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    January 2013. "Great Expectations": "Here is an incomplete list of the things Ken Levine says have inspired BioShock Infinite: the presidential administration of William McKinley; the Spanish- American war; the blistering pace of technological change in the early 20th century, with the introduction of electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, phonographs, and movies; the 1893 Columbian Exposition at the Chicago World’s Fair; Eugene V. Debs; Emma Goldman; a black-and-white photo of young boys sitting next to a dead horse on a cobblestone street in turn-of-the-century New York; The Music Man; It’s a Wonderful Life; the sequence in Back to the Future when Marty McFly first arrives in the 1955 town square; that scene in The Shining where the two little dead girls appear; Blue Velvet; the chest-bursting scene in Alien; Roman Holiday; the cover of X-Men #141; the sun reflecting off a metal mailbox during a jog on a sunny day; roller coasters; an off-Broadway play called Sleep No More; and a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s 'Songbird' performed on Glee ('It’s so embarrassing that I’m almost tempted to say this has to be off the record,' Levine says)."
  • NewYorker.com
    October 26, 2011. "The Video Game Art of Fumito Ueda": "As video games have become more and more popular, the medium’s defenders have developed a misguided tendency to point to the ways that games are useful, practical, functional. I do not know if Ueda’s games will make you smarter, or improve your vision, or promote world peace. I very much doubt, in fact, that they will do any of those things. Emphasizing the ways that games are tools for instruction—whether intellectual, physical, or moral—is an unfortunate residue of their origins as children’s playthings. Abandoning it will be the sign, maybe the last one, that this new form of storytelling is all grown up."
  • Grantland
    July 7, 2011. "Hard Times on the Paris of the Plains": "The NBA lockout has begun, and 30 cities now fear the same sad prospect this fall: day after day of staring at a lovely arena built for the pleasures of watching grown men play professional basketball, with no actual professional basketball team around to play in it. Twenty-nine of those cities host actual NBA franchises. The 30th is my hometown, the place where I grew up and will always be from, even if I no longer live there."
  • The New York Times Magazine
    September 12, 2010. "War Games": "Unless you regard something like 'Iron Man' as a film about Afghanistan, the movies inspired by America’s contemporary wars have consistently been box-office flops. Even 'The Hurt Locker' grossed only $16 million in theaters. Video games that evoke our current conflicts, on the other hand, are blockbusters — during the past three years, they have become the most popular fictional depictions of America’s current wars."
  • Wired
    February 2010. "Game Changers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes": "The many hundreds — even thousands — of hours that athletes put into videogame football give them more game experience than Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw, or Joe Montana were able to log in previous eras. And there’s the possibility, too, that all this electronic play is changing the structure of their brains, at least in some ways, for the better. For more than 30 years, sports videogames have been focused on simulating real-life athletics more and more perfectly. But over the past decade, games have moved beyond just imitating the action on the field. Now they’re changing it."
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    December 24, 2006. "The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion": "The G.O.P., the party of Richard Nixon's 1968 law-and-order campaign and the Willie Horton commercial, is beginning to embrace the idea that prisoners have not only souls that need saving but also flesh that needs caring for in this world."
  • Wilson Quarterly
    Summer 2006. "Playing With Our Minds": "The important thing to find out about video games isn't whether they are teachers. 'The question is,' as game designer Raph Koster writes in A Theory of Fun for Game Design, 'what do they teach?' "
  • Wired
    December 2005. "To Boldly Go Where No Fan Has Gone Before": On Star Trek New Voyages, Captain Kirk "is a professional Elvis impersonator, with muttonchops and a hornlike pompadour, who lives in nearby Ticonderoga. Spock works at a Virginia videogame store. And McCoy is an Oregon urologist." Chekov? Still Walter Koenig, the actor from the original series.
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  • Slate
    My old stomping grounds. My most recent contributions are a few "Gaming" columns, including an annual, end-of-the-year email dialogue about video games, which I moved to The New York Times in 2012.

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May 23, 2006

Review of Castronova's Synthetic Worlds in the Washington Monthly

My review of Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games is in the June issue of the Washington Monthly. I'm giving away the conclusion here, but I was most intrigued by his chapter on "The Economics of Fun," an analysis of the rules and conditions that make a virtual-world economy fun for its players. Castronova doesn't make this point, but to me, his prescription for a "fun" virtual-world economy sounded an awful lot like the prescriptions for the real-world economy offered by the Bill Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. (Mickey Kaus might be be upset by Castronova's emphasis on the importance of beginning virtual life with economic equality, rather than social equality.)

Shorter Washington Monthly: "Edward Castronova thinks the United States faces a looming emigration crisis. That's right, the problem may be going, not coming, as America's huddled masses yearn to breathe free in a mysterious land somewhere beyond the C drive. Once an unknown economics professor at an obscure university (Cal State Fullerton), Castronova has, over the past few years, become the world's pre-eminent authority--and go-to quote for reporters--on the subject of "virtual worlds," persistent online spaces where thousands of earthlings gather simultaneously. These online worlds, Castronova insists, are a new frontier, a place where millions of people will move and reside permanently. Some of them already do.
...

"Liberals could learn something from the best chapter in Synthetic Worlds: "The Economics of Fun." Drawing upon his experience as a game player and his expertise as an economist, Castronova assembles a list of characteristics that make a virtual world fun. Alongside risk, competition, and acquisition, he lists fairness and equal opportunity. Every new player begins "life" with an identical allotment of abilities and equipment. Inequality quickly surfaces, but players don't mind because they understand that the rules of the game are fair and equitable. "Humans seem to prefer the challenge that inequality represents rather than the security that equality affords--with one very important proviso: everyone's status at the start of the game must be equal," Castronova writes. Of course, video game designers aren't concerned with political ideals; they just want to create a world that's entertaining.

"Perhaps there's 2008 campaign-slogan potential here: It's time to make America fun again. And let's get it done before everyone moves to Norrath."

Recycled virtual-world content: "The Virtual World Gets Real," Wired, August 2005; "Global Gaming Crackdown," Wired, April 2006.

May 23, 2006 at 05:46 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)