buy and choose clothing for their avatar. It’s deeper, when games provide downloadable content (DLC) that provide more outfits for the character, but possibly also more different equipment, and even more story to the game. The fundamental level is, where the players can create such extra content and provide it for other players to include in their games. At the deepest level, and actually, in it’s original form, it is when players reverse engineer games, hack them, and provide modified versions of the games with new features.
Game modding started out from replacing the graphics and sounds with new ones, often for comedic purposes.[1] Essentially this was borderline illegal, Continue reading “Testing Game Mod(ification)s”→
Ernest Adams states that in interactive storytelling the player/audience commits to an agreement with the author.[1] This agreement involves that the player will start following the story. For example, if the story begins at a train station, with a ticket to a train and the train about to leave, the player will board the train, instead of heading home, or starting to assault people at the station. On the other side of the agreement, the narrator will deliver the player an interesting story with interesting choices to make.
Kaksikymmentä kysymystä on peli, jossa yksi pelaaja ajattelee jotain asiaa ja toinen esittää tälle kysymyksiä, joihin voi vastata joko kyllä tai ei. Kysyjän tavoite on 20 kysymyksellä, tai vähemmällä arvata, mitä toinen ajattelee. Tähän peliin pohjautuu Akinator, johon olen perehtynyt viimeisen kuukauden aikana.
Akinator pyytää pelaajaa ajattelemaan jotain henkilöhahmoa (fiktiivistä tai todellista) ja vastaamaan kyllä/ei -kysymyksiin, kunnes lopulta peli esittää arvauksen. Continue reading “20 kysymystä Peter Parkerista”→
For a few years now I have been teaching a course at University of Turku Department of Future Technologies, called Principles of Interaction Design. The course was originally inspired by Janet H. Murray’s book Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice[1]. It was soon amended by Cooper, Reimann, Cronin and Noessel’s book About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, as well as other material we had background in through our research background.
Here’s the optimistic posting I promised in my last posting, “Who decides what you see?” Have I understood it correctly from the involved documentaries, concerning the recently released sequel movie Blade Runner 2049, the original film in 1982 marks the beginning of dystopian science fiction movie culture, as distinction to the preceeding utopian science fiction, such as the original Star Trek series (and movies) and the original Battlestar Galactica series. We are living the era, when science fiction is dominated by dark colours and threats from outside our home planet, as well as from the technology we are building. Even Stephen Hawking is warning that the development of artificial sentience would become the end of humankind.[1] I tend to disagree.
The first season of Star Trek introduced the Prime Directive[2], which emphasised the importance of not harming the development of less developed species. Continue reading “Aliens, AI and Aesthetics”→
To All You Zombies 