GDC day one
I didn’t take notes, and I was also in and out of the tutorial on “Social dimensions of digital games.” This will perforce be brief.
“Games are to computers as birds are to dinosaurs.” – Julian Dibbell. Discuss.
He also made the case that even Huizinga thought the magic circle was not sacred, and indeed should be broken, and that the issue isn’t that work is crossing into our games, but rather that play is taking over our entire economic system. This led to this question being raised:
“What do we do when money trumps skill, time, everything?” – Heather Kelley. Discuss.
A plaintive question from the audience:
“The tutorial title says ‘social dimensions of digital games.’ Why have we talked about MMOs for seven hours, when all sorts of games have social dimensions?” – David Shaw. Discuss.
Oh, and I met Patrick Dugan. 🙂
“What do we do when time trumps money, skill, everything?”
I dunno, but the DIKU-derived MMOs are doing pretty well!
–matt
“Games are to computers as birds are to dinosaurs.” – Julian Dibbell. Discuss!
Alright, I can’t remember who wrote it but whoever it was wrote that the only legimate use of a computer is to run simulations, all the other things word processing, spreadsheets and the web are all nothing more than happy side-effects.
So the question now in my mind becomes are Computer Games more like Simulations or more like non-Computer Games. You could play a game of Doom (or whatever the cool kids play) in your backyard but it wouldn’t be the same but I suppose it would definately be possible to play a game of Civilisation on paper if you had the time. So the Computer Game isn’t really dependent on there being a computer.
However I suspose that a Game is a Simulation of some system, be it economic or social interaction. And most Computer Games are too complex to be run without a computer keeping score, and keeping the whole system in a coherent state.
Hmm, going back the quotation, if it’s saying that Games are evolved Computers then it’s obvious false, though I don’t think that’s what was meant, only that you shouldn’t be thinking about the computer when you have the game.
Conclusion: You need a computer if you want to simulate a complex system in a short time. Games shouldn’t have to be complex to play but might be to run. Therefore you might need a computer.
Apologies: Stream of conciousness is the natural writing voice of the Irishman, and I have trouble making any of it make sense if I edit on the fly.
1, Julian is crazy. This has been proven. This is grounds to listen to him. =P
2, I’d offer up that his quote refers not to direct evolution, but well… think about this: how much do birds and dinosaurs really have in common? I don’t know if he’s referencing Jurassic Park here, but the dinosaur to bird theory isn’t reliable, really.
3, Instead, maybe he’s suggesting that they could have the same roots, but go in a completely unexpected direction? Like, say, feathers?
“What do we do when money trumps skill, time, everything?”
Money is supposed to be the ultimate metric of economic decision making. It’s not. What you do is you create a market schism. If game design is art, then you need to recognize that some art is meant to make money, and some art is designed to do… other stuff…
And you have the UN create little RFID tags for every human being and use those to log in so you don’t need to use passwords anymore and you can’t buy and sell characters. =P The scary part, for me, is I thought up a dozen loopholes and workarounds and obstacles to that in the minute after I wrote it.
How is this even possible? We’ve all laughed at that IBM commercial with the Medieval knights asking “are you suggesting we throw money at the problem?” Money is an enabler and the boundary maker, not the solution and process unto itself.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding though. Is Heather wondering what we do when someone says “this must cost us $200,000 at most and that’s final”? If so, then the way I see it, that again just frames the boundaries. Instead of building from scratch, you find some tools and references and build/emulate/innovate from there.
Resources are a constraint unless the project has truly no planned ship date. How many people are that lucky? 🙂
Sorry, I should have provided more context. Heather is wondering what we do in game design when the magic circle is completely permeable, which was a common theme in the session. Julian argued that the inside of the magic circle is coming out to invade all of life; the social scientists pretty much all argued that it was illusory anyway, that the social dimension of games has always crossed the circle as if it weren’t there.