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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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  • 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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August 13, 2006

Wilson Quarterly: Playing With Our Minds

The Summer 2006 issue of The Wilson Quarterly includes a long think piece by me on video games.  I was having trouble summing up the article, which includes some discussion of the "serious games" movement, a brief look at the history of video games, and quite a bit of analysis and history of the "games are teachers" argument popularized in Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You. Fortunately, the magazine's editors did the job quite nicely for me on the table of contents: "Video games aren't for adolescent geeks anymore--if they ever were. Now they're powerful teaching tools, for better and for worse."

Although I'm basically sanguine-to-neutral on the long-term effects of video games on society, I'm particularly interested in what people think about my riff on the "for worse" part of the equation. I'll give away part of my conclusion here:

Shorter Wilson Quarterly: "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 (2004), 'what do they teach?' ...

"Whether you find the content of video games inoffensive or grotesque, their structure teaches players that the best course of action is always to accept the system and work to succeed within it. 'Games do not permit innovation,' Koster writes. 'They present a pattern. Innovating out of a pattern is by definition outside the magic circle. You don't get to change the physics of a game.' Nor, when a computer is the referee, do you get to challenge the rules or to argue about their merits. That isn't to say that there aren't ways to innovate from within the system. Gamers are famous for coming up with creative approaches to the problems a game presents. But devising a new, unexpected strategy to succeed under the existing rules isn't the same thing as proposing new rules, new systems, new patterns.

"Our video game brains, trained on success machines, may be undergoing a Mr. Universe workout, one that leaves us stronger but less flexible."

The article isn't online, so head to your newsstand of choice (even in Kansas) and plunk down your $6.95 for the hard copy to read the rest of it.  Alternatively, you could save gas money by mailing the magazine an $8 check.

Recycled video-game stories: The War on Terror's lamest video games; Madden: Sports' new arbiter of cool.

August 13, 2006 at 08:28 PM | | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)