The Art of Interaction
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Is the illusion of player agency as good as real player agency? Isn’t a video game just a simulated game master? Is the Chinese Room a good game? If the author is dead, what about the algorithm?
The music for this episode is “The Acorns. Seedin Time in The Oak Room.” by Loveshadow, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.
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Difficulty and completeness: Why do games have to be hard, and how is finishing a game separate from completing it?
The music for this episode is “Big Bad World One” by Jonathan Coulton, and is available under a cc by-nc-sa 2.5 license.
This episode, unlike most, is available under a cc by-nc-sa 2.5 license.
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The next episode will be about the length of games and how that relates to game classification. Is there a distinction between an interactive “short story” and an interactive “novel”? If you have comments or ideas, contact me at gregory@ludusnovus.net.
Variable player experience: What do we mean by interaction, and how can two players have different experiences with the same work?
The music for this episode is Enrique Granados’s “Spanish Dance n. 2” performed by Mario Mattioli, and is available under a cc by-nc 2.5 license.
This is the first episode in which I’ve talked much about table-top roleplaying games.
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(Note: I’m going to start putting the titles of IF pieces from the IF Comp in quotes, as that competition is intended for short works, so participants presumably intended their pieces to be analogous to short stories.)
This past week I took a trip down to Indianapolis with a friend to attend Gen Con Indy 2006. I was scheduled to run four events, but I only ended up running three of them (people who’d registered for one of them didn’t show). Now, I haven’t talked about roleplaying much (if at all) on the show, but I think that tabletop and other roleplaying games fit in with digital games quite well. In my opinion, they’re the same form of expression, one that has a hundred names, all lacking, that I call “interactive art” (note that this term is also lacking, as it’s also used to refer to a form of expression that may be unrelated).
Anyway, I found time to see a lot of cool stuff at the convention.
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