Ludology.org

Notes from distant countries / Lucky people

I have been doing a lot of travel recently. After spending almost a week in London for GDCE, I had to travel to Uruguay (that's a 20 hour flight) and I am about to catch a flight to Tokyo in a few hours. Sometimes I do complain of being tired (I certainly am), but quickly try to change subject, because it is not nice to complain about moving around when most people are stuck in some place. Traveling is the best non-virtual reality. While a tourist, nobody knows you are a dog (actually, everybody knows you are a dog). The trick is not to behave like a tourist. That will be my plan in Tokyo, blend into the crowd, speak perfect Japanese and speak into ridiculously small cellphones. I may need a plan b.

Digra 2005 CFP

The call for papers is up. The abstract deadline is November 15th and the paper deadline March 15th.

BBC, art students and games

The BBC reports on art students trying to get jobs in the game industry. Also, in The World, yours truly and Noah Wardrip-Fruin talk about newsgaming (Windows Media Format). Update: BBC Online has posted a transcript of the talk.

Name that game

(via LaPetiteClaudine) Can you tell classic games from their classic sound effects? If you can, name them!

Game Studies - The Early Years

The prequel to all PhD courses. Ludology Episode 1. No, just kidding, but this is the title of Espen Aarseth's upcoming PhD course. So if you need some ECTS (that's the European credit system), this may be a fun way to get them. The course will happen right before the Other Players conference, so this is a great excuse to extend your Copenhagen trip. See you there (right now I am in Uruguay, but don't worry, I'll be back up North quite soon)

Myst gets real

Thanks to Chris LaVigne who writes about A quiet weekend in Capri, a Myst-like, point-and-click game shot on location. The islands in Myst where boring as hell but millions visited it, so I can't think why people wouldn't do the same with Capri. Of course, if they included real food, then gameplay would not be an issue at all.

Markku Eskelinen on First Person

After unsuccesfully waiting for more than 10 days for the EBR to post it at their forum, Markku Eskelinen has published his response to Julian Kuklich's comments on Eskelinen's article at First Person at EBR.

GDC Europe Academic Day

The truth is, I didn't have high hopes for the GDCE academic day. I was the first to be surprised when it turned out to be a really good day. First, the attendance was very good, we had plenty of participants. I had the pleasure to share two panels with Matt Southern, one on R&D and the other on Education and Training. My favorite talk was on Moovl, a simulational tool for kids developed by the same people behind soda constructor. Certainly, GDCE is extremely small when compared to its American equivalent, but it is also cozy and allows an amount of focus and interaction that would be impossible to have when you are surrounded by hundreds of persons. I am glad that I attended.

The Horror

While in London, I could not really follow the events in Beslan. But yesterday I was able to grab a couple of newspapers and read them on the plane. Certainly, politics are complex and I am sure that I am missing many elements of the context of the war in Chechnya. But one this is sure: no matter how oppressed a country can be, no matter what has been done to them, there is no possible excuse in the universe for gunning down children. If there is an universal moral truth, this will be it. The world is in shock because there is no explanation ot the horror of Beslan. We can try to understand what went wrong with the counterterrorists, we can try to understand the politics behind the Chechnyan war, but there is no room in our minds and souls to make any sense from the slaughter of innocents. The terrorists in that school lost their last drop of humanity. How is it possible that you can reach such state of inmorality? True, hundreds of children die daily. In Uruguay, I saw them every day, living in the streets, begging. I saw them in Brazil, in Argentina. And they were as doomed as the little ones in Beslan. The shock comes when we see them running for freedom, covered in blood, looking for their parents. I'll be taking a flight in a few hours that will take me to Sao Paulo and then to Montevideo. In their streets, thousands of children face a similar fate than the ones in Beslan, even though their death will be slower and probably more painful. We react to concentrated horror, but we dilute it on everyday basis. I will walk by these children in the next few days, probably have some seconds of pain, but then I will keep walking, probably thinking of games, films, good food or some other frivolous thing. Every step that my indifference will take, each one, will trigger a bullet. The horror.

GDC Europe and "no comments"

Well, the "no comments" in the title simply means that the Anonymous comments feature in Ludology.org has been disabled for good (you may have noticed how our comments database got all messed up, showing thousands of fake comments).
rAbout GDCE, so far, so good. The conference is way smaller than the American version, but people who have been here before say that this is a normal thing. The ECTS looks quite small, actually, but again, I am comparing with E3 and TGS, so it may be an unfair comparison.
rToday there was an interesting talk by John Welsh, former VP of Games at Shockwave.com. John started his own company, PlayFirst, which will launch on September. Based on what he said, it seems that they will try both to have their own portal and work as a broker with the other major portals dealing with so-called casual webgames. Welsh is a good presenter and very open when it comes to talk about the webgame business. It is interesting that most players on this field are men and they make some comments that can sound really offensive to the women in the audience. A similar thing happened with other male presented at the downloadable section of GDC San Jose this March. I am referring to comments such as (para-phrasing) "well, we realized that women are a big part of our audience, so we should try to stop making so many laser guns and start focusing on geometrical shapes and brilliant colors". Of course, I understand what they mean, but the language seems that they are referring either to toddlers or monkeys. Geometrical shapes? Brilliant colors? Certainly, there may be different patterns of play between the genders (notice that I say "may", the jury is still out until we have some more decades of serious research). But this fact could be phrased in a far more careful way.
rAnyway, going back to the downloadable business model, I think it is pretty exciting the way things are going, not because of the corporate consolidation but because it is a market that does not require big teams nor budgets and it may encourage some original work. So, I'll be following PlayFirst closely.