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.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And when Souris posted to a mailing list about it, I tried to put my rather vague thoughts into more coherent terms. I realized that I had been noticing four big trends that are already shifting the tectonic plates of the vast entertainment industry. I need to do some more thinking in these areas but my initial thoughts are that the futures of entertainment will be shaped by:

1. Tension between Immersion and Transparency.
What I think of as Big Media -- giant, big-budget movies, games, TV Shows -- seek to really *immerse* people in a spectacle of scale and sensation. And we say that we love that feeling of being utterly transported -- but at a My Bloody Valentine show I went to recently, what did I see? People were texting on their phones! Taking video of the band! Twittering! I was doing it too. We were *layering* these ambient communications transparently on top of what was supposed to be this overwhelmingly big experience, because we wanted to *share* this experience with others, we wanted to record it for ourselves. This has to do with what Linda Stone calls "continuous partial attention." I call this "transparent" because I don't believe it in any way diminishes the experience of, say, a rock show; it's simply a new way of experiencing it.

Future entertainment will find clever ways to accommodate, even encourage, this behavior.

2. Asynchronous Instant Communication.

Most of my friends have embraced Twittering, text messaging, Facebook, and the like. One of the things that is really new and intriguing about these forms of communication is that they are simultaneously instant and asynchronous. The update happens instantly--and the recipient can read or answer at her leisure. Or not. Facebook status updates are absolutely brilliant ways for expressing an immediate state, and allowing someone else to browse the "immediate states" of friends. Entertainment will increasingly make use of these styles of communication in the backbone of the product itself.

3. Credible Advertising with Integrity.
For a child of the 80's like me, this seems like a ludicrous notion. Advertising in that decade was so transparently slick and false that we quickly grew inured to it and scorned it. It seems designed to trick people into buying things they didn't need. Arguably that is still, at base, the aim of advertising. But it doesn't have to be that way. With targeted ads there is a chance to serve the consumer with something that she actually *wants* to see. The ad becomes both a form of entertainment and a service to the consumer.

Media companies that accept advertising should become increasingly picky about the ads they accept. They will accept ads that align with their values and their mission.

As an example, look at Penny-Arcade: the creators of the popular web comic have stated that they will only accept advertising for products that they themselves believe in. That endorsement is a HUGE win for both the consumer, who is a fan of Penny-Arcade and of their values, and for the advertiser.

4. Tools *are* the Content.
"Content is king." Well, there's about to be a revolution and some regicide. The consumers of tomorrow want content for free. And they will make their own content. That is potentially more fun and more interesting than consuming carefully planned, carefully made, well-mannered content from a professional. Films and TV are already at that point where they are consumed and remixed freely by consumers. Music was there long ago. Games will be there soon.

The content of the future will be in tools. Tools like the ones shipped with Little Big Planet (although I suspect it's still too early for that game to start a true paradigm shift.) Tools that will let consumers engage directly with the content.

Actually, this is the tipping point when "consumers" become "users". Consumers are passive. Users, active.

So, these are my initial thoughts. I need to work on them some more and flesh them out, but I think there is something to think about here.

Isn't it funny how when you get together with a fellow gamer, especially an MMO player, you immediately start sharing experiences of how you play the game? I was out for a walk with my neighbor Jack and we got to talking about World of Warcraft, and I had a sudden realization about the success of the game.

Yes, it's a solidly designed game, friendly for newbs, and all that, but - it's also a game that supports what I think of as layerability. In other words, you can sometimes layer the experience of WoWing over and under other experiences.

In WoW, about ten percent of my time in the game requires ninety percent of my attention. The other ninety percent of the time requires anywhere from five percent (say, flying to another area) to fifty percent (grinding a familiar area, or helping to power level a low-ranking friend). So I find that more often than not I am checking email, on AIM, making tea, etc. during my WoW sessions.

That goes against the notion that games have to be immersive, or that the strength of games as a medium is that they are so immersive.

And yet WoW *is* immersive, in the sense that I played last night until 3:30 am without even noticing it. "Just finish up this one last quest" we told each other in our group, "just one more quest item, just one more mission." I'm wondering if the layerability of the game contributes to the play sessions - because you can continue to do some other things as you play, you are more likely to keep playing longer.

Hm! I don't think most console games can get away with this - can they?

Tuesday evening I saw the game Dark Sector at a D3 preview event. The game pleasantly surprised me with both its technical achievements and some neat little gameplay features that showed that at least the team was trying to do something new with the action genre. But what impressed me most was how much it looked like Resident Evil 4.

It hadn't really occured to me until that night how influential RE4 was - is, I should say, for it continues to be so; the blockbuster title of the this year is an ardent homage to RE4. By contrast the other big fancy game, Resistance: Fall of Man looks... almost primitive. What's new in Resistance? Nothing. We feel like we've seen it all before.

Is it just me or are we experiencing FPS fatigue? Of course, Halo 3 might still change all that. But until it comes out, I have to say that FPSs are looking just a little bit old-fashioned.

Ernest Adams, who sometimes jokingly refers to himself as a cantankerous old game designer, is really anything but: his speeches at the GDC are often inspirational, exciting, and stiumlating. His latest column introduces an idea he calls "Perlin's Law" after NYU's Ken Perlin, which attempts to express the tension between freedom and storytelling in a game.

The theory posits that games have a "credibility" budget which both the player and the designer can break if the story is pushed in an altogether improbable direction. It's an interesting way to think about balance.

Of course, designers have always limited the freedom of players, even in "open" games like GTA or Oblivion. But how far do you push it? It seems to me that one thing Adams doesn't talk about is how to quantify something as subjective as credibility. I'm not sure you can, outside of your own perception. Something dismissed as wildly improbable by some might actually be a real news story, as bizarre as it may be; and other folks seems to have no problem believing in stuff that I find completely crazy (uh, Scientology for example.) In the context of a game or a film this discrepancy is what causes disagreements over the quality of a piece of work.

To be clear, I'm not talking about "realism" in games; simply the internal coherence of a game world, which must seem predicatble to some extent if the player is to feel like a real player in it. Moments that break that coherence can be difficult for the player, but how does one measure how difficult?

MacKenzie Wark, professor at the New School and author of A Hacker Manifesto (in book form here), has launched a new project called GAM3R 7H30RY which is at once notes for a future book as well as a unique platform for discussion and contribution.

I haven't had much chance to poke around myself, but the interface is simple and elegant and its goal is intriguing: open an author's draft for inspection, critique, comment... I don't know that I would have the courage to do that!

I learn this morning via Joystiq that Blizzard has graduated to the virtual afterlife a largish chunk of World of Warcraft players who've been farming gold in the game world and selling it out here in wetworld for the coin of the realm(s). Thus inflames the million-voice choir with the seed of a debate over whether or not Blizzard should be allowed to do this. Nonsense. Of course they should be allowed to do it. Blizzard has the absolute right to do what they wish with their game world. This includes canceling player accounts for in-game conduct that they do not like. This includes canceling the whole game if they so desire. I thought we had worked out all this philosophical intrigue with Sony's EverQuest. For the avid WoWer, it should by now be quite clear: You play at the pleasure of Blizzard; learn to live with it.

That's not to say this is necessarily a wise business move. Indeed the parental urge of the game's developers to curtail creative and perhaps unforeseen uses of their world may prohibit them from making considered decisions. Any game has the potential to go stale, and I would argue that it's just a matter of time before all games go stale. People doing weird things in World of Warcraft of course may cause some trouble, but they are also working for Blizzard, not for free, but actually paying Blizzard to work. Innovative use of the game world keeps things fresh. Even if it's annoying. Not all of it will benefit the game world, of course, but if it keeps you coming back out of delight or sheer frustration, it enhances the marketability of the game. And this ultimately benefits Blizzard.

If you did a little gold farming on the side and today discovered you no longer exist in Azeroth, go buy yourself a fresh copy of WoW, load up on some more game hours, and get back to it. This time, try not to get caught.

I have a friend named Doox. Like a few of my other friends, he's got a copy of Half-Life 2. I asked him, what difficulty level are you playing on? "Easy," he said, "because I like to tour."

For the last few years, I've been playing my games mostly on hard. I used to want to tour, to explore the far corners of all the levels and characters. But recently I've wanted more of a challenge, where I have to struggle through the game and overcome foes. I feel it makes me a more skilled player and invests me more in the action.

Doox and I have two different approaches to enjoying the same games. This came up in a discussion in an Interactive Media class at USC Film School. Some students were asking each other whether specific games were fun. It got kinda useless - one person's fun is another persons headache. I brought up Marc LeBlanc's "Eight Kinds of Fun" - finding more specific language to describe what we enjoy in games. I read through his list of eight: sensation / fantasy / narrative / challenge / fellowship / discovery / expression / submission.

The teacher, Erik Loyer, listened to the list, and brought up a terrific point: games today offer difficulty levels for players. What if, Loyer proposed, game designers presented a few different modes for experiencing the game?

So next time you boot up that first-person adventure RPG shooter, instead of choosing between Easy, Medium or Hard, you could choose between Tour, Expression or Challenge. It would describe more of the emphasis in the gameplay - is the game going to slack off on enemies and ease up on some puzzles to let you wander through the landscapes and architectures (Tour, or Discovery as LeBlanc calls it)? Maybe the game is going to spend more polygons on character customization, allowing the player to leave a greater impact on the world (Expression). Or maybe the focus is on foes, waves of cunning enemies testing a players resolve and the discipline of ammunition conservation.

Writing this out, it seems a great solution - game designers could build more complex titles than the game hardware can support, and allow the players to emphasize the gameplay they crave. Then the game allocates processing power to AI, architecture, or physics. Modular play! Umm, that's not sounding so great any more. Too much complexity and overhead.

It's the same problem I have with most fantasy RPGs - when a game starts, how do I know whether I want to play a thief, a fighter, or a magic user? I haven't even tested their powers or seen what the landscape looks like. Same with tour, expression or challenge - I don't know the shape of the world; how I want to play depends on the game, not the menu beforehand. Moreover, my mood might shift and I might feel like a touring break one Sunday morning, or a crazy fight after a few beers. Choosing modes of gaming based on gameplay is less broken then choosing a difficulty level, but it still ain't optimal. It's enough to make me want to study Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment! Maybe there can be Dynamic Gameplay Adjustment? Building in the game's ability to accommodate touring, expressive, or challenging players, behind the scenes.

I was going to do a bit of not thinking this weekend. It is, after all, Super Bowl weekend in the States, and what better 48-hour period to eschew both introspective and extrospective rumination, opting instead for the triplet vices of carbohydrates, saturated fats and American sports spectacle. Unfortunately, however, I had one of those chain-reaction moments Thursday night while watching about 15 minutes of the television program CSI -- not TV snobbery; I really did watch but 15 minutes. One of the principal characters -- a forensic pathologist or microbiologist, some sort of academic type judging by the chin-stroking way he speaks -- quoted Sigmund Freud, "The only abnormal sex is no sex. Everything else is just a matter of time and preference." (Or something like that. Via cursory research, I can fairly attribute the first sentence to Freud; the second sentence is highly suspect, but it's the first sentence that is essential for my purpose.)

So when do we hit the all-time comments record for GGA? My look at Max Payne has generated quite a slew of thoughtful commentary (this is the part where I suck up to everyone before slamming them). Indeed, I'd guess the majority who've commented enjoyed the games' narratives and dialog as they, and this is the important qualification, relate to the overall gameplay. Taking this into consideration, apparently you're all a bunch of dolts. You should go read books.

The French Twist being a garrot. Getting directly to the point: in a comment posted to Jane's Manhunt entry, someone mentioned having a "scholarly" interest in the game. I discovered that I do too, in addition to merely wanting to give any game a shot. But especially as the survival/horror genre contrasts between games of Japanese and western origin. And I'm also particularly fascinated with games purporting to have some sort of plot. I think it would be interesting to play through and compare, say, Fatal Frame 2 and Manhunt: what scares on the Pacific Rim as opposed to what's supposed to give us the creeps western style.

I've been playing an inordinate amount of Crimson Skies on Xbox Live. Though a great many gamers may be playing a great many more games than I, as far my gaming goes, I'm at this one quite a bit. To the point I'm waking up with muscle cramps in my hands and arms. A lot, you see.

My growing dissatisfaction with the games produced by the industry has been troubling me of late. I’ve purchased three games this past month, and although they all please in the average sense, nothing is blowing me away. Prince of Persia was a sure-fire bet to be a crowd-pleaser, and while my take-away experience with it was in general a positive one, I can’t get past the negatives, nor the lack of anything truly innovative. Yes, it’s a good game. No, it doesn’t get my vote for game of the year, and I would not have given it the insanely high marks it’s been getting (as high as 9.6).

That’s not to say that the rest of you shouldn’t like it. Hell, love it. Please. Lust after the beautiful wall-striding and swinging backflip jumps off a wall to a nail-biting ledge-grab. If you enjoy their combat system, kudos to you. I want to be sitting where you’re sitting.

But the problem doesn’t lie with the game-developer, or general consumer. It’s me. I’m afraid that I’ve killed my only remaining hobby.

This morning, when I finally turned my Playstation 2 off, it had been on for some 16 hours. This is because I left it on overnight. This is because I was too scared to turn it off. In fact, I ran out of the room. Closed the door behind me. Went to bed with a little difficulty.

Hello, my name is Tony, and I am the biggest coward on the planet.

Of course, this is a scary game, nobody will argue that. The textures, the suffocating use of dark and of shadows, and the juxtaposition of constant, creeping dread and stark, sledgehammer terror would put most people ill at ease. But I screamed like Bambi's mother.

I think I have a pretty good tolerance where "manmade fear" is concerned. I've never lost sleep over a book or a movie, although yes, I did cry at Tennage Mutant Ninja Turtles when Raphael died. Haunted houses and graveyards at night don't really bother me either.

But Silent Hill, like its predecessors, did the trick and did it right. Video games really hit me where it counts. Why is that? It could be the interactivity, the identification with the game's protagonist at a very primal motor level, sure. That's the simple answer, and it's probably right. But I think that's just part of the reason why I reacted so strongly. There was something that obliterated my faculty for reason and that caused me to scream to my friend (who was watching):

"WHAAAAAFFFFKING DI-DUDE!" (sic)

My theory is this: after playing games for all of my conscious life, I think I've gotten to the point where I can ignore the motor control aspect of most games, or at least shift my attention away from it. Basically, I'm receiving all the benefits of interactivity without being distracted by many of the trappings it necessitates. I don't have to think about pressing the X button to open a door, I just open it.

This could explain a lot about the vastly different experiences that casual and hardcore gamers can take away from games. If you're concentrating on controls, you aren't concentrating on other things, right? Instead of focusing on dodging the bandaged, hinge-headed dogs, I was listening to the sparse-but-horrific music, or noticing the footfalls of something coming out of the screen's periphery.

Let's not forget, though, that I am also a huge wuss. However, I'm at least not as bad off as my friend Emmy, who cried at Myst. Myst!

-Tony

PS Although I gave the impression that I have the godlike game control skillz, it's really more that I don't pay attention to them as much. I'm actually pretty sloppy, and the SH series' famed clunky combat facilities don't help much. At least in this installment they give you the option to switch to objective "2-d" controls, though.

Sorenstam's Got Game, in Reality and Virtually - as part of the Sunday New York Times Week-in-Review section, game designer Sid Meier demonstrates how his SimGolf game could be used to model a match between Annika Sorenstam, the first woman to golf with the male PGA players in 58 years, and Vijay Singh, who said that Sorenstam shouldn't play with the male golf professionals. Meier designs a course that favors precision, and then establishes two avatars modelled after Sorenstam and Singh. The results of their virtual matchup? More questions in the use of sports games, and simulations over all, to model and forecast human competition. In this case, gender retribution has a guest-starring role, arguing for the video game as a level playing field, where an amateur designer can make a course that caters to anyone's strengths.

Stuart Dennett, a postgraduate working on virtual environments and haptics, wrote to direct my attention to a paper (PDF file) which suggests that gameplaying is inversely linked to feeling of immersion in virtual environments. In other words, subjects who played a lot of games reported feeling less presence in the environment than subjects who had not played a lot of games.

Stuart quotes the relevant portion of the paper:

"We... found that females had a higher sense of presence than males. However, since females also played computer games significantly less than males, substituting game playing for gender yields a better fitting model. Greater game playing is associated with lower presence. No other variables were significant [Empasis mine]."

"Game playing is negatively associated with presence, irrespective of anything else. However, there is the same confounding of game playing and gender."

This correlates closely with my feeling that gender studies in videogames have often been conflated with casual-gaming studies, leading to all those moments of disassociation among female gamers who feel, "But *I* don't game like that!"

A lot more work to be done to separate gender from gameplay habits, I think.

Anyway, Stuart wonders if this phenomenon doesn't help to explain perhaps why we "grow out of games"; or, in my case - not yet having grown out of them! - why we seek greater and better immersion; why we can't roll back the graphics technology - graphics being an important element of immersive feeling. Is immersion more important than interactivty? That's another question I have. Any thoughts?

The profusion of weblogs continues - How How They Got Game is a weblog started as part of the project, "How They Got Game: The History of Videogames and Interactive Simulations" funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. The team includes Henry Lowood, who's very active in moderating and appearing as a panelist at digital/new media conferences. I believe they will be publishing a collection of essays under the same title.

(seen on Ludology)

"Ludology" is the name of a good gaming weblog and a word describing the study of games. Now "games" means everything from Monopoly to Metroid, things that are completely plotless like toys (Tetris) and things that barely allow any user participation at all (Squaresoft's Bouncer). What use is the word "games" then and how could you ever hope to ludologize? Jussi Holopainen from the Nokia Research Center has written Games Without Frontiers to work through these questions. It's a preliminary stab - declaring some parameters and a general need for game study. His bibliography is good looking, as is his project - since the Finnish mobile phone giant has launched a handheld mobile phone/portable gaming device, they've been investing some money in game research. Game research - that sounds delicious.

The End of an Age in Computer Gaming

Something has to be done. Computer and video games should be the 21st Century's revolutionary cultural form. Their creative energies should match their gargantuan revenues. But as games become bigger business, their imaginative horizons are falling rapidly. In the end, that will bad for both the business of gaming and the experience of it.

More great writing by Tim on his website.

I'd wanted to go to the academic summit at the Game Developers Conference because, for whatever perverse reason, I am still attracted to the academic side of any equation. The summit was mostly about how game developers and academics might work together to further mutual interests.

I won't try to summarize all the speakers' remarks, because those notes will be shortly available on the GDC webpage and in any case, I couldn't do them justice. I'll just comment on a few things which I found most compelling. The theme that resounded most of all to me was the need for communication, not only between the game industry and game academia, but also between academics, between designers and consumers, and among all of us as consumers of this relatively new cultural product. A new shared language might spark an open source grass-roots revolution in the way we think about games and gaming.

About a month ago, the New York Times ran Charles Herold's video game review which explained perfectly the core of why The Sims Online has gotten such colossally horrible user reviews.

A manifesto posted to the new-ish site Ain't It Cool Games (a sister site to the one about movies) criticizes mainstream console games for not being innovative.

Oh, really?

I have been reading a little of Gamecritics and it's quite interesting. It's part of the new breed of accessible, intelligent writing on games and game culture. Haven't gotten through all the articles yet but I am most intrigued by the Zelda: Link to the Past piece which experiments with applying Joseph Cambell's ideas of mythology to one of the most popular classic Nintendo games.

Steven Johnson wrote a fun piece for Slate on the expansion of game space:

L3 takes place in virtual space, while the Go Game unfolds on actual city streets. But they share a common denominator: the widening of the game environment. Most forms of entertainment are defined by their edges: the outline of the Monopoly board or the dimensions of a movie screen. To enter the world of the game or the story, you enter a confined space, set off from the real world. Play-space doesn't overlap with ordinary space. But Go and L3 don't play by those rules. Go colonizes an entire city for its playing field; L3 colonizes the entire Web. These are games without frontiers.

Fresh take on DDR by Kathy Walker for Shift:

We're at the dawn of an epoch of activated culture. We're watching the closing scenes of the age of the couch potato. The question of "activation" isn't limited to physical movement; it's also about how our imagination is involved in video games. Most videogames are highly dependent on narrative -- the goal-based story is as much a part of the game as the graphics and sound. But these new aerobic Benami games are without narrative. The progression of simple shapes and arrows is closest to the minimalist geometry of the Tetris interface. Does a story-less game activate the mind? Or, does it merely signify that we are now completely comfortable with the absolutely mindless?

Sitting in an Italian restaurant just outside Philadelphia, a friend relays the story too me about loosing her cat.

I have been kind of not feeling well today. This makes me sad, generally speaking. For most of the day, I was indeed sad.

I realize also that being sick gives me a chance to be a bit creative. I am working the detail out now, so bear with me if it's a little unworked:

Networks are inherently irrational if they are designed by humans. Why? Because, we are in a very strange way both inescapable egoists, even solopists, yet we are too weak to survive without interdependence. So, the idea of the network is fundamental to the survival of the individual, but the individuality of of each human sabotoges the whole venture.