Henrik Bennetsen.com

Please join us on Tuesday the 17th of April 2007 from 3pm - 4:30pm on the 4th floor of Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University for a How They Got Game workshop with Jesper Juul.

Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005.  Additionally, he works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. His blog, The Ludologist, can be found at http://www.jesperjuul.net /ludologist

Abstract:

In 1977, there were no “hardcore” players of video games: Every video game had to be created with the assumption that players had no understanding of video games, genres, and controllers. Thirty years later, video games are primarily designed for players with extensive knowledge of video game conventions. This is how video games gained a specialized audience, but lost the general public. In this perspective, video games have long ago become a developed “art”, created for connoisseurs, by connoisseurs with a deep understanding of the medium. Using examples, I will discuss the rise of the hardcore gamer market, and how video games are once again opening up to new players via new platforms like the Wii, and via casual games.

For more information or to show an interest in attending please contact Henrik Bennetsen - bennetsen@gmail.com

Please join us on Wednesday the 4th of April 2007 at 3pm on the 4th floor of Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University for a How They Got Game workshop with Daniel Huebner.

For more information or to show an interest in attending please contact Henrik Bennetsen - bennetsen@gmail.com

Sitting here in Newark airport having just entered on my brand new H1B visa. Last update on my life was about my having started my thesis work back in May 06, so lemme start there. Working on the thesis turned out to be a really great experience. It started with a desire to understand creativity in Second Life. As a part of the project I was working out of the Linden Lab offices in North Beach. This was a really cool place to be literally as the snowballing feeling around Second Life really started to kick in. In the fall I wrote up my thesis and went back to Denmark and successfully defended it in December 06.

My returning to the States now marks the official (looong story) start of my work as content manager for the L2 research project at Stanford University. More details on this later. Basically I was a little written out after my thesis, so blog updates have been far between and few. Feeling myself coming back now, so with any luck and stuff that I need to bang on about then this blog should spring back to life again.

I have to say that I am in two minds about Jaron Lanier’s Digital Maoism essay. On one hand the serious open discussion of good and bad things about Wikipedia is overdue and the other hand I believe he makes a fundamental mistake. Calling Wikipedia a result of the hive mind is a simplification that you meet in main stream media all the time, which I suspect has lead certain people to think that Wikipedia is some kind of magic pixie dust and if you don’t believe this you then something must be wrong with you.

The important distinction that gets lost here is between collectivism and collective action. Wikipedia is not the average result of the efforts of everyone who ever typed www.wikipedia.org into their browser, but rather the work of a dedicated relatively small core of people empowered by technology that have taken the “collective action” to build a free online encyclopedia. Interestingly Lanier states the distinction well this himself, but fails to apply it:

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first time I heard of Danger Mouse was when he put out the outstanding Grey Album. A mashup of vox from Jay-Z’s The Black Album & The White Album by the mighty Beatles. The fading giant EMI did not like this one bit and served our little mouse friend who was forced to comply. This again led to some tasty civil disobedience; Grey Tuesday (First Monday piece on this) courtesy of the good people at Downhill Battle. These people think culture has always been made by talented people who got inspired by other talented people, just like science actually. Imagine our world if scientists were not allowed to incorporate each others works. If you can go here. Then I’ll get off my soapbox for a while and just be happy that our little friend is now back with Gnarls Barkley. Their Crazy is appropriately the first single ever to go number one in the UK based just of download sales. Catch a fantastic live performance of it and check out BBC ONE’s bit on them.

I am about one month into my thesis and things are moving along nicely, so I thought I’d give it a quick plug here. I went and saw Cory Ondrejka at Linden Lab out in North Beach a few months back. He told me that 75% of people in Second Life had created something from scratch in the last seven days. You may ask: “Created what exactly?” but it seems like something that deserved a second look. I always try to boil things down to the bare essentials, so I formulated this question:

Do creative people become SL residents or do SL residents become creative people?

This forms the basis for the qualitative analysis of creativity in Second Life I have now embarked on. At SLCreativity.org I intend to pour my thoughts into the wiki and blog about my thoughts as they pop into my head along the way. You are hereby formally invited to join in the conversation.

I created this website as a way to think to about games. Games, as in computer games, are the subject of my next book, GAM3R 7H30RY. I am interested in two questions.

1. can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
2. can there be a critical theory of games?

All in all, an envelope-pushing endeavor, in both form and content. Eventually, GAM3R 7H30RY will be published by a conventional press, but between now and then we’re trying to investigate new creative strategies in the peer-to-peer environment. We call this a ‘networked book’ — the book as social software. We’re hoping to spark discussion about that as well.

This interests me for so many reasons.

[Via Boing Boing]

So Will Wright is writing a book. This is very exiting. If he can keep the standards he displays in his talks then I don’t think claiming best selling game design book ever would constitute sticking your neck out too far. Right now if you want to learn about Wright’s interesting views on how to make games you’re left to dig up his talks online in various random visual and audio quality levels. Hopefully the book will be the end of that. (Can I just bring to your attention how I resisted any and all urges to make plays on words in the headline?)