Salad Sandwiches, Mods and a Good Chat
Hello All,
Since we didn't meet on Tuesday (did anyone win at the races?), we have fully blogified class. Your last reading for the semester is 2 papers in the back of your reader. They are both on the theme of participatory design. The first is an interesting chapter written by Andrew Glassner on 'Designing for Participation' in games (from his book on Interactive Storytelling). After you've read the chapter, and considered the ideas Andrew puts foward, let me know what you think about:
1) "Imaginative Memory": do you agree that this happens? If so, why do you think a first high-res image stays with the user regardless of other lower-res versions? Why not do all games this way?
2) IC & OOC: In the past, with traditional entertainment like theatre and films, characters are always 'in-character'. With social worlds, as Andrew mentions, players have the dual dialogue of IC and OOC. In conventional entertainment this would be a massive "breaking of the fourth wall" or breaking of the illusion of fiction. Why do you think the dual dialogue is a not a problem in interactive works? Does it break the illusion?
3) "Mods": How important do you think it is to facilitate easy mods of a game?
4) "Player Reputations": many large online producers are moving away from forums and so on because the users become so high-maintenance (their comments need moderating and the users are active long after the show or product has 'ended'). Andrew suggest using 'reputations' to help manage unfriendly users. You've been asked to provide advice to a large producer on how to manage online communities, what do you suggest?
The second reading is a paper by R.Michael Young, who is coming out to Oz for The Second Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. The paper is about the elements that are necessary for a good conversation, and how these should be applied in interactive design. He cites Grice's Maxims of Conversation:
* The Maxim of Quantity
* The Maxim of Quality
* The Maxim of Relation
* The Maxim of Manner
Provide examples of an interactive work (website, videogame...) that breaks any of these maxims. For example: many bots that we've looked at break the maxim of relation because they don't stay on topic.
That is it! Don't forget to go back and add any comments for weeks you've missed.
See ya next week, I look forward to seeing your works!
posted by Blog Newbie @ 6:26 pm
2 comments
2 Comments:
whoa... thats alot to comment on...
here goes...
1) Forms of Imaginative memory I think are very common, an example i can think of is when i first played carmageddon about 8 years ago, I remember thinking how 'amazing' were the graphics. so i think my brain recorded that the carmageddon graphics were the best out. But just a few weeks ago i happened to play the game again, still thinking "yeah, that game had the best graphics ever" and then realised that carmageddon had some of the worst graphics ever. so i don't know if this is for or against Imaginative memory, but it is interesting anyway.
2) When talking about IC & OOC I always think of online gaming, I've played a bit World of Warcraft in my time and these terms have different names, instead they are RP (role playing) and OOC would be referred to as not RPing.
These two things do not take away from the game at all, people mostly know when it is time to talk in or out of character. Each has their time to be used, something’s are not possible in either way so both must be used by all.
i'm not a nerd... :P
3) I like mods, the greatest first person shooter, Counterstrike, would not exist without them.
4) eBay seems to have a good system of feedback, if people "stuff up" then they get negative feedback and therefore find it hard to but or sell anything. This could be used in online forums in the same way, if a lower reputation level person "stuffs up" then a higher reputation person can give them a bad comment and maybe after 10 bad comments from different people that user is banned forever or for a time.
I can't think of an good example of something that breaks any of these maxims, the Blogger website could be an example because I found it confusing from day one, but I know that many other things are guilty of breaking them as well. Weak answer I know.
I'm done...
Thanks for the lessons Christy :)
Hello All,
thanks for putting the time in with these posts. I like reading your thoughts -- it is different to chatting in class.
Good idea Hard Tofu: about the paying to be in a community. I wonder as well, if haying to pay then brings up issues of discrimination (against those who cannot pay) and elitism.
Also, Benaiah, good example of eBay and Blogger for the maxims.
Good stuff, all of you.
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