"A Chimpanzee Can't Dance"

Oliver Sacks talks to Jon Stewart about the fundamental impact of music on the brain. Rhythm, he says, is a purely human trait...only humans can listen and respond to music by dancing to the beat. Makes it all the more tragic that music programs and education are getting cut from public schools, doesn't it?

Check it out.

Game Developer Magazine Salary Survey

Hey! Make sure you take the Salary Survey on Gamasutra.com. The results are super useful for tracking the growth of the industry, as well as your place in it.

Spontaneous Games

Hi everyone, I'm doing some research on gaming in unconventional places, like using PSPs or DSs on airplanes, in parks, in lines at E3, and so on. Have you played games this way? I want to hear from you!

Have you played other games with other devices? Maybe mobile? Have you ever turned a bar into your own personal gaming theatre? I want to talk to you, too.

jane at gamegirladvance.com.

Generation M

The Kaiser Family Foundation will release a report on young people and new media use on March 9 in Washington D.C. Senator Hilary Rodham Cliinton will give the keynote address. This is a really important event, as it is a national study and you can see from the line-up of panelists that they tried to get a cross-section of participants. I do think they should have included at least one young media-saturated person, however.

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Dance Dance Education

Once again I’m doing another study on video games for class (albeit a different one than before). This time, I’m trying to investigate the phenomena of people using video games to exercise, especially, but not limited to, Dance Dance Revolution. And once again, I extend the hand of “I need help” to you folk.

I’m currently conducting interviews with fitness experts, doctors, and people who have used video games specifically to exercise. If any of you are within this range of expertise, and wouldn’t mind a five-minute phone interview (at my expense), please e-mail me at msd248@nyu.edu with times when a phone call would be welcome and not ruin your dinner.

While I’m relatively sure from my research that DDR and games like it are a legitimate form of exercise, I’m trying to also weigh in issues such as possible injury as well as effectiveness when compared to more traditional fitness programs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and for more information, please e-mail me.

The Games of New York

I’m attending a class at NYU called “Writing New York” (no, there’s no ‘in’ in the title). The entire purpose of the class is to show how books, movies, music, and other artwork portray the New York City, both by people from and not from the city.

As many college classes tend to, we have a final project. While the majority of the students are likely leaning towards the analysis of either films or books, I’m trying to do a project on video games that take place in the city.

I intend to take a look at the city as a playing field. I want to look at how games view New York City, both as a quintessentially American city as well as a source of play. I especially want to concentrate on the differences between games developed outside the U.S. and games developed within.

My ultimate purpose is to show video games and how the represent the city. Is the city a hardboiled wasteland like the Max Payne games seem to say? Is it a source of American power that is to be defended, as games like Red Alert 2 or Freedom Fighters seems to say? And is Nintendo’s Mario, generally considered to be an Italian immigrant from Brooklyn, indicative of anything?

Although I appreciate the need for self research and my own ideas, I would like to extend the hand of “oh Jesus, I actually have to do this soon” to you guys. I’ve already got a strong list set up, but I’d greatly appreciate any games that either take place in New York City (including games like ‘Punch-Out’) or games whose environment is strongly influenced by New York City (like Grand Theft Auto III). And if you know, the country of origin would also be incredible.

Furthermore, if any of you have any views on how New York is portrayed in games, what that means for the city, and why a city like NYC would be used, it’d be of great interest to me.

Games Boost and Reduce What Stats?

Part two of the effects of games - continuing from the comments on the first thread: How Have Games Changed You As a Person?

People wrote about how their lives were changed by specific games, or behaviour from games. I follow their narratives, and I hear my stories echoing theirs. Listening to myself and reading these excellent comments, I get the sense that people are talking about their personal journey in interactive entertainment - "I learned to read," "I learned to solve problems," "I learned to socialize," "I learned to guide myself." As ClockworkGrue said, "If you have memories of videogames, then videogames have made you human." But these remarks have more to say about things people need to learn, and less about the specific agenda or potential for video games. By and large, any of these things could have been learned without video games. Especially if you speak about them that generally - people have been learning to read, solving problems, or finding paths even before we had computers.

But the metaphors are new. Mimi's comment pointed to this - what games have given us, or imprinted us with, is a shared set of metaphors for our experience. "Problem-solving" sounds like language lifted from business management training, "path-finding" is a definite technical term used by the game community. People studying computer science since they were interested in video games also hint at this - they undertook research in technology, a new field, since they were lead there by these games. Games are a gateway to different kinds of understanding, at least about technology, and perhaps about ourselves.

Users like mfb wrote about the way they studied - self-directed, independent, anti-establishment, that seems to reflect the way that games inspired them to learn. This echoes what other people said about video games teaching problem solving, but s/he has articulated something more specific: that games have characteristics, biases almost. I'm not sure I agree, but it's an intriguing idea - perhaps interactive entertainment has characteristics that it shares with the people that engage it, over long periods of time.

So what are those characteristics? Wedge mentions a friend studying dentistry who claims to work on teeth faster, skills he said he learned fighting boss battles. This is a remark in the right direction - how does the problem-solving or hand-eye coordination you learned from games effect the way you work? or play? or talk to other people? Consider what you might have lost or traded for that time spent playing games. By playing games, you were boosting certain stats (to borrow a metaphor from RPGs). What stats were boosted? And which of your stats atrophied?

How Have Games Changed You As a Person?

How have video games changed me as a person?

A 2001 photo of my nephew Elias playing Unreal and talking to a teammate on the phone.

This question has been on my mind for years now, wondering both about myself and my peers, people who grew up raised in part by interactive electronic babysitters. I wrote up a brief introductory exploration: How Has Inventory Management In Computer Role-Playing Games Affected The Way I Pack?

How have video games changed me as a person? Not "have they," but "how have they" because I assume that interactive media shapes the minds of the people that engage it.

I'd love to hear from you, how you think playing video games has changed you. Changed the way you interact with technology, or people, or God, whatever part of your life might have been touched by your time with a keyboard or a controller. You can email me directly if you like, or post a comment below. I have books and articles on my shelf; I want to complement them with first-hand impressions from game players. I might contact you for follow-up questions. Thanks!

The Price of (a virtual) Man

From Declan's Politech list this morning: A link to a blog that described and linked to an economic analysis of EverQuest avatar sales, which determined that "ability seems more important than sex in determining the value of a body. Nonetheless, among comparable avatars, females do sell at a significant price discount."

OTOH, this may simply reflect the mostly-male EverQuest demographic's preference for avatars of their own gender. Are there any studies out there on the different demographics/social tendencies of the various big MMORPGs?

Video-Games Are Good For You

A recent Rochester study, as published by CNN, states that 16 men between the ages of 18 and 23 took a series of tests that relied on video screens to test visual aptitude. As it turns out, the men who had played videogames regularly in the past 6 months tested consistantly higher than those who hadn't.

Now, this isn't proof positive that video-games aren't mindless, as the CNN article attempts to claim, since the tests only involved the ability to locate the position of a blinking object, count the number of simultaneous objects on a screen or pick out the color of an alphabet letter. These aren't necessarily life-changing skills we're talking about, but they are a measurable quantity for test purposes.

What the article boils down to is that videogames are at the very least an effective tool for training better soldiers.

Hopefully someone will do a study on other (social, problem solving, etc.) aspects of gaming and how they apply to real-world situations.

You're in Control! or, Play with your Pee

The geniuses at MIT Media Labs (and I'm not being sarcastic) have come up with an expensive but sanitary way to play at the urinal. The stream is read by sensors and used as the interface for an onscreen game mounted above the urinal. "You're in Control encourages cleanliness while reintroducing play to the act of micturition," says the paper (available in PDF).

For the future? "We envision a variety of additional software applications. For example, users could play a game in which they uncovered a hidden image with their urine." Oh, fun! Pee off the sand and find the treasure! "Another possibility is a co-operative networked game -" Never mind, I think I'll stop reading that now. My favorite: "Users could even browse through news stories, advertisements, and stock quotes as they voided their bladders, in a new form of bathroom multitasking." Sounds great. When's the female version available?

Brenda Laurel at Stanford

Last week Brenda Laurel gave a talk to Katherine Isbister's CS class (where Justin and I also spoke a couple weeks ago). Brenda is a co-founder of Interval Research in Palo Alto, and founder of Purple Moon, a spinoff of Interval Research Corporation, focused on making technology for girls. She's written several books, including the ground-breaking Computers as Theatre (she has a PhD in Theatre) and The Utopian Entrepreneur. She's worked at several leading companies in the industry, including Apple, Activision, and Atari. She currently serves as the Chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design.

She's been an inspiration to many people in the way she combines geek knowledge with humanist values. She is also an amazing speaker - funny, passionate, and absolutely thoroughly steeped in professional research. A real rabble-rousing shit-kicker, with a mane of strawberry blond hair and tatoos on her arm and peeking out over the collar of her purple tank top on her upper back. She spoke to the students about doing good design research, using her own experiences at Purple Moon as a test example. I'll attempt to paraphrase her remarks from my notes.

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Informal Poll: Calling all Musicians

Draigon asked in a comment thread, "How many gamers are musicians?"

I'm curious too. There's something about music composition which is both creative and disciplined in that math way which might attract the same kinds of people drawn to videogames and gaming. Am I way off base? How many of you gamers have also composed? Written music? Played music? Played with sound software to create music?

Have any of you had other associations between music-making and game-playing?

Yes Game, No Pain

Howard sends a provocative article from CNet, examining the use of games as medical distraction:

Subjects who played a zombie-shooting action game during the experiment were able to tolerate pain a full minute longer

We knew that games had broad social applications - inuring people to deeper pain was not one of them. I guess it's a good thing to be able to take people's mind off of suffering. But there's a dark side to this revelation, if you wildly generalize and think about society at large deferring pain through games: we're all indoors, distractedly blowing shit up, while outside, there's a war going on (a common distopia). Among the juciest ideas from the 030303 conference was Greg Niemeyer's loose historical hypothesis that "Games are played by civilizations at their moment of decline."

Anyhow, here's something fun for the day: Can video games ease physical pain?