Just saw this announcement on Jane McGonigal’s blog… it’s worth investigating and definitely worth pondering vis a vis the games for change movement.
I have been looking at a fair amount of NPD market reports for the Wii on and off and I am an avid reader of Kotaku’s frequent posts on the matter. This latest irked me for some reason.
None of these seems to lend credence to the “Casual Revolution” actually and yet these “games” aren’t particularly well studied in game studies either. I’ll note that aside from the Wii Fit phenomenon all these games are thickly social without necessarily being casual ( I am happy to try argue this point on sports resort and NSMB if you like) but really we need more play data to go with this market data — what are the top 5 played games in the world?
Anyway - see the full report referenced at Kotaku here
The G3 research team are preparing for their first field research session this coming weekend. They are planning to snowball the initial research sessions- a program of microethnographies of gestural game-play- into an expanded array of game players. They have an ongoing request for people who are willing to be interviewed and videotaped while playing games on the Wii digital game console.
Amanda got a few more gestural input mechanisms prototyped on the “modular pong prototyping platform” and is integrating the work that Shyam did on that earlier this week so that it’s easy to switch around and compare many different
control gestures. She also worked with Lynn wrestling with budget and funding planning as well as organising an overview of the TAG lab’s activities. A more procedural and visual representation of our research is now visible on one wall of the lab.
The LuV team have been focussing on hand-held devices as platforms for their projects. Perhaps most importantly, they bought an ipod touch (32G), downloaded Leaf Trombone, I am T-Pain, Spider (and am getting better at eating bugs) as well as a few accelerometer percussion apps. This research unit has been playing around with VocaForm, an iPhone/Touch performance synth app as application worth exploring for then Victorianator. Has anyone played with this one before?
Heather has made a bit of progress on was research for various engines to develop iPhone games. Unity is well known but she would like to look at others, such as GameSalad, Cocos2D and others based on Blender and compare. She has also entertained the possibility of exploring other platforms, primarily Google’s Android.
Peripherally, Jason is developing an outline for an intermedia project to be installed in the MB Atrium during Congress in May, and this one time poetry-installation project got him thinking about new media applications of old media, so that has to be useful for the Victorionator.
The 5a7 Symposium featured a lot more coding, with an introduction to game prototyping software for the assembled crowd, and Amanda gave a quick demo of the controller testing system she and Shyam are working on. Katian and Adam are initiating the process of creating a (grad) student’s organisation to support the symposium and non-faculty researcher’s TAG related work.
The Ludic Voice(LuV) research group has two possible projects on the table at the moment with several more awaiting future development. One emerged directly out of the original desired points of exploration with the Recitation game, and the other represents an adaptation of some of those ideas to a combined gesture and recitation game. The first game may still
be called Recite for now, and the second presently goes by the name The Victorianator. Jason met with Elena, Heather and Amanda in extensive discussions to further develop these ideas.
The Gestural Games Group(G3) are continuing to develop sites for ethnographic study of games using the Wii console. Amanda and Shyam are developing code and test interfaces so in future we can implement off-the-shelf and experimental controllers.
Last week’s Wednesday night symposia featured a Rock Band heavy emphasis, with Adam presenting a paper “Digital Dionysians: Nietzsche, Rock Band and Ekstasos”. This week’s Symposium will center on Amanda presenting her and Shyam’s work; a research roundtable, with TAGgers talking about their current work; and the usual mixture of ludos and libation.
Friday, the Gestural Games Group, lead by Bart Simon and Lynn Hughes, unveiled the concept for their genre busting musical fight game, “Fists of Sloth”. Earlier in the week, Lynn, Katian Witchger and Adam met to discuss the music for “Fists of Sloth”. They will start collecting samples of music on which to base further developments. Katian and Adam also met to discuss fieldwork, specifically finding subjects for an ethnographic study of Wii games. They also launched a blog ” to chronicle our ideas, findings and insights” and invite discussion.
Jason Camlot’s project “Recite” explores the various opportunities for interesting interaction/gameplay with late Victorian era sound recordings as the context. In their recent discussions lots of ideas swirled and right now one the “Recite” team, which includes Heather Kelley and Elena Razlogova, are thinking about is an iPhone app/toy that the player can use to “victorianize” their own speech. The next team meeting is on Tuesdsay and will get caught up with current status, figure out next steps, and specifically talk about some voice control stuff that Amanda and Jason discussed recently.
The Wednesday 5à7 Symposium discussed the range of research interests represented there. Cindy Poremba lead a discussion about the documentary game, “Grime” she is developing based on the work of the contemporary artist Moose Curtis. A call was made to play games that came up in the evening’s chat. Next Wednesday Adam will present a draft of a paper he will subsequently present at the ISSEI conference in Ankara, Turkey entitled “Digital Dionysos; Nietzsche, Immersion and Rock Band”. A research roundtable, as suggested by Saleem, will happen in the near future.
If there are any errors or omissions in the “TAG Research Update”, please contact Adam and he will address them.
The RELIQ (Réseau d’Études Ludologiques Interdisciplinaire du Québec), together with the Ludiciné research team from Université de Montréal and the Homo Ludens research group from UQÀM, are pleased to invite you to the meetings of the first season of the Reliquary.
The Reliquary is a ludo-club. Inspired by the formula of the cine-club/film society, each meeting has a participant presenting a given game or franchise (a “relic”) in detail, by way of oral presentation, video clips, and/or live demonstration. The chosen object acts as a springboard for discussion and collective thinking in an easygoing environment. Participants may mobilize interests, subjects, approaches or methods from any one discipline (including aesthetics, philosophy, art history, film studies, sociology, anthropology, computer science and programming, design and architecture, cultural studies, cybernetics, semiotics, etc.). The theme for the Reliquary’s first season is video game classics and canon. The text below contains an introductory text to the main questions that will be covered, as well as the schedule with all presenters and games to be featured. While all presentations for the first season will be in French, cross-linguistic discussion and questions are welcome and expected, and future seasons should feature English-language presentations as well, pending interest from presenters.
So I have been scrambling to get my abstract finished for a conference I want to go to in May in Cardiff. I am rather excited about this project after 48 hours of (re)playing Nintendogs, reading Haraway and looking at Nintendogs Youtube videos. I thought I would share in case any of you had two cents to toss in before I forget about this again until March. Check it out -
Playing Rock Band at Wednesday Symposia
So I conjectured that ekstasos as it appears in The Birth of Tragedy might map onto immersion as we notionally think about it. A couple of months and nineteen pages later, I think that ekstasos as a human quality maps well onto the immersion found in games. What I found most interesting was that not only did VR not usefully lead to immersion, but that narrative also wasn’t necessary. I am not saying that narrative and compelling images don’t assist in approaching immersive states. But I am saying that they are ancillary to ritual which leads to the state of ’standing outside oneself’.
The relationship of narrative to ritual is complex and I am still grappling with the previous scholarship. In The Birth of Tragedy the ritual becomes the counterpart of a narrative- the death and rebirth of the god Dionysus. Scott Scullion’s discussion of the ritual roots of attic tragedy- that these were concurrent cultural entities, not one an off shoot of the other- only strengthens my sense that the ritual plot, the sequence of events in a ritual, precedes the narrative plot.
So here’s your Xmas challenge… come up with an idea for a nutcracker video game.
Let’s consider this as a case of multi-platform adaptation. The nutcracker most of us know (and the one I just saw with my daughter on Friday) is some version of the 1890’s Tchaikovsky ballet adapted from Alexandre Dumas pere which was adapted from the 1816 story of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by ETA Hoffman.
Now don’t get me wrong but the ballet (now my fourth time in as many years) is like an Nvidia demo relative to the original story. The second half the ballet especially is an intense combination of orientalism and pop culture schmaltz… the most popular template for the classic Pas de Deux? Its Disney without Disney… Icecapades for the high culture set. There’s certainly a mainstreaming of the historical ballet going on in the context of Xmas marketing and girl culture nostalgia but also - what happened to the original story?
Ballet is more than capable of doing something with the original Hoffman, as is film. In fact, New Line is slated to produce a version of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King for 2012 (Robert Zemekis directing… hmmm). I did a brief search and there is no video game as yet… Surely in this new moment of the video game adaptation (see the new Dante’s Inferno) there is room for a Nutcracker. Is there a more obvious ‘AAA’ title to pursue for the current extended market that Wii brought.
Can this game deal with the original story, speak to the popular culture that has grown up around the commercialized ballet, and give some sense of the context of adaptation? Can there by a game mechanic which combines the narrative depth of the Hoffman story with the spectacle if not bodily engagement of the ballet? A ballet RPG using Natal perhaps? Or how about Ballet Hero - team version for the dance of the sugar plum fairies?
Have a nice break all….
Note the cheiristerai (an early game paddle) in the hands of the three figures to the left.
The last two Wednesdays we have had modest, informal get-togethers to play games, gab about our current research, and engage in a symposia. These were so successful, we’ll be doing it again most if not all Wednesdays next semester, 5 a 7 at the TAG lab. If you want to give a short, more informal presentation of your work, let us know, preferably in advance and we’ll make sure the Magic™ players will stop to listen, and the Werewolves will stop harassing villagers so you can speak and get feed back.
If you are a games researcher, especially at the graduate or under- graduate level, Wednesdays would be a good time to drop in and get to know us and what the TAG Group is up to.
Have a great holiday, and hope to see y’all in the new year.
adamvs1 AT gmail DOT com
