reviewing

My week of recording game play sequences is over - some 12 hrs of footage in the bag - and I'm in the process of writing a review for Game Studies on Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play. I won't kiss and tell - you'll have to wait for my humble verdict when it is published some time during the spring.

Silence - recording in progress!

Check out the Gaming diary section - that's what's happening at the moment!

In the studio

This week my research diary is truly a gaming diary. I'll be on a research leave for the rest of the week to work on a specific task regarding my thesis: recording gameplay footage for my case studies. I intend to compile a DVD to accompany my thesis and illustrate my theories, so now it's time to gather the raw material.

I've already recorded some sequences from Halo, Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, Frequency, Half-life, Rez, Alchemy, Pac-Man, Galaga (the last two from the Namco museum collection)...

Still to be done: Shenmue, Chu-Chu Rocket, Heroes of Might & Magic, Knights of the Old Republic, Tekken 4, Vice City, Bejeweled, Activision Anthology, and some others...

The only setback so far is that the DV recorder I'm using (borrowed it from work) does not handle NTSC signal, so at the moment I am unable to record any Gamecube stuff :(

We'll have to see what part of the material ends up in the thesis anyway - for now, I'm trying to make sure that there is enough!

There's universal ammo and I feel fine

Dear gaming diary, I've been playing Deus Ex: invisible War. It's great, despite so many less than favourable reviews. At least on xbox it works. I'm not that big of a fan of the first game, although I liked it I did not play it that much...thus, I actually like the sequel better.

Why do I like it? The mechanics are low context-wise, so that the game favours parallel solutions to challenges. There's a complex physics engine for the game's sake, not a physics engine for the sake of a physics engine. There's universal ammo and I feel fine. I truly feel that DX:IW shows the way for more nuanced and intelligent games regarding their subject matter: the WTO vs. Order conflict is complex and intriguing, not irritatingly black and white.

I'm going with the Order now, but I'd definitely like to see how the game shapes out with favoring WTO objectives. And it's not supposed to be that long - maybe, for once, a game I have time to actually finish.

I'm really looking forward to Thief III now :)

genre spotting

After a slow start, my chapter on game genres has progressed quite nicely. I'm nearing the completion of a proper first draft. I've promised to put my mechanics chapter online for such a long time now, so I won't make any promises about this one. Still, I'm supposed to move on to game rhetoric and case studies soon, so i will post the genre stuff sometime in spring.

I had to abandon an ambitious plan to analyse every nth game reviewed in Gamespot in order to find out whether there lurks some meta-game behind such popular genre categorizations that Gamespot, among others, uses. But as there does not exist public gaming libraries, the task seems impossible in practice. Alternatively, if I picked the games that I have access to, the premise would not be valid. Maybe future ludologists have it easier ;)

Anyway, the working title is "Three takes on genre: dynamics, theme, pleasure". I certainly think it introduces three useful perspectives to game genres.