(Part 3) Top products from r/truegaming

Ah! Looks like I saw this post a little late but I'll throw in some additional suggestions as I am year into a PhD on a games related subject area (social dynamics of online games are of particular importance to my work).

I would start off by suggesting Johan Huzinga's Homo Ludens and Roger Cailois' Man, Play and Games which often underpin so much of the game studies field. Although many of the assertions made here are often extremely dated in new technological contexts they do provide an excellent reference point to more pure notions of play (as problematic as the concept may be).

Keeping it specific to your interest of social games and mention of T.L. Taylors Play Between Worlds I would recommend Mark Chen’s Leet Noobs; Celia Pearce’s Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds; the recent Routledge compilation Online Gaming in Context: The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games and also Mia Consalvo’s Cheating: Gaining Advantages in Videogames. All of these books approach the topic of sociality in and around games in different ways but I would highly recommend them all.

I would also recommend T.L. Taylor’s latest book Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming for an important study into the burgeoning cultural practices surrounding e-sports in the West. This is a subject matter that is really close to my own personal interests and current work so I might be a little biased, but much the same as Play Between Worlds, it’s a fantastically informed and important book to the field.

I could go on for a while though.. If you would like any more suggestions or have any similar material to share yourself please don’t hesitate to drop a message!

Rules of Play and The Game Design Reader by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman are great reads about the craft and art of play. Here they are attempting to establish a critical vocabulary to handle games as pop culture. If you're serious about taking games as an art, they're very interesting reads. The Game Design Reader is my favorite.

Also, heard some great things about Janet Murray
s Hamlet on the Holodeck. This was written around the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as a time when Adventure Games were king. It's interesting to me essentially because this futurist look at video games as entertainment actually doesn't follow the progression in the last 20 years. That is, until recently with Quantic Dream and Telltale games. That said, I've become even more interested in looking at Mechanics as vocabulary (see the other front page thread about Mechanics that tell a story).

Hope these help.

Finally home and having a chance to reply. I pulled five books off of my shelf that I would recommend, but there are doubtless more that you should read.

Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design

Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

They wrote a Third Person as well, I just haven't gotten the chance to read it yet. You might be able to find PDF copies online somewhere, but if you have the money, you should try to support the writer's by buying. Show them that people are interested in critical discourse about games.

Next week I think I'm going to order a few new texts (after payday), and I'd be happy to let you know what I think once i have them in hand.

i've always fantasied about starting my own game studio and making this game a reality... and since its quite a fantasy to have my own studio, let alone anyone working with/for me or even making a game, i will share this with you all;

a city building sim that actually works! i'm not bitter! that spans different eras of time; late renaissance, Victorian, industrial revolution, post WW2, modern & future. if the game was successful, we could go really crazy and go all the way back to roman times as well

the base game would be any era, but other eras are then just DLC (this is how DLC should work, allowing the player to chose content to add on that is customized for their preference not cosmetic DLC or removed features because i'm still not bitter).

thus the player would have different challenges in each time period that would smoothly transition across time so that you eventually would have a very old city with a very rich history and depth to it. different eras would focus on different city sim management styles, from micro to macro management, from allowing growth of industry, military, or culture, etc.

EDIT here is the book, Barmi-Mediterranean-City-Through-Ages from my childhood this idea is based off of, and some pictures that show the city's evolution 1 2 3 4

note, you can see in #2 that the fall of the roman empire meant this city was decimated. thats not a 'bad' thing for a city builder, infact major events that would normally be seen as city destruction could be very fun, as it switches focus and keep the mid game interesting

The SF64 map isn't a 'literal casual filter'. It's actually a fairly routine example of a difficulty filter.

You are perhaps assuming that only casual players would play the Easy path, so the map "filters" them out. However, actual research has shown that casual players do not necessarily look for low difficulty in the games they play. So calling that a "casual filter" is incorrect, and slightly confusing.

If you'd like to learn more about casual players and casual games, I would recommend "A Casual Revolution" by Jesper Juul.

Besides the obvious standards, there's quite a bit out there. Reality is Broken is quickly becoming my go-to book for introducing people to talking about video games. If you're less focused specifically on video games, then Hamlet on the Holodeck is basically required reading for any discussions about interactive narrative and Pervasive Games: Theory and Design gives a great introduction to pervasive games, which are definitely different from video games, but there's a fair amount of overlap in good design principles there.

If you liked Mass Effect the books are very well written...hell even if you didn't like Mass Effect, that are fun books to read.

Ascension

Revelation

Retribution

Deception comes out at the beginning of 2012

> he has an idea / concept in mind that he feels can be only incompletely expressed with words.

Well a bunch of us have tried (see the talks and videos in his description on youtube, which includes one of my talks), and continue to try.

It's a difficult topic for sure, but one that seems to me to be at the heart of game design as the area matures.

Jingo is such a fun word to use. I learned it from Terry Pratchett. It's like patriotic, but with negative and militant connotations. Actually pretty useful these days.

If you want to learn more about eSports, this book provides an interesting, sociological perspective on them without getting too pretentious or academic about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Stakes-E-Sports-Professionalization-Computer/dp/0262527588/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1466638367&sr=8-2&keywords=esports

I recently wrote a law review article examining the upcoming legal issues in eSports, and this was a helpful source in that process.

Someone already suggested "Replay: The History of Video Games", so I'll suggest one that covers the other aspect of your post:

[Introduction to Game Analysis by Clara Fernández-Vara] (https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Game-Analysis-Clara-Fern%C3%A1ndez-Vara/dp/0415703271)

It's written for an undergraduate level and does a nice job of discussing various aspects of games and how one might use those in an analysis of games.

Racing the Beam covers a lot of these sorts of technical limitations for the Atari 2600.

http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X

this

you heard it here first.

>While today you can develop a great game with descent graphics and story, etc for less than $100. Hell mods that can be the size and quality of real published games with entire campaigns, voice acting,multiplayer modes, etchave been produced costing nothing.

Lies. Especially that last thing.

You're making the mistake of assuming Time =/= Money. Time absolutely equals money.

Those "free" mods, with voice acting and all that, absolutely have a cost. Someone spent hundreds to thousands of hours setting it all up. Sometimes teams. Someone spent dozens to hundreds of hours reading out voices, and someone else made executive decisions on which reading to use. That all of the time was volunteered does not mean it cost nothing. Were it done by a business, every single person there would get a paycheck for their time.

Skyblivion was started in 2013. Assuming 30 hours were spent on it per week on average, between 2014 and 2018 you're looking at 6,240 hours. At $10 an hour (an underpaying rate) you're at $62,400 to make what they've made of it.

Comic Books take roughly 6 months from start to publication (if not more, some have their stories finished and ready to print 6 months ahead of the print date) and if there's only one artist and one writer (usually there's also an inker, sometimes two writers), you're looking at $84,000 a year for the pair. If you only get six months of work out of them, that's still $42,000, signifigantly more than your "few thousand" estimation. And that's before we even get in to printing and distribution costs.

The current average feature length budget for a Hollywood Film is between $70-90 million.

This book gives a figure of $10,000 per person per month to develop a game, meaning a 400 person team given 3 years for an AAA game would need $144,000,000 to make a game.

A 50 person team taking 2 years for a more A level game is going to use up $12,000,000.

And 5 people taking a year to make a little indie game need $600,000 to do it.

I.. uh.. don't see how Gaming is in any way falling behind.

> ...The "anything it takes to win" mentality makes one consider the entire possibility space and introduces the concept of removing undesirable limits that we place on ourselves. It makes you better at getting better at things, since it gives you practice in a risk-free and fun environment.

Learning how people improved at fighting games changed my life for the better. A couple of years later, I found a book that accurately describes the process of looking at things. I don't know if you've read this, but Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse Worth a read. It's a short book.

It's crazy when you see other people stagnating or see that they have stagnated. Self conconciousness of what you think other people are thinking of you is the worst thing in my opinion.

After reading the link to [sciencedaily] (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111130095251.htm) by Dr. Yang Wang, I smelled red herring. The research makes little sense in terms of 1) research sample size (only 28 adults), 2) tasks selection (in this case, why does it have to be violent games, not brainy games like Echo Chrome or Trine or Portal?), and 3) the duration of the test itself and post-mortem followups. For example, if someone is to do a research on marathon running/training, you'd need to have the sample group doing the exercise/training for at least 3-4 months+ before you can confidently suggest any significant "short-term" effects; and 1-2 years+ before any real long-term effects are shown. Besides, long-living creatures like humans generally require more time for biological reaction to take full effect because cell regeneration and metabolism rates are different from amoebas.
Let's examine the marathon running hypothesis again - the week after your training begun, you've got to feel sore! Worst is that the research ONLY picked people who don't usually exercise. So, if I were to conclude from one week of resting after one week of marathon training, I would call it "mentally draining, physically damaging, and can lead to outbreak of heart problems and even fatal." See the problem here? Not to mention - how do you get from "the cognitive control is regained after gaming stopped" to "long-term effect on cognitive control?" Am I reading gibberish or am I crazy? In addition, the age selection is also very problematic - 19 year-old brains are not fully matured, so that can complicate things. The best is to use a sample size of the same age group - 25 exact, or older groups -30~40.
Check out [this article] (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15720178) and its [link 1] (http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v1/n11/full/tp201153a.html) and [link 2] (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4682801.stm) and see what you think. Here's an extract from the "Discussion" part of the research paper (link 1):
>Individuals with higher ventral striatum volume might experience video gaming as more rewarding in the first place. This in turn could facilitate skill acquisition and lead to further reward resulting from playing.

And lastly, the golden rule of statistics - [correlation doesn't imply causation] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation) (It's importantly enough to have its own wiki page).
If you are interested in how statistics can be altered to support shrewd ideas, there's [this book.] (http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728)
As for my personal opinion, I'd have to agree with some researchers - the problem is too complex with too many variables. It'd be hard to determine exactly what effect long-term gaming has on our brains (of what types of games played). Until we have a sample size of 1,000+ from around the world, and doing a long term study with 30 yrs+ monitoring with strict rules/conditions, we can never be sure. It's possible, we've done similar research for the effect of exercise on the elderly before, we can do it again on other theories (i.e. can gaming help/prevent Parkinson's?).

While I said that war is normally a part of my strategy, I usually don't end up going for Conquest or Domination victories if I can help it. Normally I'll go for one of the peaceful victories because conquering the world can get kind of tedious. The reason I go to war is just to make my empire more powerful/secure. Like conquering my entire continent or an enemy "wonder city". I play Civ with friends occasionally and when I say that I am usually a peaceful player, they always point out that I am the most warlike player of our group. Maybe there are some real world parallels there.

The book is called Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson. It follows Lawrence of Arabia and a few other lesser known individuals and how they affected the war in the middle east in WW1. It doesn't really read like history and it's pretty easy to follow.

this is like a parody of a gamer hot take or something

> They often gives poor rating to a game for no reason even though the game ends up selling quite well.

???

> what is the point of a reviewer if they can't predict which game will sell better? Or is there another objective of a game journalist which we ought to know about?

uh

> Battlefield 5 received very high rating from some reviewers and they applauded some political aspect of the game. However it was received quite poorly among battlefield players.

uh ok?

> it is said to be the best horror game ever made, it's definitely one of the best titles in last 10 years.

is it though

> Many reviewers bashed GTA5 for "encouraging violence"

who

> Many outlets even forced to stop selling physical copies of Rockstar games because of reviewers/activists.

who

> The division 2 is not out yet

uummm

> if we add cuphead and other difficult games in this game the list will never end.

wut

> I am being criticized because seems like many people think it's not a job of reviewers to determine whether a game will sell well. Then tell me, how do you feel about games as service?

wut

> They will rate RDR2 low and mass effect high because of political points and not gameplay.

who

> You guys just don't care about AAA gaming market collapse

whew

> gaming journalism being dead

whew

> Some of you will be the reason behind the death of video game industry as we know it.

whew

> Feel free to downvote me into oblivion.

ok

You're right that everyone was gung-ho to go to war, but that doesn't change the fact that people will confuse or combine WW1/WW2, and/or associate the Germans to evil regardless (since the story is told by the victor, or however the phrase goes).

I remember reading a book in 5th grade (I Was There) that was a real eye-opener (as much as can be said for being in 5th grade). During a war, there are really very few people who can truly be considered evil/at fault.

Edit: OP has revealed the truth. He does not hate capitalism, nor does he support socialism. He sees flaws in capitalism but stil supports it, and wished to test the socialism jerk on /r/truegaming , and also admits to not know that much about economics. This makes me respect OP a bit more, but I'm also not a fan of this type of manipulation in general as I feel it can lead to a waste of people's time. Hopefully, we've collectively at least informed those who didn't know of how capitalism can deal with this situation.

OP /u/whatamidoing11 I'd love it if you (or anyone) read this;

I understand you. Do you understand capitalism?

TL;DR OP blames capitalism for next gen consoles and believes socialism is better

I just went on OP's user page and read all their replies in this submission, and it was eye opening.

OP, you're not just angry at the lack of economic understanding in Redditors (if that lack of understanding even exists). You're angry at the economic system of capitalism. You're angry at the lack of understanding that the problems of the new generating of consoles are, as you perceive them, based on problems in capitalism, or at least our implementation of it, which you do not support.

No wonder you were upset that people thought you were a hardcore Republican! You're pretty much the opposite! You hate our version of capitalism!

The economic systems that you do support are:

> (Social Democracy, Socialism, Resource based societies, etc...)

Let me tell you how I misunderstood your original post.

I thought you were asking us to just accept these problems because they unavoidably stem from capitalism; that we should accept them and move on. I thought you were mockingly appeasing those who were unwilling to accept the problems by offering them an alternative you did not believe in.

It was the opposite. You are unwilling to accept these problems, and you believe strongly in these alternative economic systems.

Firstly, I know some basic economics.

I took a course. I read the book Naked Economics. That's not much, but it's a start. Maybe I'm brainwashed, or maybe I'm informed.

Do you know economics? Do you really know capitalism?

Next, you said yourself that you

> don't know a lot about economics

And that concerns me, because I wonder whether you hate capitalism because you truly hate it and believe in these other systems, or because you misunderstand capitalism. I'm not an expert economist either, and don't know about your other economic systems. Maybe you're right, or maybe you're wrong.

Whatever the case may be, if you've only learned about capitalism from sources that hate capitalism, I urge you to learn about it from a source that loves and understands capitalism like Naked Economics. It may change your mind, it might simply re-affirm your beliefs, or maybe you already know it all and it's a waste of your time. That's why I said if.

A lot of the other comments are already defending capitalism, and I've got a defence of it too, but I better see what work the others have done first to avoid repetition.

Edit: Wait, Socialism?

Now, socialism instantly brings communism to mind. Now, I'm not one to immediately dismiss communism and anything related to it just because America had a war against it, and I recognize that socialism is not communism. But I am highly skeptical of it based on actual economic reasons which are supported by the real life evidence of its failures. I intend to look into social democracy, socialism, and resource based societies as you suggested, but with skepticism.

I'll also put some of the burden on you. Commenters here have explained how capitalism will solve these problems. How exactly can socialism solve them?

Edit: Formatting