The Psychology of Video Games

 Today I'm spreading the word about a new blog, The Psychology of Video Games, written by Gamer and PhD Psychologist Jamie Madigan. Today's article is about Social Identity Theory and the Psychology of Warfare (see
How Social Identity Theory Predicted the Console Wars of ‘07), but there are a number of other articles up already that I am looking forward to reading.

[Hat Tip 2 Raph Koster's Website]

Darius Kazemi Takes Good Notes

In preparation for the Game Design Concepts class I'm signed up for this summer (taught by Ian Schreiber), I'm doing some reading on the topic. This is from Darius Kazemi's blog: Tiny Subversions, and is an interesting summary of Ian's GDX talk.

Here are my raw session notes for Ian Schreiber's GDX talk, Duchamp, Pollock, Rohrer: Games as the Next Avant-Garde. This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

Game Design Class

How would you like to take a class in game design? Ian Schreiber is offering a class called Game Design Concepts, and it's free [except for the optional books, which are not at all expensive].

[From Game Developers Conference 2009 Speakers] Ian Schreiber has been in the industry for eight years, first as a programmer and then as a game designer. He has worked on five published game titles and two serious game projects. Ian has taught game design and development courses at Ohio University, Columbus State Community College, and Savannah College of Art and Design.

Ian also has a blog: Teaching Game Design.

So I signed up for the class, my books should arrive via Amazon tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to meeting Ian at ORIGINS is summer. Maybe this will help me get some of my game ideas into a form where they could actually be played.

[Found on Applied Game Design]

Fear of Failing

Jesper Juul has a book out, or rather a chapter he wrote which is collected in this book which is coming out soon.

Juul writes:

Winning isn’t everything

It is quite simple: When you play a game, you want to win. Winning makes you happy, losing makes you unhappy. If this seems self-evident, there is nonetheless a contradictory viewpoint, according to which games should be “neither too easy nor too hard”, implying that players also want not to win, at least part of the time. This is a contradiction I will try resolve in what follows.

I read the Fear of Failing article, and recognized his "Snake" game and the accompanying survey. I don't know if was one of his study participants or if I encountered it at some later time, but I recall play this game and completing the survey (some years ago). Now that I'm trying to write about games on my own, it is particularly interesting to have this particular research come back to me in this way.
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But back to the article: Mr. Juul gives an excellent account of the balance between game difficulty and player skill/ability, and that the proper balance is what make a good game. He is writing about video games in particular, but this easily applies to the sort of tabletop games as well.
Before I forget, the image to the right (© 2004 Noah Falstein, reference: Falstein, Noah. 2005. "Understanding Fun—The Theory of Natural Funativity". In Introduction to Game Development, ed. Steve Rabin, 71-98. Boston:Charles River Media.),

Then I got to thinking, and although I still think this applies to tabletop games, is not so simple to describe what is going on you add in the dynamics of human players, either in tabletop games or multiplayer video/computer games. I touched on this briefly when I wrote about The Mathematics of Netrek, and I intend to spend some more time on this in future posts.