Polymath

my to-do list

Gotta get this thing done.

- campaign game - rally: 1 hour
- campaign game - speech: 2 hours
- campaign game gfx : 1 hour
- campaign game - debate challenge: 4 hours
- campaign game - interview: 12 hours

20 hours to go.

I must be an idiot.

The debate rages on: Grand Text Auto » Take Back Illinois. It's a political debate, with little discussion about the game itself.

I've tried playing the game, and I have to admit defeat. Before I know it, the game is over and I don't have a clue what I was supposed to do. Clive Thompson at collision detection seems to get it. He writes: "It's incredibly cool, and possibly one of the best political games I've ever seen."

I click on the people. Sometimes I can order them to see a doctor. This has something to do with how close they are to a hospital, but not always. (The menus for making this selection are tiny, and it is easy to click the wrong place. Often, this will select a different person, which is quite annoying.)

ARGH!

Dear Electronic Book Review,

Please make your site usable.

Game Studies

This afternoon my attention was caught by an exchange between Julian Raul Kücklich [particle stream] and Markku Eskelinen. The verbal sniping is amusing, though it pales in comparison to a netnews-era flamewar. What I find interesting about this discussion -- and I have made oblique comments about this on grandtextauto -- is that most of the posturing has an implicit assumption: that game studies has a coherent object and is worth pursuit.

Now certainly there are games, and there are people who study games, and so there is something called game studies. The more polemical of the game studies crew have even coined a Latin-esqe term for the field: Ludology. In the sortie above, Eskelinen argues for a game studies/ludology concerned with rules, goals, and more-than-passive player effort, a hard science positioning which may [or may not] be opposed to the soft science approach of narrative and social science. And this is where the debate perpetually lingers: should we discuss games the soft way (story) or the hard way (rules)?

And I am perpetually wondering why we should talk about games at all.

Political Campaign Games

A recap of this year's political campaign simulation games, in alphabetical order:

• Frontrunner by Lantern Games -- Released: July 30.
• The Political Machine by Brad Wardell, published by StarDock -- Release date: August 2004
• Power Politics 3 by Randy Chase and Kellogg Creek Software -- Released September 1.
• President Forever by 80soft -- Released ?

I'm posting this partly as self-motivation to finish my own campaign game, Political Icon 2004. Right now my to-do list looks like this:

- campaign game - rally: 4 hours
- campaign game - speech: 8 hours
- campaign game gfx : 2 hours
- campaign game - debate challenge: 4 hours
- campaign game - interview: 16 hours

Videogames on the radio

News flash: the 10 September 2004 edition of The World features a segment on videogames, including brief interviews with Gonzalo Frasca and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

There should be an archive of the story posted in the next day or so.