Disqus - Latest Comments for ChrisBateman

Re: Wikipistemology

ChrisBateman — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 11:45:30 -0000

Hi James,
Just to let you know that this humble little blog series is now a book, also called "Wikipedia Knows Nothing"!

It's a Free PDF, paid paperback or ebook, published with a Creative Commons licensed by ETC Press at Carnegie Mellon:
http://onlyagame.typepad.co...

Thanks for taking an interest in my work!

Chris.

Re: The rule of 0-1-100

ChrisBateman — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 01:18:17 -0000

Hi Laura,
It's definitely not a given that 16th century English will hold for 21st century English - this I gladly concede! :) But I would far rather defend a position on our language by drawing against literature that has been part of our culture for five centuries than deploy the more disappointing justification that we are gradually absorbing US English via the internet, television and film. ;)

I could ramble on about this, but I think we are travelling quite far from Nicholas' original post!

Take care!

Chris.

Re: The rule of 0-1-100

ChrisBateman — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 06:18:20 -0000

Hi Laura,
Thanks for your comment here, but both Nicholas and I are English, and 'a hundred' is fine in UK English. I shall cite, in my defence, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, Act IV, Scene I:

"A hundred mark is a long lone, for a poor lone woman to bear ; and I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fub'd off, and fub'd off, from this day to that day, that it is a shame to be thought on."

Both 'one hundred' and 'a hundred' are allowable in UK English.

All the best,

Chris.

Re: Announcement: Zoya is leaving Gamesbrief

ChrisBateman — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 02:06:19 -0000

Godspeed, Zoya, or - as the Klingons put it - K'plah!

Re: Three basic principles of fun

ChrisBateman — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 03:03:52 -0000

Aye - there may be no 'right' answer, but there are many wrong answers! :)

Re: Three basic principles of fun

ChrisBateman — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 07:09:08 -0000

Different players learn in different ways, which contributes to tutorials being the toughest part of games design. There is no magic bullet for tutorials: an experiential tutorial will immediately lose players who need demonstration before they are willing to experiment. A didactic tutorial will frustrate players like you who want to experiment and learn from it.

These two learning styles (and their many variants) make a 'perfect' tutorial impossible - you then have to decide who you are going to inconvenience more. The 'winning' move (actually, the option with the least number of lost players) seems to be demonstration with opt out...

Re: Centers and Peripheries of Games Criticism

ChrisBateman — Fri, 23 May 2014 16:35:43 -0000

Dear Oscar,
I have long struggled with the advantage that having English as a first language gives me, but I have also noted that many people (especially in mainland Europe) who speak English as a second language speak and write it *better* than many who have it as a first! I vividly remember one of my first trips to the Netherlands, where the doctor whom we were staying with asked me to check over his paper in English for errors - and of course, it was immaculate. Few of my students could write with the eloquence of this Dutch doctor!

Despite coming from a family line that includes an interpreter to the Pope who spoke (I think) eleven languages, I do not have a great gift for spoken language, although I do okay with written languages. I can get by rather well in both France and Japan, especially if staying for more than a week, and I can read signs in Greece, for instance. But my language skills are rather limited compared to my great-great-grandfather, and it is a disappointment to me. I continue to practice my French and my Japanese, but without native speakers to engage with regularly, I never get very far.

It is important to reiterate the advantages of having a lingua franca, in that it does allow communication on a scale otherwise impossible. But at the same time, it is all too easy for the speakers of that language to 'bully' their communities around... There are no easy fixes. But like you, I feel the power of the multilingual as a translator is immense, and has a gift to connect cultures otherwise uncomfortably bound.

This problem is far from constrained to games, of course - talk to film-makers about making commercial movies in languages other than English, and the massive changes in budgetary scale this implies, or talk to Eurovision Song Contest entrants about the greater chance they have of winning in English... It seems all creative industries are struck by this limitation. Perhaps the rise of Chinese cultural exports will serve to sober the effect of English's ascendance, or perhaps the growing volume of Spanish language speakers in the United States will have an effect... I'm uncertain where we are headed, but it seems unlikely English will be toppled from its spot in my lifetime, even if it is not inconceivable that it will be within a few centuries. Time has strange lessons for us all.

I have nothing to offer in conclusion but my support for anyone wishing to push beyond the easy paths on this issue.

With unlimited love,

Chris.

PS: A reply to your letter will arrive next week!

Re: It’s a big day. The Curve is out.

ChrisBateman — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 09:26:44 -0000

Congratulations, Nick! Best of luck with this one. Still working on my long term plan for a New York Times bestseller candidate - I need to complete just a little bit more research before I can give it a shot. :)

Once again, congratulations!

Re: Time for a Story (On Papers, Please and Gone Home)

ChrisBateman — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 05:48:13 -0000

Looking forward to playing it, but soooo swamped right now! Things should settle down by mid-September, hopefully. *waves*

Re: Time for a Story (On Papers, Please and Gone Home)

ChrisBateman — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 05:29:07 -0000

Ooh, great stuff - "Gone Home" is on my play list right now. Will read this after I've had a chance to play the game...

Re: Feed-Forward Scholarship

ChrisBateman — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 03:27:13 -0000

Thanks for your reply, Steve - and even more so for emailing it to me!

"To be blunt, I think large portions of contemporary scholarship are involved in a good-natured but naïve form of confirmation bias."

I tend to agree - this is a theme I have pursued in my own work, actually! I'll send you some papers to throw onto your pile, but for anyone listening in, here are the links to the blog rough-cuts:

"Implicit Game Aesthetics" (2012):
http://blog.ihobo.com/2012/...
"Fiction Denial" (2013):
http://blog.ihobo.com/2013/...

Also, I appreciate any reply that takes a moment to poke Plato in the eyeballs - a particular hobby of my own, actually. ;)

All the best,

Chris.

Re: A New Leaf

ChrisBateman — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 06:12:02 -0000

While "Animal Crossing" was a landmark GameCube game (and playable on import in the UK/Europe with Freeloader), don't dismiss "Doshin the Giant" out of hand. Extremely popular in Japan (one of their top ten games of 2002), it's lack of popularity outside of that country is noteworthy in itself and worthy of further enquiry. Despite its flaws, I still rate Doshin as a sandbox and as one of the more interesting console oddities of the early 2000s. *waves*

Re: Feed-Forward Scholarship

ChrisBateman — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 06:00:24 -0000

Hi Steve,

Came here from Oscar's post - very supportive of what you're trying to do here! I am remorselessly pursuing journal articles right now but I detest the form because of the long lead-times (over a year now) and the way the format blocks dialogue and turns peers into masked antagonists. My compromise is to blog rough thoughts and then work them up into formal papers later. I did this with "Fiction Denial" this year, and "Implicit Game Aesthetics" last year.

A few random comments...

"If you don’t know what you’re looking for, inquiry is impossible."

This seems to be based upon a false assumption. Curiosity is all that is required for inquiry, and this can be based upon entirely partial information. It would be fairer to claim 'If you don't know what you're looking for, the outcome of inquiry is uncertain'. But this is an extremely tolerable state of affairs! You do not need to have an answer ('what you are looking for') to ask a salient question ('inquiry').

"Now, if Games Studies is inherently homeostatic, then there must be something that our research practices are keeping stable... Which is despite the fact that we clearly have some larger sense of what a game is, given that we are constantly in need of adjusting whatever rules we’ve somewhat agreed upon."

Unsure how this positions me in the game studies sphere to be honest - an enemy of the status quo? A trickster? An irritant? I hope my contributions have been more positive than this! Yet the most consistent thread in my work has been denial of the prior assumptions implicit in the deployment of the term 'game' - see the first chapter of "Imaginary Games" or "Implicit Game Aesthetics" for context. I began by challenging the assumption of challenge as the sine qua non of games in "21st Century Game Design" almost a decade ago, now I'm up to disavowing the term 'game' altogether! :) Yet I still publish in 'game studies', which is obviously my 'home field'.

I'm unconvinced by your homeostasis argument - it makes me seem far more avant garde than I feel is justified by my publication history... perhaps it's just that I don't belong to any of the schools you chose to single out? Or that I am a game designer who has simply fallen by accident into academic discourse, and so am ironically an 'ousider'? Honestly, I don't know how much of my issue here springs from a commercial career as a game designer spent pushing against a publishing industry that for so long has been horrifically blinkered in its understanding of how and why people play games. Your argument *seems* to position that industry as the inadvertent wellspring of game studies, yet the two spheres are radically disconnected and quite unaware of each other (just as literary scholars generally know nothing about commercial book publishing!). Am I misunderstanding you, or am I misunderstanding my place in game studies? I'm unsure.

Out of time, alas, and this is already too long for a comment... Because I'm on holiday right now I'm unlikely to get back here to read a reply so if you want a chat about any of these points, you can reach me via the contact link at ihobo.com. Otherwise this comment can stand quite comfortably as a largely irrelevant stream-of-consciousness response to your post. :)

Keep up the good work!

Chris.

Re: [Gamesbriefers] Is Steam unfair to indies?

ChrisBateman — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 03:30:59 -0000

Nice set of reactions (it may help that I know a lot of the faces!). I see two basic problems here: Valve did not inform applicants to Greenlight that once applying they were locked into that process. This is a failure on Valve's part, and it's not clear that their chosen response is the best way of dealing with this failure.

Secondly, Greenlight is Valve's bottomless chum bucket, it's their way of palming off their originally undertaken responsibility to curate their content because they finally realised that they *couldn't* curate the volume of content this implied. Greenlight is a reasonable response to that problem, however much I dislike it, but Valve can't then pretend that Greenlight is anything other than a last resort.

To suggest - without warning - that their last resort option is mandatory when undertaken borders on hypocrisy. The official message, after all, is that 'you are welcome on Steam with a publisher (under certain conditions) and if you don't have one, you must pursue the last resort'. If the last resort leads to a publisher, there is no prima facie reason that this should not suffice as adequate gatekeeping. After all, Greenlight's purpose is to see if a game is worth publishing- and Valve have *already* set having a publisher as one valid test of this!

The *only* reason this would be not so would be if Valve had clearly and specifically said that once you go through the gate of doom you may only return if you pass our trial-by-geek. They did not do this. And now they're closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. That's bad business practice right there, even if Valve's reason for acting are sound. Ethics is not just about how you act, but about how you communicate about your intentions.

*waves*

Re: Science Stories: The Mythology of Evolution

ChrisBateman — Thu, 30 May 2013 03:23:05 -0000

Coming out shortly after the Darwin bicentennial was a real problem for this one - as perhaps was a title that fails to align with either side of the alleged "debate". 'Mythology?' thinks one side, 'must be a Creationist.' But 'Evolution?' thinks the other, 'must be a Neo-Darwinist'. *sigh*

I'm lucky this is out on Zero Books who have a publishing model that doesn't require a book to get immediate traction. I have time to grow interest in the book over the next decade or more... I'm optimistic it might be a book like Bernard Suits' "The Grasshopper" that is initially invisible but eventually comes to be of value.

All the best!

Re: Science Stories: The Mythology of Evolution

ChrisBateman — Wed, 29 May 2013 09:54:50 -0000

Just reread this for the first time since you first wrote it. This is a charming review, and to date basically the only review the book has had! Thanks so much for writing it.

Re: Minecraft grosses over $250 million in 2012, but which platform dominated?

ChrisBateman — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:12:56 -0000

Cheers for this, Nick! Very useful and interesting. I can't believe I couldn't find anyone two years ago who thought it was worth putting together a related project. Guess it had to get big to show how big it could get... and it's too late now. *waves*

Re: Are free-to-play experts the new games writers?

ChrisBateman — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 07:59:53 -0000

It's so very, horribly true on both counts. :)

Re: Penguin will publish my book in 2013

ChrisBateman — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 05:31:59 -0000

Hey, great news Nick! Penguin are a great publisher, and won't leave you hanging like some out there. Congratulations!

Re: Is Nintendo a natural free-to-play game company?

ChrisBateman — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 04:46:53 -0000

It would be a mistake to think that Nintendo's games don't succeed on narrative terms as well... However, the real barrier to Nintendo joining free-to-play is that they are an old Japanese company who have a successful strategy based upon adequate investment in well-tested products. Free-to-play thrives on minimum viable product - for Nintendo, this is a concept they simply do not have, nor are likely to get.

Re: Sony shows it doesn’t yet understand the smartphone threat

ChrisBateman — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:00:21 -0000

I wholeheartedly agree with most of your assessment here, Nick. The barrier between free and any cost is psychologically gigantic (especially the first time a consumer purchases and has to provide payment details). I can't see how Vita can carve out a viable niche - but I'm not yet sure what to think about the home console situation.

Sony are (slowly) recognizing that service is the way to go, and it's going to be interesting to see how they approach this in terms of a new home console announcement (whenever that finally happens). Expect to see the cloud mentioned more and more in connection with Sony entertainment in the months to follow. *waves*

Re: TV is no longer the first screen. It’s the second.

ChrisBateman — Thu, 31 May 2012 05:57:45 -0000

The first screen was always in our mind - before television, it was radio, before radio books. But I take your point. :)

Re: Games Are Stories: The Final Word?

ChrisBateman — Tue, 29 May 2012 05:23:56 -0000

The focus on story vs games continues to mislead here. The important factor is fiction in games, of which story is just one form. And as your guest author here correctly imputes, fiction is *very* important to games.

Re: Equivocitis [Terminology Wars] - What Games Are

ChrisBateman — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:39:19 -0000

Stupid Typepad - like so many things in life, it's great when it works! :)

Re: Equivocitis [Terminology Wars] - What Games Are

ChrisBateman — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 05:55:08 -0000

Tadhg: Your insistence on ending terminology debates by asserting your own terminology might be seen as counter-productive, I'm afraid.

I have launched another futile attempt to move the discussion in a more productive direction - it would be great if you would consider my proposal seriously:http://blog.ihobo.com/2012/...