GAME 340

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 11: Texture

“I had forgotten how tactile a game like Go is. The black and white often have a different texture from one another, depending on the type and quality of stones one uses. The feel and weight of them between the fi ngers somehow aids the pondering that comes with their placement” (77)

“Traditionally, Go players would hold a stone between the index and middle finger and strike their move, so as to create a sharp click against the wooden board” (77)

“Go is a cerebral, minimalist game that exudes purity and austerity. Computer versions of Go adapt these values unflappably. Although purists favor silence in selecting and holding a stone, for me Go is a game of rummaging for a stone in a smooth wooden bowl and stroking it in thought before placing it to mark territory. These features are not unique to Go, but they’re distinctive” (77)

“In chess the pieces rest on the board, or off , never to be touched save to punctuate decision. Although both games are cerebral, Go is far more sensual. Go reminds us that the physical world—games included—have texture. They offer tactile sensations that people find interesting on their own” (78)

“In painting, texture is an acknowledged aspect of creativity. The word describes the weave of the canvas, the application of the medium on it, and the interaction of the two” (78)

“In the culinary arts, texture refers to the physical sensation of a food in one’s mouth, such as the crispness of a cucumber or the slipperiness of an oyster” (78)

“in music, texture is used metaphorically to refer to the relationship between sounds and voices in a piece—as if they were layered through time like paint on a canvas” (78)

“In the computational arts, the term texture usually appears only in technical speak. Textures are the graphical skins laid atop 3-D models so they appear to have surface detail. Texturing techniques like bump mapping and normal mapping use 2-D image data to perturb the lighting patterns applied to objects by 3-D rendering algorithms to make them appear to have a surface texture not actually present in the 3-D model itself. These simulate the appearance, but not the behavior or sensation, of texture” (78)

“To simulate the behavior, rather than just the appearance of texture, games have to use more than visual effects” (79)

“Simulated properties of the physical world can also contribute to texture” (79)

“videogames simulate the texture of the real world in two ways: through visual appearance or effects” (79)

“Tactile computer interfaces (sometimes called haptics) had become a consumer industry by the early 1990s, with companies like Immersion developing cheaper, simpler sensors and motors that allowed such devices to be integrated into objects other than the expensive, awkward gloves and vests of dedicated virtual reality labs” (80)

“Rumble allows games to create tactile sensations in addition to visual and aural ones” (80)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 12: Kitsch

“Thomas Kinkade paints cottages, gardens, chapels, lighthouses, and small-town street scenes. He paints such subjects by the dozens each year, but he sells thousands of them for at least a thousand dollars each, all ‘originals’ manufactured using a complex print process that involves both machine automation and assembly line–like human craftsmanship. The result has made Kinkade the most collected painter in history” (83)

“There’s a name for this sort of art, an art urging overt sentimentality, focused on the overt application of convention, without particular originality: we call it kitsch” (83)

“Are there kitsch games? Such games would have to accomplish the operation of kitsch as much as its appearance” (84)

“it might be tempting to point to the glut of selfsame casual puzzle games and social games as likely candidates. But those games don’t adopt another necessary property of kitsch: trite sentimentalism. Nor do they exhibit the necessary level of quality” (84)

“Kitsch is often derided in the ‘real’ art world for offering manufactured copies of ideas served to a dispassionate and accepting audience of consumers. This sentiment of rejection has remained more or less the same since the critics Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno first coined the term ‘culture industry’ some sixty years ago” (87)

“kitsch was always meant to be displayed, to serve as a marker of an upward-looking bourgeoisie. It offers tactile evidence of sentimentality, and in doing so provides social purpose. Videogames cannot easily be hung in a foyer or displayed on a console table” (87)

“Facebook is one candidate. The news feed posts in which games like FarmVille, FrontierVille, Pet Society, and City of Wonder report player actions often resemble a shelf of knick-knacks. These games follow the kitsch tradition of adorable sentimentalism, too” (88)

“Instead of displaying the games themselves, players of Facebook games display the exhaust of gameplay, the kitschy virtual trinkets they amass in the process. This array of virtual trinketry might help realize the videogame equivalent of Kinkade’s million-seller art” (88)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 13: Relaxation

“Videogames, people say, are a ‘lean forward’ medium, while others are ‘lean back’ media. Leaning forward is associated with control, activity, and engagement. Leaning forward requires continuous attention, thought, and movement, even if it’s just the movement of fingers on analog sticks and digital buttons” (89)

“It’s one of the features that distinguish games from television, even if the former are often played on the latter. Leaning back is associated with relaxation, passivity, and even gluttony—just think of all those snacks we eat slouched on the sofa in front of the television” (89)

“But what if we wanted another kind of experience from a game, from time to time at least: a relaxing lean-back experience—a Zen game” (89)

“Will Wright has compared playing SimCity to gardening, suggesting that the methodical pruning of the city recalls the care of agronomy even more than that of urban planning” (92)

“The karesansui, or Japanese dry garden, is a pit with rocks and sand that can be raked in the patterns of water ripples. Like meditation, the garden offers the visitor calm, presenting only a few objects of interest. It is often called a Zen garden in the West, a term that some Japanese garden proponents oppose for reasons of imprecision. No matter, the idea of tending to nature as a way to focus on oneself to elicit calm can be true of all kinds of gardening, from dry gardens to herb gardens” (93)

“But the most Zen gardening in a videogame by far is in Harvest Moon. The daily reaping, milking, chicken lifting, and related chores require precision, duty, and calm” (93)

“Medieval labyrinths were thought to provide pathways to commune with God, a kind of surrogate pilgrimage. Henry David Thoreau wanders the ponds of Walden in the mid-nineteenth century at the same time as Charles Baudelaire wanders the streets of Paris, ennobling an increasingly alien environment with a kind of haphazard strolling, or flânerie” (94)

“The early PDP text adventure game Colossal Cave was inspired by Will Crowther’s hobby of caving. Later adventure games like Zork and The Legend of Zelda continued the lineage of exploration as a part of the experience, but the persistence of riddles, puzzles, and enemies quickly make calm meandering in these games difficult” (94)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 14: Throwaways

“Proponents argue that casual games both open up new audiences for games and make new styles of games possible, but the genre has largely floundered in a swamp of copycat titles. One reason for this is a lack of imagination about what casual might mean” (96)

“Here’s an alternative: casual games are games that players use and toss aside, one-play stands, serendipitous encounters never to be seen again” (96)

“We might summarize the industry’s conception of casual games along two axes: design considerations and player resources” (96)

“These games attempt to minimize complexity and investment in player time, money, and control mastery” (97-97)

“Casual games sport designs and controls of reduced complexity that take little time to learn and to play, that come at modest cost and are easy to purchase” (97)

“Such titles offer short gameplay sessions, measured in minutes rather than hours” (97)

“They are marketed modestly, to be sold from websites or app stores for play on personal computers and mobile phones” (97)

“The typical design values of casual games strongly resemble the early coin-op industry” (97)

“As for money, the business model for coin-op games is somewhat different from that of desktop or web-based casual games. When designing games for the bar or arcade, developers aimed for short sessions, usually around two to three minutes. Such tactics maximized ‘coin drop,’ the cash the game could acquire in a fixed amount of time. Coin-op publishers looked to sell a large number of lower-priced plays of the same game, and to rely on repeat purchases of that game. This dynamic naturally encouraged a particular kind of competitiveness: players who get better at the game can play longer for less money, effectively reducing the publisher’s incremental profit while maximizing the value of player’s own leisure dollar” (97)

“Coin-op games were also low cost, usually just a single coin. By contrast, most casual games are accessed on or purchased from online portals. Players download, try, and then purchase, usually for $20 or so. There’s no doubt that online purchasing offers easy access, one of the industry’s design values. But is $20 really low cost? It’s one-half to one-third the price of contemporary console games but still a considerable figure for a discretionary purchase. It’s more than ten times as much as the average price of mobile games, for example, those available in Apple’s App Store for iPhone and iPad” (98)

“The genre’s current conception of ‘casualness’ suggests informality rather than simplicity. If core or hardcore games are ‘formal’ in the sense that they require adherence to complex gameplay and social conventions, then casual games are ‘informal’ in the sense that they don’t require such strict adherence” (99)

“Applied to games, casual as informality characterizes the notions of pickup play common in casual games while still calling for repetition and mastery” (99)

“Consider Zidane Head-Butt, a very simple game created and released less than a day after Zinedine Zidane’s infamous and shameful head-butt of Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final. The game is crude at best, its gameplay little more than a modification of whack-a-mole, as the player controls Zidane and clicks the mouse to head-butt an endless barrage of Materazzis. The game’s sole, simple mechanic offers no novel experience. It’s yet another skinned whack-a-mole. The game even lacks a score tally. As such, Zidane Head-Butt stands mostly as a curiosity, a media gimmick released quickly enough to capitalize on the hubbub surrounding the event itself.”

Commentator’s Note: This is the only reference in academic literature to this game that I have ever seen! This was the first soccer game I ever watched, and we played this game on repeat in the computer lab at school, getting much teenage hilarity out of it. More recently, I dredged it up from the internet to show to one of my game development classes.

“we should celebrate Zidane Head-Butt precisely for its fleeting nature” (101)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 15: Titillation

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Mass Effect: “Even though both were far less explicit than sex scenes in R-rated movies or on cable television, enormous controversy erupted around them. These examples underscore just how scarce and touchy sex in games still is” (103)

“Despite their relatively sophisticated computer renditions of nudity (given the era and the platform constraints, anyway), the Mystique/Playaround games don’t engage adult sexual fantasies very effectively. They sometimes amuse, but they mostly offend” (106)

“These games may not be particularly noteworthy as culture, as games, or even as porn. But they do have historical interest, and they show us how flexible the commercial game environment of the early 1980s really was. And perhaps most startling, they represent a large percentage of the commercial marketplace for sex games in all eras, at least in the West” (106)

“Things are quite different in Japan, where cultural tolerance for sexually explicit materials is quite different from North America and Europe” (107)

“The Japanese obsession with technology allowed hentai to make its way into videogames in a far more widespread fashion than has ever been the case in the West. Some of these games are much tamer than the hentai name would suggest. The most popular sort is known as bishōjo games, or ‘pretty girl games.’ Within this designation are several types, of various levels of explicitness. In the ren’ai game, or dating sim, players manage a male protagonist who must converse with a variety of girls in hopes of courting one. Dating sims are often completely nonsexual” (107)