On this episode of Spark: Games, Games, Games! We take a look at how games affect our culture, our time, and our lives.
Click below to listen to the whole show, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:00 — 24.8MB)
You can also listen to individual stories below.
Reward for Repetition
World of Warcraft is an on-line multi-player role-playing game. It can suck up a lot of your time, but it’s also a place where people make friendships and connections. And then there’s the “grinding”. Now, take your mind out of the gutter, “grinding” in WoW refers to repetitive tasks that are done to increase your character’s power in the game. Or, something like that. To find out, Nora spoke with Michelle Hoyle, a cybertechnologist & educator at the Open University (UK), and an avid WoW player. Michelle’s PhD research (with the School of Informatics at The University of Sussex) is in looking at WoW as a learning environment, so we went to her first to find out why some games are such a grind. (Runs 7:59)
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Games and Girls
When it comes to games in the 21st C, we still haven’t come that long a way, baby. Women are still underrepresented in the gaming community – both as players and as designers. Nora spoke with Jennifer Jenson, a game designer and a Professor at York University in Toronto. She recently completed a 3-year study of gender and digital gameplay. (Runs 12:11)
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- Jennifer Jenson
- 3G Summitt – The Future of Girls, Gaming, and Gender
- Full uncut version of interview with Jennifer Jenson
Games as Art
One of the biggest debates about gaming is: can a video game be a piece of art? Earlier this year, film reviewer Roger Ebert got himself a lot of attention when he pronounced that video games can never be art. But some people in Canada’s thriving indie game scene beg to differ. Jim Munroe is an indie game community organizer and game developer in Toronto. And Mare Sheppard is a game developer from Toronto, who currently lives in Tokyo. She’s also the co-creator of “N.” (Runs 7:26)
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- Download “N” here
- Jim Munroe’s blog
- The Hand Eye Society
- Roger Ebert – Video Games Can Never Be Art
- Music in the piece from Osmos
The Gamification of Our Lives
As gaming evolves in both theory and practice, a fascinating new trend is emerging. Now more than ever we are seeing the real world and game experiences combined. It’s The Game of Life – for real this time. Games have proven to be powerful motivators in influencing the choices we as humans make. Something in video games seems to touch a primal need in our psyche to achieve. Nora spoke with Seth Priebatsch, the “Chief Ninja” at Scvngr – a gaming company that is building a network that intertwines real world experiences with game dynamics. (Runs 9:09)
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Putting the Fun Back in Games
So we’ve heard a lot about intertwining our real lives with game mechanics, and how sometimes games give us tasks that are repetitive, boring, and suck time like there’s no tomorrow. Dan Hon has another request: keep gaming fun. Dan is a senior member of Wieden + Kennedy’s creative team where he specializes in games, play, and new ways of storytelling. Dan’s concern is that pretty soon everything from brushing your teeth to filling out your income tax return will be an opportunity to score. This could make gaming about the grinding chore of collecting points instead of true enjoyment. (Runs 8:00)
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If you haven't seen it already, Health Month is a game I've been playing for a couple of months now which gives you points for making small changes to habits in your life The goal is that by making small, repeated changes, you'll eventually form good habits that help you live a healthier life.
An excellent example of using game mechanics to do something good and motivate yourself (and others) to live healthily: http://healthmonth.com/
Cool! I've been doing some 'self-monitoring', and I find the ability to get feedback about how I'm progressing towards my goals is really effective.
I found the discussion with Jennifer Jenson interesting, and have this to say in reply. Where does it state that gaming needs to be gender balanced? Just because we have 45% men and 55% women on the planet, why does our gaming have to be equally divided? Where is it written?
What's wrong with having a natural imbalance in gaming? I don't see Mattel rushing out to develop a special doll so that boys will start playing with Barbie. Honestly, can you see a single boy, aged eight, sitting down with four other eight year old girls to play Barbie? Mattel accepts that boys are not very much interested in playing with dolls, and focuses their R&D money on products boys like. So why not accept that boys/men will always be gamers and girls/women not so much?
Hi Dave,
Thanks for your comments. I asked Jennifer why she thought it mattered if girls and women weren't playing games, actually. Her argument is basically that games are more than just an isolated activity that a person chooses to participate in or not. They're a dominant cultural industry, one that governments are investing in as a source of jobs, and a tool for networking. If girls & women are not active in those spaces, they're not participating in a major cultural and economic engine.
Companies like Mattel do hit the "doll" market for men by calling these Barbies "action figures". I am a female gamer who does wonder where the other Samuses are. I love playing as Link and Mario, but I would love to have some more choices, not just in gender, but going beyond the typical hero. There is SO much room for the exploration of playable characters (including the female variety) and types of game play they might involve. And that doesn't mean I don't love playing my Unreal Tournament, it just means that I'm ready for more!
Don't you hate it when you miss an error and can't edit it. That should be written by women. .. for women to read. Made by men. . . for men to play. Again that is the stereotypical and cultural presumption not necessarily the reality.
Also for a program about a male dominated genre I found it strange that the majority of your guests were women. Would it have been too much to invite a single actual male gamer to your show on video games, someone if a wide variety of experience (beyond just wow) both in the games he played and the people he interacted with? Someone to give practical perspective to the whole intellectual conversation?
Hello, David. By my count, it's a pretty even male/female guest split.
Female guests: Michelle Hoyle, Jennifer Jenson, Mare Sheppard
Male guests: Jim Munroe, Seth Priebatsch, Dan Hon
How about this for a podcast game: you get one point for every guest sentence that starts with, "So…". You'd have almost 50 points from the latest episode alone!
I suspect that most non-gamers, like me, found the problem of "grinding" and the "so what factor" to be self-evident around the time those Italian plumbers first showed up.
Thanks for this spark episode, which covered several issues in my present situation. I'm retired and in late summer started playing a diabolically addictive and rather unique video game, foldit, constructed by University of Washington (Seattle WA) researchers to get thousands of gamers to help them achieve minimal energy configurations for polypeptides (Maclean's Magazine recently quoted one of the UW types as suggested that might help humanity achieve eternal life!) http://fold.it/portal/
A couple of weeks ago I joined foldit's #3 "group" and yesterday they helped me grind out 37th place in the most recent "puzzle" which now places me at 127th in the game. You have no idea how motivating that is, with support from leading "folders" from the group that include an edgy New Zealander, a young teenager from the US mid-west who's a self-confessed proud "aspie," a very nice lady who runs a web design business in Block Island RI and even a fellow Nova Scotian from New Waterford.
Foldit is a peculiar combination of bulling through amazingly obscure documentation and baffling game play to "rise to the next level," and being in on the ground floor of what might conceivably evolve into a new medical technology. Although the majority of players fall into the typical young adult male mold the top overall folder is female and the diversity is quite remarkable. Although all the players are amateurs foldit is now running its first money-prize competition (for US & UK university-based teams) and this game may become much like that work-as-game model guest Seth was alluding to.
I was at a conferance a short while ago and one of the vendors took us on a tour of their plant. Part of which was their research and development lab. It was related to us during this stop, with a demonstration, of some of their cutting edge next generation product.
The company and their existing boffins, (not often you get to use that one) had realised several years ago, that if they were to remain competative and attempt to make that leap from a second tier company to first, they were going have change how things were done.
They did. By hiring game designers to write the software. I can't relate which industry this is but once this gets approval from the authorites having jurisdiction it will shake up the industry they are in.
I think we all did a head shake when we told this info. And Canadian company too boot!!
A very nice show, but since the interviews are so short, they make the subject matter sound oversimplified and even silly for nongamers. I realize that this is the format of Spark, but I would really love to hear a show about the gaming community, there is so much to say, I could talk for hours about various social aspects in online gaming: not only networking but everything from politics to racism. Also there is always the aspect of how it relates to real life, the argument of addiction… I mean, there was more than one report in the media about people DIEING after playing non stop for days… So, is there a show on CBC radio that would be interested in this subject more extensively than 9 minutes?
Thank you for the full interview with Jennifer Jenson though.