Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. Nietzsche’s maxim is articulated a bit differently in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, although Gilles Deleuze cast it in this way: “Nietzsche says that three anecdotes are sufficient to define the life of a thinker (PTG)—one for the place, one for the time and one for the element. The anecdote is to life what the aphorism is to thought: something to interpret” (Deleuze 1983, 110). 2. In 2004, MIT Press published First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan), which also saw two sequels, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007) and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009). Three titles of great interest to the exploding game studies curriculum were published in 2005: (1) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman), (2) Handbook of Computer Game Studies (edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein), and (3) Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. In 2006, MIT Press published both Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and T. L. Taylor’s Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Bogost’s ambitious (and highly influential) Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames came out in 2008. Also, the first World of Warcraft reader was among their listings that year, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader (edited by my good friends and one-time fellow PhD students Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg). Along those lines, they also released Michael Nitsche’s Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds in 2008. But 2009 surpassed previous years with MIT Press’s publication of six key books in this field: (1) Miguel Sicart’s The Ethics of Computer Games; (2) Celia Pearce’s Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds; (3) Mary Flanagan’s Critical Play: Radical Game Design; (4) Jesper Juul’s A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players; (5) Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System; and (6) Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Finally, in 2010, we have seen from MIT Press William 166 Notes Bainbridge’s The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World and Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer’s Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Chapter 4 1. Markus Montola defines a pervasive game “as a game that has one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially ” (Montola 2009, 12). In the collection Pervasive Games, however, the focus is on designing game worlds as pervasive spaces, although he does acknowledge that the boundary between the “real and the artificial” is largely blurred in such a way that Huizinga’s notion of the “magic circle” “loses its meaning as a ritualistic separator of ordinary and playful, becoming only a representation of a code of conduct within the game” (Montola 2009, 19). 2. In addition to being a computer programmer, Crowther was also an avid cave surveyor. When he decided to write a computer-based adventure game for his children , setting it in a world of caverns and dungeons was perhaps an obvious choice, especially because Crowther was also a fan of role-playing games such as D&D. 3. In addition to the Essex MUD, there was also one other official MUD1 system in operation in the 1980s. This was the now famous “British Legends,” which ran on CompuServe from 1987 to 1999 when the company’s DECsystem-10 machine on which it ran was finally decommissioned as part of Y2K cleanup efforts (Toth). Thanks to Viktor Toth (aka MrSpock), in 2000, British Legends is still available online and can still be enjoyed by fantasy players with a flair for history. 4. TinyMUD is now available via telnet. do “telnet LANCELOT.AVALON.CS.CMU.EDU 4201” to connect. The game should be reasonable self-explanatory. If you have trouble, use the “gripe” command inside TinyMUD to complain (or if you don’t, use it to let me know what you think). Don’t expect too much out of the parser. Note: It’s ok to build things, the database will (mostly) survive crashes and new program versions. —Jim (Aspnes 1989) 5. One of the things he...