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.

When does an action become a gesture?

I’m not so sure how it happened, but while writing my thesis today I somehow ended up arguing that primarily the prevailing visualist approach to understanding the experience of gameplay is in a sense an embodied account, in the wider sense that it pertains to how we experience our lifeworld, i.e. that we primarily think about our interaction with videogames as being about what’s on-screen. Not really sure if it will still make sense to me tomorrow though, not that it does particularly now really. Freaked myself out a bit actually.

Also unexpected, but pleasantly so, was the discovery that my DiGRA 2007 paper Notes Towards a Sense of Embodied Gameplay was used as an optional reading for a MSc (Media Technology and Games) course on Game Culture at IT University of Copenhagen taught by T.L. Taylor. Not that I’m bragging mind, it was just nice to think that my work is being used to teach students at arguably the best university for game studies in Europe.

I’ve used the phrase ‘intentional stance’ a few times in the chapter I’ve been writing, and I wasn’t really sure of where I had gotten it from, or if it was something I had come up with. So i decided to google it, and it seems like it was a lucky thing I did, seeing how its the name of a “theory of mental content proposed by Daniel C. Dennett” according to wikipedia.

Anyway a clarifying footnote later, the actual theory itself piqued my interest, as it seems to have some fleeting resonance with the layered model of the interface I developed in my DiGRA 07 conference paper . The crux of the theory is that things can be explained firstly by anthropomorphising them, in the sense of treating them as a rational agent, and then considering it at different levels of abstraction, from the most concrete physical stance, through the function and purpose orientated design stance, to the titular intentional stance that is concerned with thinking and intent.

Whilst the theory seems, at least from what I can glean from its wikipedia entry, to be concerned with things work, i.e. make predictions, rather than the with the different levels at which we actually interact with things, in the case of my paper, the interface, there is something to the most abstract layer, the intentional stance, which I think may help we elucidate the most abstract level of my model, which I termed the conceptual level for lack of anything more effectively descriptive. Perhaps what I was trying to get at with that layer is that our use of the interface, both in its physical and software manifestations, is not just arbitrary but directed and meaningful at a higher level, that it is intentional. Might be some lucky timing as I will probably need to revisit the paper in my thesis writing sometime soon.

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.

Went to start writing about Ecological Psychology yesterday, only to realise my notes on Gibson’s “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception” were quite brief, missing much of the stuff I wanted to raise about his conception of the environment in terms of ground and medium to put the key concept of affordance into its wider context. Oh and both library copies are on loan until mid-June. Luckily I can start on the later part of the section, with the work of Norman, Gaver and other’s that have used affordances to talk about computers and videogames, but it seems a little backwards.

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

I’ve added a photo of myself to my ‘about’ page. No particular reason for it, I needed a photo for a staff profile on the course I’m teaching blackboard page, so I thought I might as well put it up here as well. It is in sepia tones, but this is more to hide the fact that it was taken using my housemates MacBook Pro under fluorescent lighting, and I looked a bit like a zombie with normal colours.

I’ve just about finished reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, being into the final chapter. Its taken me a while, as I’ve generally been reading it on the train too and from Uni everyday, and the trip itself is usually only about 15-20 minutes or so, so I don’t get through much in a day unless there are delays or cancellations, which are, admittedly, quite frequent. And it is quite a dense book, even the copy editors have missed a few spelling mistakes in the edition I have.

I’ve been wondering if I should move next to Heidegger’s Being and Time, I mean, its only another 550 or so pages of complex, foundational philosophy to read. Despite my reluctance, It did feel quite awkward trying to write about Heidegger in relation to Merleau-Ponty, when I’m only drawing upon Dourish’s briefest of accounts, and a few other mentions of his work in a couple of other texts. There is a book I’ve come across called Phenomenology and Existentialism by Robert Solomon, that seems to be a fairly collection of essays and excerpts on, well, existentialism and phenomenology that I was thinking of ordering from Readings, that includes sections by Heidegger, and also another on Heidegger’s approach to the concept of the tool. Maybe I should put some of those hard earned tutorial dollars to work.