Remember how I was talking about Goffman’s notion of frontstage and backstage?
Well, I want to bring that up again as that I got that specific feeling when playing zombie in L4D2 versus mode. You are somehow playing the game on a metalevel compared to normal co-op mode. When you play survivor, the environment is very much hostile and scary, and you never know what’s lurking around the bend.

However, when you play zombie, the environment is not scary whatsoever, but rather very meta as you see crawling marks that lets you know where obstructions might be traversed etc. Furthermore, you have to watch the cooldown on your special skills, and you can always see your fellow zombies, and the survivors. Playing this team is radically different from playing survivor, and although very fragile when exposed to the survivors, the omniscience of knowing the location of the survivors and the ghosting mode before spawning, induces a sense of quasidivine power, which, at least to me, does not seem compatible with being a zombie disturbing direct immersion.

more on this, after dinner!

I’ve been playing L4D2 in co-op mode quite a bit. I have two friends in the UK that I keeps in touch with solely based on our bi-monthly L4D2 sessions. As you have completed the maps a few times on normal, the novelty of the game resides, and it becomes more of a trivial activity to perform while conversing. However, it does serve nicely as an icebreaker and a way to start a conversation, which I find that most social games does. 

To me, the co-op mode is highly motivating. I think the balance between relying on your teammates, while still being responsible for your own situation is appropriate. The end credits that follow completion of a campaign that notes the number of kills and special kills etc. is motivating as well for performing better than your teammates.

When that is said, the maps get boring faster than for example a Counter Strike map, because the massive focus on cooperation diminishes the focus on the skills of the single player, thereby removing the incitement for the single player to excel. 

This could have been countered if there was a way for groups to challenge each other. I would suggest that this would provide a reason for refining the cooperation in the team. To me, at least, the versus mode where one team is survivors and the other zombies does not cut it. The gameplay between being zombies and survivors is so different that you might talk about two different games. Furthermore, the zombies cannot work together the same way as the survivors, but must find a spot to attack the opposing team based on their special abilities. If there is a way for the zombies to cooperate in a joined effort the games does not offer any affordance as to how this is achieved.

Thus, I find the versus mode too disruptive to play, as the differences between playing survivors and zombies are too diverging. The game might benefit from a different way of teams challenging other teams, where both teams have the same point of origin gameplaywise.

So. Today I spent 4 hours Minecrafting, and I am massively annoyed. However, I have learnt stuff about organisation and architecture.

As I started building today with no overarching plan of what I wanted to build, I have made a cavernous, factory-looking monstrosity of a house and I don’t like it one bit. I used the wrong materials. I didn’t account for poor lighting in huge structures. I built the bastard too far away from the supply of raw materials. And made a shitload of similar mistakes. 

This is my horrible construction. Huge, but horrible.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I am pretty sure that I learnt many valuable lessons about architecture that I don’t think I would have learnt, had I not crafted the materials myself and know the amount of labor necessary to alter stuff. It sticks better when you are personally invested in the labor. This, I think, is the forte of digital games - learning by doing. Much like the Greek though mimesis to be necessary for catharsis, games have the possibility of teaching stuff in a very fast and poignant manner by mimesis. Now, I know the importance of planning the desired construct in advance and have a vision of the end result, the importance of organising and optimising your work effort, and a variety of small details about architecture.

I just wish I had visited that castle on the mountain with the trees on top and the lava cavern below, before I started building. That looks to be a organisational beauty that made a optimal use of the materials, and location.

On of the following days, I’ll build a tree house instead. A nice, unassuming, modest tree house.

Actually, I was supposed to minecraft this weekend before stuff turned up that needed my attention. I was going to minecraft with three friends, and the Minecraft sessions we do usually work out like this: 

1) Acquire vasts amounts of alchohol
2) Acquire vasts amounts of Red Bull
3) Order (family size) pizza
4) Mentally prepare for the weird-ass time warp that occurs during playing Minecraft and cancel all appointment for the following 24 hours
5) Total engagement for a day
6) Appreciation of the huge lava swimming pool, the house made entirely from glass constructed in the sky and other really stupid things 

Oh, and that’s me on the left.

What I am amazed by while playing Minecraft, is how massively engrossed I become in this game. I have no sense of time - 8 hours can easily pass by without me noticing it. I think it might be because of the notion of flow. As I am the one setting the goals, I never become overwhelmed by the complexity of a task and experience aporia ( the feeling experience when confronted with an unsolvable tas, as opposed epiphany). I don’t get stressed out either. I tend to stress out during games that demand too much of me, especially so when there is a temporal stress factor involved.

I once played Doom III ended up sitting in a closet for half an hour. I think this might be linked to a general feminine reluctance of trying new things that demand new skill sets (note that this does of course not apply to the awesomesauce female gamers that thrive on this). However, this does apply to me - I really liked Counter Strike, probably because the maps are small and once you become familiar with the map, you don’t need further skill sets and you know what to expect and what will be demanded of you.

In Minecraft you set the goals - on a micro level as well as macro, an innate feature of sandbox game. This way, the game is always tailored to your specific mood and wishes. There might not be a game in the sense of Callois’ notion of a game being defined by ludus (structured activities with explicit rules)but rather paida (unstructured and spontaneous activities). The game structure of Minecraft becomes a negotiation between the players. For some reason this works so much better for me than most games that are defined by a presence of ludus. Maybe most games are demanding the wrong things from me? 

Ok, so next step on the road to discovering why I enjoy Portal more than other top-notch single player games, might be partially due to the protagonist being female and the game generally gender neutral. This is one of the few cases where I get, as a woman, to identify fully with the avatar in the game, which might be a subtle feature in a first-person game, but still, I think, of paramount importance. There are no military grunts, oversized weapons, primarily male cast of characters, or anything like that. The protagonist is a very androgynous discursive narrative construct - at any point Chell might as well be a man as a woman. The sleek interior of the testing facility is mirrored in the gender neutrality of the avatar. More amazingly, the avatar is not partially naked or have a massive amount of boobage. Yay; again more in line with my reality. Even the antagonist, GLaDOS is female.

The humor of the game, which is based on the narcissistic passive-aggressiveness of GLaDOS is charged with a stylized, satirical version of femininity at it’s worst. This creates a dark feminine feel to the game, although the game space with it’s clinical appearance and the focus on math, science and testing seems to diverge from the usual conception of femininity. The game seems to bridge the gap between the genders, as it presents a ludic deviation from the usual conception of male and female values. I think this might be why many non-stereotypical women (such as the more nerdy branch) appreciate this game - we are no longer cast as overtly sexual figures as in, say, WoW, where it’s positively ridiculous how better armour reveals more skin on the female characters. WTH, Blizzard?

Ok, so for today’s assignment where we had to play a game in an oppositional fashion, I came to think of an experience I once had playing Counter Strike (1.6).

For no apparent reason all the terrorists in the map Dust decided for no apparent reason to stay at the spawn site and dance around ( as far as the gameplays allows for actual dance), people would spray festive tags and people would emulate stroboscope light with their flash lights. When the CTs found us, most of them joined in when they noticed what was going on. For some reason this was immensely entertaining after having tried to kill each other for hours.

However, after 15 minutes a tension grew, as this didn’t continue being entertaining. People stopped jumping and ‘dancing’ and began discretely moving in the direction of cover. And then all hell broke loose and everybody started reorienting themselves as to who were one the same team, and the battle was infinetely more interesting than it had been just 15 minutes ago where you expect to clash with the opposing force in certain places and knew where your team mates are located. 

Breaking the rules of the game, engaging in interaction not prompted by the gameplay, made it seem much more real. The avatars seemed much more as real people, as the unorthodox interaction revealed much more of their personality than the uniform movements of the skilled CS player, which for the most part look alike.

Awesome experience.

Ok, so I started a bit late on the blogging. Unfortunately, if things are not noted in my calendar, I will not remember them, and I forgot to write this down : /

Ok, so here goes. I am a gamer positioned somewhere a casual gamer and an average gamer. I do not obsess with games as many gamers do - in fact I am very picky about the games I really enjoy to play. Usually, these are multiplayer, as I am a very social gamer. However, Portal managed to capture my interest although a singleplayer game, which is very uncommon for me. I might be the lack of stressful situations and the focus on puzzles, or the simplicity of the narrative. I’m going to dissect the different foci that I find to have an influence on my appreciation on this game, starting with the spatiality of the game.

SPATIALITY
What I find particularly interesting about the game is the spatial impossibility of the premise the game is based on. It’s all about thinking with portals, which necessarily is tricky as hell, seeing that we don’t have a natural frame of reference. Much like the dictum the enemy gate is down from ‘Ender’s game’ (read it if you haven’t), the player is forced to rethink her perception of spatiality and reorient herself in this new game space in order to succeed. I remember playing American McGee’s Alice and feeling violated for some reason in the part of the game where there is a hallway where the doors to the sides leads into the same hallway; this way, the same room multiplies and becomes an impossible, spatial abomination, that somehow freaked me out. I then realised that I had come to accept the spatiality of the game on the same premises as reality. When physics engines are developed to mimic reality it’s somehow really uncanny when the rules of the game space does not adhere to those of reality and breaks the fourth wall. The same goes for Portal - somehow it’s not the robots or whatever else is present in the game that is impossible that creeps me out - it’s that space itself when it challenges all the assumptions it builds on.