{"id":912,"date":"2008-11-25T18:16:38","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T18:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=912"},"modified":"2008-12-12T18:42:18","modified_gmt":"2008-12-12T18:42:18","slug":"catching-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=912","title":{"rendered":"Catching Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There were a few things that popped up in my RSS reader last week that I thought were pretty interesting and didn&#8217;t get a chance to link. So here they are, just in time for the holiday.<\/p>\n<p>James Portnow <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge-online.com\/blogs\/the-ethics-persuasive-games\">posted his notes<\/a> from a talk he gave at this year&#8217;s Meaningful Play conference on the ethics and responsibilities of game developers working on &#8216;persuasive games&#8217;. His thoughts actually <a href=\"http:\/\/www.utne.com\/2007-01-01\/PlayingwithOurHeads.aspx\">echo a great piece<\/a> by Chris Sullentrop from a year ago. An argument that the fears of Portnow and Sullentrop may be misplaced could be read into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brainygamer.com\/the_brainy_gamer\/2008\/11\/second-thoughts-on-emergent-narrative.html\">a recent post<\/a> by Michael Abbott over on The Brainy Gamer, about the admiration he had for the game design of <em>Fallout 3<\/em>. I would say that we give far too little credit to players in assuming that they are unaware of the biases built into a game&#8217;s design. Video games haven&#8217;t nearly reached a level of immersive quality that we have to worry about intentional, or even unintentional, brain-washing.<\/p>\n<p>On a different topic (or is it?), Matt Thrower at Boardgame News has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boardgamenews.com\/index.php\/boardgamenews\/comments\/matt_thrower_when_2_2_5\/\">another good post<\/a> that applies to video games as well as board games, namely the idea that games are simply &#8220;carefully dressed up mathematical exercises&#8221;. He then goes on to discuss how obvious the intrinsic mathematic nature of a game should be in its presentation, and how that affects the reception a game receives, especially among more neophyte gamers.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Hope you all enjoy these and I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There were a few things that popped up in my RSS reader last week that I thought were pretty interesting and didn&#8217;t get a chance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}