The Sandbox

Online games are an escape. Even better, for most people, they're a private escape. Any hour, day or night, some dude in Iowa can sit down, log on, and boot up. Then, after an hour or two (or six) of battling through World of Warcraft or flirting in Second Life's Midnight City, he shuts down, and returns to his carbon-based life.

But what would happen if his sense of privacy was gone? Would the success of online games be hampered if the gamer thought that someone, somewhere was monitoring his play?

That's the question raised now by Google. As detailed in a report in the Guardian, Google filed a patent last month for tracking gamers' online activity and selling the data to advertisers. Under the plan, personalized banner ads would appear on the player's screen. For example, the patent reads, "If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for Pizza Hut, Coke, coffee." What no Cup 'O Noodles?

The overall effort is to engineer an instant online personality profile. "User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc)," the patent reads, "Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc)."

I'm not surprised at all by this kind of Orwellian ad-speak. As games shift more and more online, companies will have to find ways to monetize play. But they need to do it in a way that doesn't piss off the players - who will surely find, or create, alternatives of their own.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is mostly known for cutting edge research in such tightly coupled disciplines as Biomed, green Technologies, Interface Design, Micro-Devices, Natural Language, etc.... It might interest our readers to know that they have also been active on the ethnographic front.

Not just any ethnography, either; social ethnographies of the MMORPG genre's current Leviathan, World of Warcraft.

You knew this post was coming, right? If there's one existential question both developers and players ask about games, it is, "Can a game can be considered Art?" The latest foray into this realm I've read is Ian Bogost's "Why We Need More Boring Games" on gamasutra.com. That article is also a – perhaps unknowing – member of a set that inspires one of my personal existential questions, namely, "Why do all 'Game as Art' conversations invoke Casablanca?"

This article at CNN points out something that most gamers have known for a long time, that games can be great ways to connect with other people, that they can foster good social relationships, instead of being the tools of isolation that they're accused of being.

The International Computer Games Association held its 15th annual computer
chess championship in Amsterdam, and the winner was Rybka, a program
written by Vasik Rajlich, an MIT grad and one of 10 engineers IEEE Spectrum
profiled in its most recent "Dream Jobs" issue.

Rybka, the highest-rated chess program in the world, snagged the Shannon
Trophy by drawing its games with the second- and third-place programs and
beating the other nine. Here's an illustrated report of the tournament.

On the heels of Rob's post about the possibility of a DSM classification for "video game addiction", Destructoid recently found an article on the research of Oregon psychiatrist Jerald Block which concluded that the denial of violent games to teen killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was a catalyst for what became the Columbine massacre.

As someone who has worked on several FPS games, I completely understand this conclusion. FPS games are widely misunderstood in the popular media.

Yes, I should be posting about E3: it's the biggest video game show in the US, and it's going on right now. Even though it has been moved to a gas station bathroom in Santa Monica, apparently, it's still a big deal. No more roaming for unknown gems in the wilds that were Kentia Hall anymore....

Anyway, on the heels of my last but one post, which was on the heels of Rob's post, about video games and their effects, yet another researcher has come out saying that violent video games may be good for some kids.

Not living in a battleground state, and not watching any network television, I don't see a lot of Election 2008!! commercials, but gamepolitics.com informs me that I've missed out on a truly excellent Mitt Romney commercial. Titled Ocean, Mitt comes out against liking things that are bad.

No, he was mildly more specific than that, belaboring a "society is an ocean in which we swim" metaphor, and video games get mentioned non-specifically for their pernicious influence. Yeah.

I would encourage Mitt to read The Sandbox, specifically this or this or this. Get with the program, Mitt.

I posted earlier about Games as Art, a perennial topic among developers and players of games. Of course I come down on the side of the fact that games can be capital-A Art, at their best: not because I'm an artist myself, and not because I develop games, but because I know a thing or two.

Roger Ebert says I'm wrong. Clive Barker says I'm right, but really, do I want to be on Clive Barker's team? Sigh.