In amongst the recent flurry of game design books, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology attempts to move beyond formalist and technical concerns to touch on game’s sociological and phenomenological dimensions. Review by Aphra Kerr

Morality and Immortality - the games industry under siege

spring_alpha, a multiplayer online game still in development, combines the narrative of building a social utopia with the question of the user’s relationship to the game software. Reviewed by Matthew Fuller

If Public Enemy called Playstations ‘the new plantations’ what do you call a multiplayer game that sets in train a narrative in which an estate boots out the cops, lets the kids decide the fate of the school, in which the sources of food, goods and equipment have to be invented and where money is only good for kindling?

FACT’s recent conference, Situationist Sim City: Critical Video Gaming Conference, June 28, 2004, attempted to analyse how the ‘virtual’ world of games infects and informs ‘real’ life and vice versa. But between the artistic modifications of corporate software which remained too close to their originals and the activist blue-sky games which lacked any tangible results, Mathew Kabatoff found the participants’ approaches fell short of an effective engagement with the genre

> Kristan Lukic and Jelena Klasnja presenting Civilization IV : Age of Empires

For a while now, old, long outdated video game consoles of the 80s such as the Atari 2600 or the Vectrex have been enjoying something of a renaissance. They've found their way into the canon of good taste; a multitude of records and T-shirts are testimony to that. PC emulators for old school games are being introduced everywhere with verve, as if every reviewer has to prove his or her proper socialisation with the holy trinity of Pong, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong.
 
But the nostalgic and sentimental enthusiasm for the cute little games of yore is being played out on another level as well. Strategies are also being developed for saving the endangered artefacts of digital culture.

The Psychosemiotic Intervention of the Computer Game on the Politico-Virtual Model of Post-Communist Net Centric Macro-Sociology.

God games are a genre of video games which position the player as an invisible controller/manager/all-seeing-being of a simulated real-time world. From the early days of pixellated three-quarter view landscapes with tiny bit-mapped creatures running around, to today's slick, beautifully rendered, near-photographic 3D panoramas with convincing creatures and stunning special effects, the task remains the same: to nurture, coerce and assist the inhabitants or bully, maim and generally subject your populace to a lighter shade of Armageddon. The result of your labours is to either bring peace and tranquillity to the kingdom, or throw it into terminal darkness. Grandfather of God games is Peter Molyneux, one of the figureheads of the games world and developer of the soon to be released title Black and White– featuring bells, whistles and a huge creature that you directly control. John Paul Bichard catches up with Peter Molyneux at his Guildford bunker and tries to dig beneath the cranium of the man who would be God.

Tom McCarthy on the recent Converging Stories conference at the ICA

“Yes, oh dear yes, a novel has to tell a story,” wrote the gifted but hopelessly limp-dicked E. M. Forster. But does it really? What story is being told by Finnegans Wake? By Tristram Shandy? Isn't Don Quixote more about a refusal of story, lampooning the very notion that a heroic event-landscape can be smoothly traversed by parading the farcical pratfalls of the protagonist who tries to do so, interrupting itself, undercutting its own authenticity time and again? Narrative was always present in the novel, but the text's relation to it has been, from the outset, complicated, plural, problematic.

Exceeding the minor scale on which it occurred, and somehow moving beyond its host institution’s low-key support, the ICA’s July new media event Radical Entertainment pulled off a small feat of transformation. The season may have explored the modifications of submerged and emerging technologies and the renegade strategies that a specific, dominant gaming culture has induced: both tendencies may also have been shown in the context of the actual and ubiquitously mediated youth market in which this gaming culture thrives. But new media curators Lina Dzuverovic- Russell (now ex-ICA) and Lauren Cornell (of Williamsburg’s Ocularis screening house) managed, ultimately, to make this a festival about something much broader. Not so much a collection of parts as a collection of those parts’ frames, their modes of exhibition.

Buried away in the summer programme of the ICA, the new media show Radical Entertainment represented an ambitious attempt to anthologise recent interdisciplinary work focused on the digital domain. Here, Ian White reviews the exhibition and asks whether our idées fixes about the new media genre – its levels of ludic subversion, its critique of the institution of Art, its interactive nature – aren’t misnomers in the face of the realities of the white cube. Instead, he suggests, we might view these ‘black box’ works as a revitalisation of the legacies of Romanticism

The first person (shooter) video game is an environment seen ‘through the eyes’ of the player character. This projection of the players presence onto/into the game space allows the player to construct and develop an extension of their ego as a negotiator between their physical self and the fantasy space implied by the games constructs.

The resultant character is rarely if ever seen. This 'seer' in some ways acting as a sacrificial other to the player in their journey through the rules and behaviours of the synthesised space.

This skybox is a tranquil haven within which the seer can be rested whilst not in the throws of being sacrificed to satisfy the players ludic whims and desires.

Instructions
1 – cut around skybox
2 – crease tabs and edges
3 – fold box together with image side facing inwards
4 – glue tabs

Only a few years ago, academics and computer games seemed an unlikely combination. Except for the odd psychologist tracing the roots of street violence to children’s bedrooms, Tetris, Doom, Myst and the like were regarded as symptoms of a decaying culture, rather than cultural objects worthy of study. Now, games are no longer the devil’s plaything, but rather a hip new field of research for students of the humanities as well as economists, educationalists and, of course, computer scientists.

Playing with the Future, a conference held at Manchester’s Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, brought together academics from all these disciplines with industry and government representatives. Although the approaches to computer games differed widely in terminology, methods, and findings, one thing was clear: computer games are not just for kids anymore.