Why in the growing field of game and media studies do we rely on old formats and procedures for submitting conference papers? Having common formats for printing is one thing but coming from a design perspective this seems restrictive.

I was in a project meeting today where my team members and I were discussing a paper we are writing for a conference. For my section I’m reviewing a list of games and their mechanics. Each game is rated as to how best they fit a certain player type that we are presenting in the paper. As a note to myself, and to my other team members, in the title header for each game I place a key showing which player types the game provided for the most. We have been producing a lot of documents for this project and I have been trying to work in more visually oriented note-taking because I think it helps make sense of large written documents. For this latest document another team member liked the ranking notes I made so we are going to try to add a small visual element in each game section to show how each game relates to our player types.

This paper is for a new game conference so we will have an easier time working with the formatting. But I could see other conferences going nuts because we are using images without subtext or as part of the main header. That’s what I don’t understand why is the academic conference world still text heavy? Is it because we have other venues like poster or demo sessions that can be more visually oriented? (Though CS posters might as well be papers) Perhaps people feel they must rely on text to get more of their ideas across? Or are we just stuck using systems that were created for the hard sciences and us soft sciences just have to follow along if we want to be treated with respect?

It is ironic that the project I am working on is looking at the different ways that people learn and tries to alter games in order to fit those needs. Yet the conferences where this project will be published rely on text-based means for getting information across to others, instead of a more visual one that I, personally, would prefer.

Saw this over at the information aesthetics blog: wordle. It’s a website that takes a text document or a users del.icio.us tags and creates a tag cloud. These clouds are customizable: you can remove common words, choose different fonts (~20 available), change the color scheme, and set the layout of the words (the Any Which Way options is sweet). What is really neat is that another word can fill any open space within another word. I made my picture from my del.icio.us tags, which I have not used in a long time but apparently I was very into social networks (the SN tag), Web 2.0, and conferences. The creator Jonathan Feinberg cannot release the code because IBM owns it, which kinda stinks. One thing I would like to see is an RSS option so I could take my blog and output a picture of my most common words.

This also reminded me of Chris Harrison’s work on word visualization. He has a lot of great projects over at his website.

Cross posted at The Digital Tabletop Blog.

Summary

This quick card game is for 2 to 4 players. The premise of the game is that each player is a goblin mechanic (because goblins are obviously mechanically inclined). Each player starts with the same amount of cards that are placed in a draw pile. These cards allow the player to create a Machine, basically a series of cards that cause actions which affect their own cards and the cards of other players. The purpose of these machines is to force other players to exhaust their draw pile before you. Once a player’s draw pile is depleted they lose the game. So the last player with cards in their draw pile wins.

I found it to be a fun and easy game to play, except you need to understand what cards are available in the game. I’ll go through the major rules of the game and the card types next.

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I’m currently reading Thomas Barnett’s book entitled “The Pentagon’s New Map.” The premise of the book is that after the cold war ended the pentagon and defense department did not fully understand that there were no more large wars to fight. So for the last two decades the pentagon has been acting like World War 3 is about to happen but end up fighting smaller battles all over the world. The main problem with this is that when we did fight a nation to nation war (the Iraq war) we were so swift and efficient that we had no idea what to do after we won, hence all the turmoil that has happened since the end of the major assault. Dr. Barnett gives a wonderful talk on the TED website where he explains how the pentagon should be split into two forces, a kick-ass fighting force and a peaceful humanitarian force.

Recently, I have been looking into the concept of conflict theory and how people begin, maintain and end conflicts. I’ve been using this knowledge to better understand how conflicts can be modeled within games, since games are basically safe places to have conflicts. In Dr. Barnett’s book he outlines something called a Post-Cold War Horizontal Scenario that describe conflicts. These scenarios look at conflict from multiple perspectives, Barnett believes that to understand conflict one must have a multi-disciplinary mind-set, not just from a war perspective. With this I whole heartily agree and find it funny that we also say the same about games. Barnett defines what makes a PCWH Scenario in his book and I went through each characteristics to see how they map onto how conflicts work within game environments.
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I’m presenting a paper at the SIGGRAPH Sandbox symposium about neutrality in games. As I was touching the paper up for the final submission I re-read through a section I wrote about alignment mechanics. These mechanics are used in games where players can choose how to align themselves with other players, factions, etc. For instance morality is used in games to give players the option of playing the game as a good or evil character, Kotor is one example. Another example would be faction status, used in MMO games like WoW, which records how an in-game faction perceives a player (is the character friendly or unfriendly towards the faction?). These alignment mechanics reward players that reach the highest limits of these alignment scales, whether positive or negative, by giving them different content or bonuses. In the paper I talk about how players who do not choose to reach these limits get left out but this reminded me of something almost completely different from a game called Munchkin.

Munchkin is a satirical card game based around the common game concept of raiding a dungeon for treasure. The game is very comical and the gameplay can be summed up with “Everybody For Themselves!” Now in Munckin a user has a class and a race card and each user can only have one class and race at any point in time. Each class and race card give the player special bonuses such as a new spell or attack. However, these cards have negative effects that they carry as well such as being weak against certain monsters. WoW and other games have similar effects: Undead characters do not have to breath underwater, Orcs get an attack bonus when using an axe, etc. This is what I was reminded of when I was re-reading that alignment section. A user’s class and race is their alignment within the game and each alignment carries pros and cons.

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