Ludokultur

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Alan MacLeod: Call of Duty is a Government Psyop: These Documents Prove It

• “Yet a closer inspection of Activision Blizzard’s key staff and their connections to state power, as well as details gleaned from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Call of Duty is not a neutral first-person shooter, but a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda, designed to advance the interests of the U.S. national security state.”

Bader Chaarani et al.: Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children

• “As part of the national Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study and after controlling for confounding effects, results of this case-control study of 2217 children showed enhanced cognitive performance in children who played video games vs those who did not. Clear blood oxygen level–dependent signal differences were associated with video gaming in task-related brain regions during inhibition control and working memory.”

Edmund McMillen: Dos & Don’ts of Indie Dev Retrospective

• “I think honesty is what art is. Business makes it dishonest. It’s a difficult field for an artist to be in, because to some degree the dishonesty of selling something, or being a sales person, can easily taint your work, and you can attempt to manipulate people into feeling a certain way, playing more or putting more money into the machine and it’s a dangerous thing. […] Not being manipulative and condescending with your work is important. Knowing who you are is important. And allowing your flaws and eccentricities to show in your work is honest, and that’s what makes art special.”

Elena Petrovskaya & David Zendle: “These People Had Taken Advantage of Me”: A Grounded Theory of Problematic Consequences of Player Interaction with Mobile Games Perceived as “Designed to Drive Spending”

• “Players from vulnerable populations will engage with mobile games which have been designed to drive spending in a different way to players who are not members of such populations. Traits which may make an adult individual particularly vulnerable to such games include (but are not necessarily limited to) mental health problems, stress at work, low self-esteem, poor quality of life, and loneliness. These factors create an offline environment for the individual where they are not experiencing satisfactory feelings of competence and achievement in their daily lives.”

Sebastian Deterding et al.: Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play

• “Positive mood is maintained where the player predicts steady improvements in their error reduction rate. However, learning improves players’ actual and expected error reduction rate for a given challenge. Thus, with learning, uncertainty or expected error over a given challenge goes down, and players get used to the new error reduction rate. Players keep doing well, but slow-down in their rate of improvement, until they stop doing better than expected. As players aim to maximise the velocity of uncertainty reduction, they will thus preferentially sample new challenges that promise more uncertainty to reduce faster.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Jesper Juul: The Meanings & Consequences of Rules & Algorithms

• “I realized the other day that it’s been years since I had this experience of someone dismissing game rules as irrelevant or meaningless, and I think there is a reason: Our world is now so completely enmeshed in algorithms and in issues of algorithmic bias, that it’s now a given that rules, algorithms, and programming fundamentally matter.”

Lucas Pope: Cramming ‘Papers, Please’ Onto Phones

• “I created Papers, Please in 2013 specifically for desktop computers with mouse control. Now, here, in 2022, desktop computers no longer exist and all computing is done via handheld mobile telephone. Time to update this dinosaur. These thousands of words and megabytes of images will cover some bits of porting the game from big desktop to little phone.”

Matti Vuorre et al.: Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being

• “Conceptually replicating previous cross-sectional findings, our results suggested that intrinsic motivation positively and extrinsic motivation negatively affects well-being. […] Our findings, therefore, suggest that amount of play does not, on balance, undermine well-being. Instead, our results align with a perspective that the motivational experiences during play may influence well-being. Simply put, the subjective qualities of play may be more important than its quantity.”

Will Bedingfield: It’s Not Just Loot Boxes: Predatory Monetization Is Everywhere

• “As Hon suggests, predatory monetization salts the earth of creativity. The games built on these systems exploit their players—they aren’t art, but propaganda, another way to turn play into work. And the history of loot boxes demonstrates that the most exploitative systems can become mainstream if they prove they can turn a serious profit.”

Zayne Black: How To Design A Videogame

• “Many of you watching might be thinking: ‘Zayne, […] everybody knows this, this is useless!’ First of all, no they don’t. If they did, you wouldn’t get games that burry their genuinely very impressive mechanical gameplay loops under layer after layer of sludgy, tedious, ham-fisted storytelling, as if the cinematic presentation was the reason to buy it, for example. […] Figure out, what you want the game to be […] and then run every single decision through that filter of whether or not it helps you receive your game’s intention!”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Casey Muratori: What is the Blockchain Threat Model?

• “As soon as [decentralized systems] try to build dispute resolution into them, you’re right back to a government and a court system, which we already have and has to involve humans making these decisions. […] Dispute resolution is absolutely critical in finance. If you don’t have it, it’s dead in the water. […] I can’t think of anything [hashed chains of blocks] defend against, where actually you couldn’t have just made a much simpler system and then have the dispute resolution that you already needed anyway.”

Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games: Untangling Language with Knotwords

• “Knotwords creators Jack Schlesinger and our own Zach Gage chat to us about their elegant new logic puzzle word game. We discuss “cracking” the game design they’d been chasing forever, and how they created the puzzle/word generator that makes it great.”

Josh Strife Hayes: The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal

• “It is indeed fun, but it is also insidiously developed from the ground up to funnel every player action toward the cash shop. […] I enjoy having to engage my brain to beat a game, but if you do that with Diablo Immortal you will ask yourself lots of questions, and the answer to every question is: the credit card. […] I cannot believe that decisions were made in Diablo Immortal with the players in mind. I believe they were made with the payers in mind.”

Keith Burgun: Diablo: Immortal and Aesthetic Gacha-ism

• “The line between game design and marketing gets blurrier and blurrier and games increasingly become ads for themselves, a constant rolling advertisement that tells you to keep playing. Of course mobile F2P gacha games are the absolute peak level of this sort of stuff, but it bleeds out and infects everything else too, more and more, year after year.”

Kyle Kukshtel: Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened To Game Design?)

• “If the role of mechanics design in a game is to best serve the content of the game, be legible to the player, and not introduce too much uncertainty into the middle of a production, the simplest answer to design is just “copy what already works”. “What already works” is a fundamentally conservative and nostalgic lens through which to view cultural production. Looking at “what already works” rejects an idea or potential of progress, and instead narrows the scope of possibility of a medium to only be capable or remediating the “greatest hits”.”

Games media worth reading, watching or listening to.

Babbling Brook: The Unfortunate Truth about NFTs…

• “Microtransactions and gacha mechanics are one thing, but attempting to turn your player base, including children, into a literal workforce that will need to grind endlessly, scam one another, and cheat to earn back their investment, is completely unacceptable behaviour. You are simply making a mockery of an industry that so many people hold dear.”

Christopher Natsuume: Let me explain Blockchain gaming and Play-to-Earn. // Using NFTs to own ingame objects: Also pretty much a scam.

• “NFTs are a pure scam. Blockchain gaming is a pyramid scheme. And play-to-earn is not only a scam, it’s deeply immoral. […] At our brightest moments, games can be a wonderful, beautiful force for good. […] And what I’ve seen in the last two years is one of the most cynical, painful, destructive attacks on our industry that I have seen in decades of working in video games.”
• “We produce more revenue than any other entertainment industry in the world. And so we presented this enormous target to the crypro bros. […] And so they’ve created this ridiculous fantasy story of NFTs and cryptocurrencies somehow adding some kind of value to any of this, for the basic reason that they want you to go out and buy cryptocurrency.”

Dan Olson: The Problem With NFTs

• “If you pitch your game based on earning potential, you’re going to attract people seeking to industrialize your platform faster and in greater numbers than would otherwise play. This is exactly the parasitic situation that games for decades now have been actively minimizing, because it creates vicious negative externalities. If players can sell their in-game stuff, then it changes the way that they play the game. It changes the way that they optimize their playtime.”

Elizabeth M. Renieris: Amid the Hype over Web3, Informed Skepticism Is Critical

• “If Web 2.0 was predicated on selling our data, Web3 will have us sell ourselves as it doubles down on extractivism, turning every interaction into a commercial transaction. Without a critical perspective, familiar harms will not only be replicated; they will be exacerbated. […] Criticism is the hard work of accepting the reality of what is, understanding how and why it came about, and addressing the deeper issues and forces involved. It is the opposite of the “building” ethos of continually punting to new tech or the next thing, as if on a blank slate of human nature and culture.”

Jürgen “tante” Geuter: The legacy of NFTs

• “But getting these assets means you “earned”. As if you had another job. And while you probably never will be able to realize those gains, you can tell yourself and the people around you, that it totally makes sense to play more of the game you “invested” in. That you should play it even if it’s not fun. That you should spend more time on it. And potentially pay for another microtransaction. […] This is why so many people warn about NFTs and the Web3 stuff: The idea that everything should be a tradable asset is even more dangerous than the massive environmental cost of the whole blockchain space.”