We’ve just had a long weekend down in this part of the world due to public holiday celebrating the birthday of our erstwhile monarch who curiously isn’t even a citizen of our country and lives on the other side of the world, and also has her birthday on a completely different day to the one celebrated. The curious outcome of a constitutional monarchy not yet quite over its colonial roots no doubt.

In any case I had a bit of extra time off, and given that the weather outside was strongly encouraging indoor pursuits, I decided that some extended computer game play sessions were in order. Particularly I finally got around to playing Bethesda’s Oblivion, which I picked up a few months ago but haven’t got around to yet.

I should point out that I played its predecessor Morrowind a lot, both for my own enjoyment, and as I analysed it for my Honours thesis. Needless to say, I am very accustomed to the way Morrowind plays, and the feeling and experience of playing it. I think it is this familiarity that caused Oblivion to feel kind of strange at first – it’s similar enough to Morrowind that I expected the experience of play to be like Morrowind, yet different enough that things kept happening in ways that were unexpected and jarring. This was particularly true of the combat mechanics, gone were the fairly simple tactics at play in Morrowind (do more damage more quickly than your opponent), in were all sorts of being knocked back and around, movement, and timed blocking. And lets not mention the changes to the GUI menus, which have me constantly clicking around looking for things where they ’should’ be.

Though I’ve gotten used to it now, I think these misplaced expectations are a good example of some of the things I’ve been writing about with regards to the importance of familiarity in videogame play. Importantly the expectations I had about Oblivion weren’t some sort of consciously held belief about how the game would play, I just sort of implicitly expected to be able to stand there and belt my opponent with my sword, ala Morrowind.

Speaking of the thesis, I believe my work plan to have it finished some time in August has been approved. Of course this will mean that I’ll remain too busy to post much here, which of course is largely the previous situation for the last 12 months extended anyway.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin has a write up about Ars Electronica which includes amongst other things a short reflection and video of his experience of Julian Oliver’s levelHead.

Julian has also recently released the source code for levelHead, as well as adding a new video of the work in action on selectparks. All of this is good news, as I’m hoping to write about levelHead as part of a chapter on tangible interfaces, but so far haven’t got much to go on. Interestingly, Noah comments that the one thing he struggled with was correcting between the the augmented environment and the tangible environment when tilting the controller-cube backwards and forwards, but otherwise found the cube easy to manipulate effectively.

Actually there’s a couple of cool things on the selectpark blog that i’ve missed over the last few months, particularly a short post on the limitations of a particular kind of computer vision. Might have to set up the RSS tracker I lost when I was given a new computer earlier in the year again.

There’s nothing quite like the prospect of waiting for a delivery to turn up, particularly when you’re given the very convenient window of sometime between 9-5. Given the weather outside its not such a bad thing to stay indoors for a bit longer, hopefully it arrives closer to 9 than 5 though.

I played quite a bit of Assassin’s Creed over the weekend, and I can get why some people have a problem with it – I only completed a couple of missions and there’s really not any variation. However I was quite happy just to leap through the cities, Parkour style, and having epic sword fights anyway.

Interestingly I don’t recall hearing anything about the game’s meta-narrative, so I was quite surprised very early on in the progression of the game when you find out that your avatar isn’t actually a 12th century assassin, but rather his 21st century descendent who being forced to relive his ancestor’s life through the quite Lamarckian notion of genetic memory, so effectively you’re playing a character who is playing a character.

The game manual, set out in part as an instruction manual for using the genetic memory accessing apparatus, the so-called ‘animus’ , even makes reference to this strange twist, stating that the system became much more useful after switching to a videogame style controller set. This is interesting in itself as the control design of the game diverges from the norm in its ‘free running’ mode, where the player has to only hold down two buttons to move rapidly through the environment, scaling walls and leaping gaps, rather than the more usual approach of requiring the player to accurately time these actions.

In a way this approach kind of makes sense within the conceptual context of the game, the player is ’steering’ rather than controlling their character, and as it results in no jumping puzzles I quite like it. Interestingly the game refers to the in game interface that your actual avatar uses as ‘contextual puppeteering controls’, with the four face buttons assigned to the head, each hand, and legs of the avatar. This is interesting in terms of embodiment, however it’s implementation is a little quirky. For instance the weapon hand is assigned to the left most button, even though the avatar wields his weapons with his right hand. Another unrelated quirk is that while playing scenes which revert back to the player’s immediate avatar the game remains in a third person view when perhaps a first person one, effectively what the player is experiencing narratively during the main part of the game, would have made more sense.

In any case its an interesting game because of both the narrative and the control design in terms of embodiment, specifically because of its blending of first and third person perspectives, and in terms of what Hirose describes as embodiment as a process, rather than a static state.

As a result of change with my thesis structure its been a little strange writing this week, going from a 70 odd page monster of a document to a fresh blank page. The new start is coming along well, though I did have some problems getting started with it, mostly due to the difficulty of deciding on what to start with. Looking over the various games I’ll be looking at, and at the themes I want to investigate, it was a little tough to work out how to disentangle the themes from each other, as they tend to overlap considerably. For instance, the notion of the interface is heavily connected with questions of spatiality, whilst there is a similar problem with notions of presence and spatiality. At the moment I’m thinking of using the game I’m writing about at the moment [giantJoystick] by Mary Flanagan as something of a test case, going over it in detail to flag the themes and different permutations of the themes that can then be examined in more details with the other games.

So far this approach seems to be falling into place relatively satisfactory, though I haven’t got as much work done today as I was hoping to due to a series of minor distractions. I had a meeting this morning with the lecturer and other tutors for the course I’m teaching in next semester, which went on for longer than I expected. Then, checking The Age website whilst eating lunch I noticed that they were about to start a live stream of a dissection of a giant squid at Melbourne Museum. Having finished my lunch I thought that it was too good an opportunity to miss seeing a 250kg mystery of the deep being cut apart, I guess I have an unhealthy curiosity in giant cephalopods, luckily I’m not alone.

Boing Boing gadgets has a fairly extensive historical list of ‘exergames’, made more extensive by the commenters.

Apparently the Come Out & Play 08 festival is on this weekend (thanks Boing Boing), focusing on the idea of ‘public play’. It features a bunch of Augmented Reality games amongst its mix, I’m kind of too far from NY to go along to any, but Competitive Picnicking already sounds like a winner with its ’sandwich round’.

My paper, Playing for Keeps: A Game of Marbles and the Materiality of Gameplay has finally been published in Refractory’s special issue on Games and Metamateriality. Thanks to Christian McCrea, Darshana Jayemanne, and Tom Apperley for editing the issue.

I’m particularly interested in reading Eugenie Shinkle’s paper Digital Games and the Anamorphic which discusses the physical and embodied nature of videogame interfaces

Well more accurately a stiff neck anyway. I think I might coin a new medical condition – DS neck! I’ve been wanting to get a Nintendo DS for quite a while, and it hasn’t disappointed, playing Zelda on the train to and from Uni is great. However I made the mistake of introducing my house-mate to Cooking Mama 2, and he’s probably played it at least an hour or two everyday since I got it on Saturday. I was looking forward to taking it online, but unfortunately it doesn’t support the quite ridiculous wireless setup that I have at home which forgoes using a router as a access point in favour of an aptly named ‘ad-hoc’ setting on my PC’s wireless card.

I’ve been doing ok with writing this week. I’ve got the backlog down to slightly more than 3 days worth, so with a bit of luck and effort hopefully I can knock that of by the end of the week. It’ll be interesting to go back through what I’ve been writing for the introduction chapter and see if it makes any sense, I’m a little bit apprehensive given that I had only a fairly loose idea of the progression of the argument in my head before I started, and as a result its probably a little bit unclear. I’ve been able to slot in sections of my DiGRA paper, and they seem to fit pretty well despite needing a bit of revision, which is encouraging – at least I’m still on more or less the same track.

Due to the vagaries of rotating rosters, yesterday was my housemate’s saturday, and, still having our friend’s PS3, he endeavoured to rent a copy of GTA4. Let it simply be said that I didn’t get much sleep last night and it took an extra coffee or two to get going this morning. Thesis writing and videogame auto mobile larceny really don’t mix, I was considering staying at home today to wring the most out of the overnight rental, until I realised that this was in fact a clever ploy to avoid getting out of bed for a few more hours.

The game itself is fairly hard to rate from only about 4 or 5 hours play, particularly when you don’t get the best out of the visual qualities due to your stunningly low quality TV, or having to endure your housemate’s constantly getting lost due to their poor eyesight and hard to read mini-map due to your low quality TV. But i’m just not sure its the giant leap forward suggested by the rave reviews its getting, or that its really that different in character from its predecessors. Its certainly an improvement, and a substantial one at that, over San Andreas, and it seems like the kind of game that requires a substantial exposure to until you start to appreciate it fully. I really have to get around to putting in an entry into Screenplay’s Your Turn competition, where readers submit blog entries, and the best one each month wins a PS3.

Something has gone wrong with my endnote library, every time I try to format the bibliography for my thesis draft I get a “service error: generic”. Apparently, the generic error is just that, one it could be one of many things, but at least I know its generic (hence the blog title). I’ve tried some of the fixes suggested by the Endnote website, and came up with a couple myself, such as importing the library file into a new file, but nothing seems to work. I haven’t dared try the registry editing fix yet, I’m not too sure IT services would like that too much. From the sound of it I need to “check bracket use”, which I’ve done once, so I guess another bracket sweep will have to do.

I’ve been catching up with research this morning, particularly the pile of papers that deal with player experience in one way or another that I haven’t got around to entering into endnote yet. I’m about to start writing about phenomenology and player experience, so it seems like a good place in the thesis to incorporate a lit review of the topic. Well, I just wrote an introductory paragraph so I guess you could say the I’ve already started, if you really wanted to.

update Just found the endnote problem, a single extra space between the author’s name and the @ symbol in the temporary citation place holder thing. I hadn’t noticed it before because it ran from one line to the next. Maybe soon I’ll work out my other problem with Endnote, how to have a conference name term list so I don’t have to write it out for every entry from that conference.

The big question though, will I be able to wrest the TV from my house mate playing our borrowed PS3 for long enough to watch Newstopia tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if he insists that I simply watch it on the internet =).