Game Culture: Under The Mask 2008

Slide 2: I work for Pixel-Lab

Slide 3: Sometimes write for this

Slide 4: Level design for this

Slide 5: Involved with this

Slide 6: previously this

Slide 7: and this. Nearly gave up in games in 2004 because...

Slide 8: bored of this

Slide 9: and this

Slide 10: but this stopped me.

Slide 11: Lots of interesting games, just needed to look for them.

Slide 15: People assume games are this.

Slide 16: For these

Slide 17: these

Slide 18: these

Slide 19: these

Slide 20: these

Slide 21: and these

Slide 23: Games originally a family thing - only one TV in the house when the Magnavox launched

Slide 24: "In 1982, 40% of Americans said they'd played a game in the previous week. Then came the punch- kick-fight games like Mortal Kombat which were massively successful. They were so successful amongst this pimple-faced eighteen year old demographic who were spending so much money on those games, that it obscured the fact that the violence lost the women and the complexity lost the casual gamer. The economics of the marketplace didn't shrink, but the population plummeted from over 100m people to less than 15. And we're just recovering from that." - Nolan Bushnell

Slide 31: Band website

Slide 32: Grimm Brothers didn’t write tales - collected variants from European cultures.

Slide 34: Before mass media, performance was local.

Slide 35: 20th century would change this.

Slide 36: Culture with a big C - on a pedestal.

Slide 37: Culture with a small c - interaction of people.

Slide 39: All things have their own culture/sub-culture

Slide 51: Media became abnormally consolidated in the 20th century - things that were previously cultural property suddenly retreated behind wall of copyright.

Slide 53: People trying to reclaim right to make cultural property with ideas like copyleft

Slide 54: and creative commons.

Slide 83: Definition of gamer by BBC: Console, PC, Handheld, web, mobile, interactive TV. 59% - play once every six months or more. Once a week or more: 48% Sample was 3500 people, 6 - 65 year olds 45%F/55%M

Slide 85: 38.5 Corrected to include 0 - 6 and 66+, assuming none in those age groups play games, which isn’t true. Actual percentage of UK population that play games is a little higher.

Slide 86: Herpes

Slide 87: Smoking

Slide 88: Football: Major internationals involving a UK team

Slide 89: Football Internationals: non-uk teams

Slide 90: 37.5 visit the cinema once a month or more.

Slide 91: While there will always be non-gamers, Demographics going to march upward.

Slide 92: My house. Full of people, all abnormally social... and regularly use these consoles

Slide 97: A few of these

Slide 99: Within a group of about 35 people who live at my house or visit regularly, are age ranges from 16 to late 30s. Comparitively few of us hardcore gamers, but we put a lot of time into things like GTA IV.

Slide 101: A small group who have Pro Evo 2008 tournaments, including our housemate Tanya.

Slide 102: She likes Wii games, anything social, short play.

Slide 103: such as pool on the Ipod touch.

Slide 104: Everyone who visits plays 4 player Mario Kart on this.

Slide 105: Another small group of hardcore gamers I know play Starcraft every week. They say it’s still the best RTS they’ve played.

Slide 106: They also play a lot of FPS

Slide 107: And have been bitten pretty badly by the WoW bug recently.

Slide 109: Another couple of people I know don’t want to spend lot of money on games, but last gen hardware is so cheap now that they each have a last gen console and fairly big collections of games.

Slide 110: When I was playing with this, Amigas and a PS1, there was nowhere near that kind of variety in gamers.

Slide 113: Even the most hardcore have disagreements: “in terms of gameplay, I expect something a bit more substantial than holding a tin foil-wrapped WWF figure in front of my TV and making "pew-pew!" noises. ¬¬”

Slide 114: Differences in opinion are going to grow, and that’s a good thing.

Slide 115: Games growing into higher age brackets. Interactivity is becoming an expectation.

Slide 118: "Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change." - Clay Shirky

Slide 121: Videogame crafts are an expression of people’s values. Again, this wasn’t around when I was playing games as a child.

Slide 143: Pictures mostly came from Wonderlandblog.com, excellent source on game crafts

Slide 144: Chiptune communities

Slide 145: Sound going mainstream through various bands that use 8 bit sounds

Slide 146: (Crystal Castles have been accused of chronic plagiarism and IP abuse by the chiptune community and others)

Slide 147: I even saw a Ska band perform the Super Mario Brothers theme tune at a festival in Utrecht a few weeks ago.

Slide 148: This is GameCamp. These crafts and discussions represent a broadening of the cultural base of games.

Slide 149: Games criticism is moving beyond numeric scores

Slide 151: Cultural variation and growing maturity also reflected in indie and amateur game development no commercial aspiration pushing the medium in different directions for the sake of exploration.

Slide 152: Interesting genre dubbed “Masocore” games

Slide 153: "in an age where game over is seen as undesirable, masocore games approach player death as a narrative technique." - Anna Anthropy Tanya Krzywinska: Playing games is about learning the right cues. Masocore games take those cues and use them to confound you.

Slide 154: Started with hacked versions of MArio designed to be very hard.

Slide 155: Clones started turning up, such as Syoban Action, all full of evil tricks.

Slide 156: I Wanna Be The Guy

Slide 157: Masocor is pretty hardcore.

Slide 158: Some casual well produced, but most are shovelware, hardly groundbreaking.

Slide 160: points and rules: seem arbitrary, but really can make things meaningful.

Slide 161: Exam invigilator I knew used to play “Ugly Kid Battleships” with workmates to make it more interesting.

Slide 162: One-Behindmanship turns good manners into a competitive game. Amazing array of dirty tricks emerged.

Slide 163: Again, this leads to dirty tricks. Basic rulesets, with other people, are fundamentally engaging.

Slide 164: www.hideandseekfest.co.uk

Slide 172: Myths from anti-game lobby are becoming more demonstrably outlandish by the day.

Slide 173: A few game designers in 2004 stopped me from giving up on games altogether.

Slide 174: Now I can’t go a week without accidentally seeing something interesting related to games that threatens to fill my time up.

Slide 175: Links to most of the things I've talked about today: http://func-auton.net/blog/?p=328 Most images used under Creative Commons, credits: http://func-auton.net/blog/?p=331 Contact / Stalk: david.hayward@pixel-lab.co.uk http://func-auton.net/blog http://twitter.com/nachimir http://www.pixel-lab.co.uk