Game theory discussion

[Bionic Bill]

I've been catching up on the recent controversies(which come and quickly go for those who've never seen one here), and I realized I would love to have a board with Las and Helm0r and Scid and Goldmund(despite never actually communicating with him in any way) and Phil and Mostly and many others. As someone who has sort of been around for a while, I know I would like to have a place where I can have tantalizing discussion. This is certainly not because I dislike any newer guys, but only because I really don't know them at all. I'm sure I'd like a bunch of new guys, but I'm very lazy.

Anyways, I'm not really a part of this community at all, so my feelings may be disregarded with extreme prejudice.

One of the main reasons for wanting to get with these guys, besides them being just plain cool, is because I want an outlet for discussion concerning video games as a serious art form. Does anyone know of such a magical place full of intelligent people delving into the potential of interactive narrative and the like? If not, I must make such a place. I am lazy though. Well, okay then. I'll share with you a few places I have been:

joystick101.org is an okay place for some decent articles/discussion. I haven't gotten involved really because discussion is sparse and slow.

insertcredit.com has some amazing articles, especially by Eric-Jon that treat video games as serious art, and tie in things like Japanese literature.

gamecritics.com is okay sometimes, but mostly an average gamezine thing.

Anyone found better? Anyone care? Thanks for listening. Or reading. Whatever.

[Barcik]

I have been searching for such sites lately. Thanks man.

[Las Naranjas]

http://www.sylpher.com/novomestro/blargh.htm


If you want a squizz.

[Bionic Bill]

Thank you Las, 'twas a good read. I'm not certain what a squizz is, but I'm sure it's something Australian. I hope you've played the Shenmue series. If not, you must. Just not the crappy English version of Shenmue 2.

Somehow I forgot one of the better resources: www.gamestudies.org. Quite amazing it be. An intelligent interview with Tim Schafer and everything. They couldn't spell his name for a while though.

I also forgot to ask the question: would anyone be interested in forming some kind of intelligent video game discussion group if none already exists? I need an outlet.

[GarageGothic]

Of course there's always http://www.gamasutra.com (requires free registration). I also recommend looking at the footnotes of other articles, such as the ones in the http://www.gamestudies.org/archive.html often they refer to other online resources.

Some other links from my favorites:

http://brasslantern.org/writers/iftheory/
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/ (lots of off-site links)

As for forming an intelligent video game discussion, I think we're already doing a pretty good job in some of the posts in the adventure related talk and chat forum. But I'm all for a serious discussion of the possibilities of the medium of games. I'm not sure we need another forum, but it would be nice to see discussions at a higher theoretical level (without getting too academic, my head hurts whenever somebody mentions Baudrillard, Derrida or Bordieu) which doesn't run way off topic within ten posts.

Maybe we could have a "topic of the week" discussion, just like the Background Blitzes and other competitions. We could build list of suggestions for topics, and each week, someone would "host" a discussion by writing a short introduction to the subject at hand, outlining different approaches to it and maybe references to what has already been written. Maybe concluding with a provocative statement to get the discussion started. It would be the responsibility of the host to keep the thread on topic.

I think the debate competitions offer a good format for discussions like these, but of course in this case it would be our real opinions, and there would be no time limits to reply.

[Barcik]

I like your idea.   I'm for.

[Hobbes]

I like this idea as well!

As for placing the responsibility of on-topicness to the person currently hosting the discussion: I think this should work. However, strict rules should work here as well. Unless you're going to give a good statement and respond to what has written before, your post will be deleted.

One-liners, monologues and such will be judged unacceptable.

I think that if you follow that guideline, moderating should be a breeze.

[Nostradamus]

Wow Bionic Bill great to see you back!

I miss the old school guys too. You forgot 2ma2, Monkeyspank, Spyros & the rest of GAC, Roy Lazarovic...
If those people would just get back to posting here it would be really fun. But if we open an old school forum this one could be severely damaged and if this happens, there won;'t be many new AGS games and that would be against everybody's interests right?

[Goldmund]

Aye, Bill, I failed to get in touch with you once we were active members.
I'm all for game theory discussion, although I must say that I miss some PRESCRIPTIVE discussions rather than DESCRIPTIVE, mainly because I wrote what I could on the latter in my thesis.
Let's start rolling with the thing - after I'm back from Mittens, that is.

[MrColossal]

lots and lots of game theory has been shooting about my little head lately. I've been thinking about writting it down...

The only reason I don't write it here is that I've been looking for serious discussion and these forums have a habit of going silly, that and there are a lot of people here and trying to read and comment on EVERYONE's comments is neigh-impossible

this is not a jab at the forums or "TEH CURR3NT STATE UV NOOWBIEES!"

[Bionic Bill]

Good to see people interested. I figure we(or I) should get on this post-Mittens. I'm thinking of starting some kind of art/gaming site, but I'm going to need to figure out how much time that would take from me. Forming something separate from AGS seems like a good idea in that it makes way for more in depth conversation, I think. But that also might mean taking the discussion away from people who are actually making games, and result in a bunch of people who sit on their arses and theorize, like me. Well, anyways. I will ponder for a little while.

[Helm]

I think I'll participate when this is on.

[Captain Mostly]

I think this sounds nice.
Although I think it would
get VERY pretentious
very quickly, which I can
find puts me off this sort
of thing a bit.
I just take issue with
the idea of "games as art"

[Trapezoid]

Yeah, I'm a bigger advocate of "games as entertainment but not necessarily mindless entertainment" ... Discussion about art can get a little meaningless in all the pretensious pseudo-mumbo-jumbo... Art is a given, it's easy to create it, but entertainment is a side-effect of art, and how to make something entertaining is a real issue. Things like the atmosphere, flow, etc are what make adventure games worthwhile.

[Bionic Bill]

Yay for more responses.

I don't know about my take on art v. entertainment in video games. Maybe that could be a discussion topic. As soon as we could get moving graphics on screen, we recreated ping pong. Ping pong has very few artistic qualities, in my opinion.

I think my bone to pick with the present state of video games is that literature and film both have works aimed at entertainment primarily. They also have works aimed at other things, greater points, identifiable complex characters, strong aesthetics and the like. As a by-product, these works may be entertaining. It seems to me that video games have only the entertaining. Most of the deepest and intelligent video games would barely rise above pulp fiction if they were literature.

Mayhaps I am pretentious. Mayhaps what I associate with "art" is just a different kind of entertainment. A lot of the game theory discussion that's occurred on this board through the years has centered around puzzle design, which makes sense, what with puzzles being the main interaction and conflict in adventure games. I would like to be able to ask questions about why we throw obstacles in front of our players. Do they further the plot? Develop characters? Flesh-out a theme? Get in people's way?

I would love for one of the discussions to be about the short-comings of the adventure game genre as a whole, and(here's the prescriptive part for goldmund) what can be done to change that. Well, I shall stop typing now because otherwise I, uh, won't stop typing.

[MrColossal]

well for what i feel is a nice essay on what's wrong with adventures read the link in my signature from the 'erik' it leads to an old man murray article

it offers no solutions but that's not the point of the essay

[Captain Mostly]

There's clearly pleanty of high-brow hoo-har-ing that could fill this speculative new forum...

[Nellie]

Why would we need (or want) a new forum for this sort of discussion?  Surely this would fit perfectly into Adventure Related Talk?

One of the main complaints about the AGS forums during the many 'the forums are going downhill' threads in the past was the lack of intelligent discussion here.  And now we want to move intelligent discussion about adventure games into a seperate forum entirely?

As for it being an oldbie-only forum, I think that would be a seriously bad idea, for both oldbies and newbies.

I remember when I was a newbie on the ezboard forums.  I had my own ideas about the nature of adventure games that I was eager to contribute.  I was seeing opinions that challenged my ideas, and forced me to re-evaluate or reinforce them.  I learned a lot from the many other voices in those debates, and when my point of view was complimented by an oldbie, it was a big thrill for me.  I would hate to deny current and future newbies the same opportunity because us oldbies had all gone off to our own, exclusive, serious discussion forum.

As an oldbie, I have even more reservations.  Though I'm attracted to the idea of an oldbie-only forum for general discussion, when it comes to serious discussion about adventure games this is absolutely the last thing I want to see.  I want a mix of oldbie/newbie opinion.  I want the long-considered view of adventure games equally as much as the fresh newly-thought-out view.  I want to know if a newbie has ideas that might jolt me out of my comfortably-settled opinions, because their take on things might be something I've never heard before.  I want to see the enthusiasm about adventure theory that I showed myself when I was a newbie.  And, last but not least, I want newbies to be encouraged and challenged in their thoughts because us oldbies are there to respond, as oldbies were there for me two and a half years ago.

Do we want this forum to be oldbie-only because we believe it will improve the discussions, or because we just want to talk to people that we know already?  If it's the latter, lets just make an Oldbie General Discussion forum somewhere and be done with it.  I strongly believe that to exclude newbies from serious discussion about adventure games is to remove a major source of stimulation and ideas from those discussions.

If we're going to discuss adventure games, lets do it in the forum we have right here, which was made for that very purpose.  We will restore the much-lamented intelligent discussion to these forums, to the benefit of both set-in-our-ways oldbies, and wet-behind-the-ears newbies.

[Captain Mostly]

No, if we tried to have these discussions here, they wouldn't work as they'd go off topic imediatly. Not to mention the fact that people would keep asking the same questions over and over again, and instead of getting sick of "WHAT'S THE BEST ADVENTURE GAME EVER!" threads, we'd all get sick of "WHAT DIRECTION SHOULD GAMES GO IN" threads.

The forums we have are invaluable, and provide an incredible and brilliant hub for AGS, but trying to use the areas provided already for any reasoned and progressing debate on ANYTHING wouldn't work.

At the very least, having a seperate area for this kind of discussion would provide a psycological distinction between the hap-hazard world of AGS general and the new forum. Ok, so making it oldbie only wouldn't work, as you've got to make a cut off point for who's new and who's old, but Adventure Related Talk could never play host to it.

In fact, a totally open forum couldn't be used for this, as Bionic Bill suggested he wanted us to get more proscriptive on each other's asses, and in the general forum (or anywhere we've got so far) this would be construed as "bad blood" and people would start having to apologise for getting heated about something. And that would be amazingly dull.


EDIT: Hang on, DID BB ask for proscription? Maybe I imagined it. But the point still stands that while we're not able to get into genuinly passionate disagreements over what we should do to make things better, any discussion on games theory would be boring and utterly pointless... Like pure maths.

[Hobbes]

We could use the forums I use for my game. It's not visited anyhow, so I could make a seperate area there which only specific people could enter...

...however, I would love to see this discussion to take place here. I think intelligent discussion can actually happen here, as long as people stick to the rules, think about what they write and not simply post gibberish.

"Gibberish."

Oops.