Resident Evil Update: Why missing it matters.

A few weeks ago, I vanquished the final foe, and completed my first video game.

It was less satisfying than I had imagined it might be. In the game, my reward for defeating the final bad guy (two rocket launchers did the trick) was saving the girl. In real life, my reward was… satisfaction in my completed task?

I think I was underwhelmed because while I wanted to beat the game, mostly I wanted to keep playing it. I miss playing it.

That’s the mark of a good game: when even the built-in goal of the game takes a backseat to the simple experience of playing it.

Many of you know about the work I'm doing in graduate school... you can learn more about it at my research group's website, which you can find here.

Epistemic games have inherent goals, such as publishing an online journal or designing and presenting spring-mass creatures for clients, that are exciting and rewarding outcomes for the players. But the activities that lead up to these successes are really fun (even when they are really hard).

Interviewing scientists or experimenting on Sodaconstructor is fun, but one difference is that after the actual game, players can take their personae with them. One great example is the middle-school age girl who played science.net and months later continued to immerse herself in both science and journalism. She wrote a letter about stem cell research to Newseek.

And got it published.

The French: Self-serving or forward-thinking (or both)?

The New York Times reported Monday, November 6th that the French Culture Minister is hoping to guarantee subsidies for the French video game industry, cementing its status along with the cinema industry as a valuable cultural enterprise.

The more cynical of us might judge the French vote of confidence as an act of economic self-preservation in a cutthroat industry.

I prefer to think of this a just another example of how rapidly games are integrating into cultural landscapes across the globe.