Recently I took on a project that required, among other things, a brief summary of the state of mobile gaming. My conclusion, in a nutshell, was that we need a lot more “1 Button Games.” The average cellphone has fifteen buttons that event handlers can be attached to. That means that, at most, a cellphone game could use fourteen buttons too many.

Feel free to correct me if you feel I am wrong, but the principle method through which people interface with their cellphones is by holding the device in their hand while pushing buttons with their thumb. So when a game requires me to hold my phone alá a circa 1987 Gameboy, the game is going against the dominant interface method.

Now if I choose to hold a non-qwerty phone as I would an ‘87 Gameboy, it becomes obvious that I am doing something other than normal non-speaking cellphone actions. This doesn’t really bug me when I’m on the light rail or killing time elsewhere, but there are times when I want to play a game and I don’t want it to be obvious that I am playing a game.

For example:

I was sitting in on an hour long conference call last week and really only needed to be present for five minutes. The only problem is, we had no idea when that agenda item was going to be called upon. Now as is typical these days, everyone in the room was only half there anyway as they were listening, speaking when they needed to, and replying to emails via Blackberry the rest of the time. I’m still attached to my Nokia 6682 until I get my Neo 1973, so while I had checked my e-mail, I wasn’t really interested in replying via predictive text.

Even though everyone’s presence in the room was very distributed, it would have been rude to obviously be playing a game…this doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be rude to be playing game period. Holding my phone in the Gameboy position, would have been being obvious about it and there isn’t another good was to go about playing a game that relies on repetitive use of the 4 & 6 (or similarly mapped) keys.

While a control scheme featuring two buttons typically requires me to hold my cellphone in an obvious manner, schemes that require more than two buttons are simply annoying. One game I was looking at used four buttons (2, 4, 6, 8). The keys on most cellphones are so close together that this becomes uncomfortably. The 4 & 6 were my home keys, and I used my right thumb to press the 2 & 8 when needed. The annoying part was that in order to push the 2 or 8, I had to shift my left thumb off the 4 in order to make room for the left thumb. Note to developers: close proximity of keys is an affordance of mobile devices, not a design flaw that someone is going to get around to fixing.

This brings me to the virtues of the 1 button game. First of all, I’m not referring to a game featuring a single event handler. The vast majority of cellphones now feature an multi-directional button or analog thumb stick, which provides you with four orthogonal directions and a fire/action button. Perhaps it will be ironic to some, but this is the same input schema that was available to every Atari 2600 game that used a joystick so don’t tell me that a game needs more than that to be successful. Incidentally, the best games I found in my survey were ports of early arcade / 2600 games. That’s right, the best games available to the mobile platform today are 25-30 years old.

All in all I’m not making explicit reference to casual games, I am just asking for more games that I can play casually in terms of time and interface with the device….and I don’t like BeJeweled. So someone needs to make that epic 5-10 hour mobile game that can be meaningfully played in 5 minute blocks and only requires the use of the multi-d button / thumbstick.

I’d love to have a counter-point on this one, so calling all cars.

Well I’m on the fence about adding this one to the avant game list, but I do find it pretty damn amusing.

What is Faceball?
At its simplest level Faceball involves two people hitting beachballs at each other’s faces. At a deeper level it’s a vehicle for the release of personal animosity, and the Shaming of the Weak.

The word of the street is that Faceball was invented by the staff over at Flickr. Check it out here, flickr photos here, and vimeo videos here.

invisible rope. gg.

Markus Montola, who might well be described as the Godfather of European Pervasive Appropriative Games, had a few kind words for my thesis Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.).

Other than the fact that the curse of Dakota Fanning has struck again (he refers to me as a she), Markus raised a few points of contention that I would like to address. Unfortunately, Markus’ website doesn’t allow for comments so I’ll address his concerns here.

Of course I disagree with many things presented in here. One of them is the classification of appropriative games to big, ubiquitous and pervasive games. I agree with the argument that we need to classify these things into more elaborate sub-groups, but I don’t agree with the division made here; Brown’s categories basically boil down to “no tech”, “user-owned tech” and “game operator provided tech”. The distinction is useful, but not sufficient as a genre classification.

The speed at which one can be bogged down while discussing genre is amazing, so I will keep this a brief and as to the point as possible. A genre is simply a category of composition belonging to a greater taxonomy. In constructing my genre system, I tried to answer two questions:

1. What do these games do?
2. How do they go about doing that?

These games erect a representational layer of play over existing space without significantly altering the physicality of that space. Everything one might layer on top of this (real vs. virtual space, 1 player vs. many players, etc), are really well-passed the core of the experience. These games appropriate space and then relinquish it physically unaffected by the gameplay.

This “representational layer of play” is either constructed through computation or non-computational means. I choose the term big games to represent the non-computational ones. I’ll admit that this term isn’t optimal, but this application reflects the rhetoric of its popular usage. The non-computational games big games received the least amount of attention in my treatment, and really do warrant a greater investigation.

I devoted most of my efforts to the games that constructed their “representational layers of play” computationally. For a starting point, I relied greatly on Jane McGonigal’s This Might Be A Game. I became fairly invested in looking at how game theorists on the humanities side of things viewed the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” versus how game theorists / computer scientists viewed the terms. I’m not going summarize that section here, but it did allow to me arrive at what I think is a valuable distinction.

Pervasive games are games that rely upon computational technology that has already been dispersed through the appropriated environment. On the other hand, ubiquitous game rely upon computational technology that must first be introduced to said environment.

Not to be short, but reducing this distinction to “user-owned” and “operator-provided” completely disavows the historical computational context through which the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” were derived. I find that a lot of work done in this field relies too heavily on convenient adjectives and verbs. Definitions constructed in this manner often make great sound bites & blog posts, but fall apart under the slightest of theoretical scrutiny.

Which leads me to:

P.S. On page 49 Brown sees some unintended implications in my model of pervasive game: In fact I tried to express pretty much the same stuff she writes here. I suppose this is an unfortunate side effects of metaphorical models: They inspire creative readings.

I can’t blame Montola for calling me out here. The first part of my agenda was to call out and debug a few of the popular metaphoric models. It isn’t so much that I disagree with Markus as much as I disagree with several conclusions I have seen that drew upon his work in question.

Unfortunately, the second part of my agenda had to be cut from the thesis. It just wasn’t going to be ready. I’m hoping to be able to address it soon (I really need to finish Ian’s Persuasive Games first). Ian argues:

…that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. [He calls] this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.

I believe that appropriative games operate similarly, but distinctively differently due to the confusion in regards to the magic circle we are referring to. I refer to this new form as “procedural dialectic,” and will be expounding about it further in the future.

So…comments?

A few days ago Julian at selectparks mused that Little Big Planet might make him want to buy a PS3. Well now I have my, “Doh, I might have to buy something from Sony” moment.

Echochrome appears to be a gem of a game heading to PSP & PS3 download. The gameplay appears to be fairly simple. You navigate a drawing-model-doll through MC Esher-esque puzzles by rotating the puzzle and warping the perspective.

Sony introduced Echochrome at E3 by calling it “possibly the least graphics and most gameplay of any title you are going to see this week.”

I love it.

Wow. Brilliant. Does anyone know whose work this is? The concept is just beautiful. I’ve placed an email to Whydoesshelovethemoon@gmail.com in hopes of finding out. Also, no chatter yet over at the ufiction forums. So I really have no idea whether this is one-shot art or part of a larger campaign.

Via Stencil Archive:

“She Loves the Moon” is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spray painted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

It’s a love story involving two characters who start in different locations. His story starts at 16th and Valencia, in front of the Crown Hotel / Limon Restaurant with the text “He Leaves his Lonely Apartment.” Her story starts at 21st and Guerrero in front of a Victorian mansion with the text, “She Leaves her Lonely Apartment.” Eventually their paths merge in front of Tartine Cafe at 18th and Guerrero, where they meet, and their paths travel together until relationship drama pulls them apart. Eventually their paths remerge, at which point there are two possible endings, happy and tragic, and two other points where the story can end unexpectedly if the viewer chooses the wrong ending. All in all, there are 4 possible endings.

Stencil Stories: She Loves the Moon has been added to the Avant Game List.

Two more links for you:
Doej15’s Flickr Photo’s
Stencil Story @ New York Magazine

Thanks for the link Al.

As much as I ‘d like to believe otherwise, it isn’t possible to make regular updates to the Avant Game List if I insist on review each game before I post it. So the new policy is going to be post now, review later.

So, via selectparks:

Neil Hennsessy’s Basho’s Frogger is a is a ludic response to Canadian poet Derek Beaulieu’s translation of the works of Matsuo Bashō; the most famous poet of Edo period Japan and master of the brief and clear haiku.

I wish I knew more about this piece- particularly which haiku inspired it. Honestly this feels like a piece out of Ian’s Games-in-Translation class at Georgia Tech and is very similar to Jeff Crouse’s Laüstic (which I need to see if he has a playable web version of).

Basho’s Frogger has been added to the Avant Game List.

Ian Bogost’s new book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames hit shelves today. Here’s the MIT Press description:

Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric’s unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.

Bogost calls this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education. Bogost is both an academic researcher and a videogame designer, and Persuasive Games reflects both theoretical and game-design goals.

Personally, I’ve been waiting to dive into this one. I’ve been sold on the concept of “procedural rhetoric” for a long time now. I’m just hoping that I can use Ian’s framework to finally get my “procedural dialectic” argument off the ground…since I really don’t have time to go out and get a classics degree at the moment.

Link-a-roos

• MIT Press
• Buy it @ Amazon
• Buy it from Ian’s site

It looks we have another mass-market ARG states side. Over the weekend, a JJ Abrams / Bad Robot branded trailer ran with the new Transformers movie. The cover name of the project is “Cloverfield,” but that is most certainly not the film’s name. The trailer follows a group of party-goers around New York (cinema verite-style) until a bunch of explosions start tearing apart the city. There is a growing vibe that this game is to promote a HP Lovecraft-based project.

So far we have a few sites (in-game & commentary):

• Ethan Haas Was Right
• Ethan Hass Was Wrong
• 1-18-08
• Ain’t It Cool News
• Joystiq
• Cinematical
• Ufiction Forums

Fun stuff so far. I hope Abrams takes this to the level of The Lost Expirience and we get some significant real-world cross-over. If you get through the material (find spoilers somewhere else lazy ones), you’ll learn that August 1st is a big day. Interesting.

I’ve been asked a few times now, “What is a good indication that something is an appropriative game?” In the past I’ve used a few different answers but after listening to a recent NPR report on Parkour, I think I’ve settled on the perfect sound bite: If the game pisses people off and makes them say something like, “Hey! You can’t do that here!” there is a good chance you are playing an appropriative game. Unlike other games, the primary friction between an appropriate game and the rest of the world isn’t a discussion of content. It is a discussion of location and Parkour is a perfect example of that.

Via Wikipedia:

The cultural phenomenon Parkour is a physical activity which is difficult to categorize. It is not an extreme sport, but an art or discipline that resembles self-defense in the martial arts. According to the founder David Belle, the spirit of Parkour is guided in part by the notions of “escape” and “reach,” that is, the idea of using quick thinking with dexterity to get out of difficult situations. You want to move in such a way, with any movement, that will help you gain the most ground on someone/something as if escaping from it, or chasing toward it. Thus, when faced with a hostile confrontation with a person, one will be able to speak, fight, or flee. As martial arts are a form of training for the fight, Parkour is a form of training for the flight. Because of its difficulty to categorize, it is often said that Parkour is in its own category: “Parkour is Parkour.”

Parkour has been added to the Avant Game List.

Bonus: A David Belle BBC Commerical: