Now as my university is building a reward system, I need to voice my concerns on reward systems.

First, how do you judge what is good research? One might not be able to comprehend the value of research beforehand. As an example, could anyone at George Boole’s time predict the importance of his work on mathematical logic? Moreover, if the criteria for the rewards is likely to guide the research. What if the criteria is such that it does not courage for the novel research?

Second, it seems that external rewards can have demotivating  effect. Jesper Juul (in a different context) writes:

A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and started drawing less.

Are adults different from children regarding this?

Third, other studies indicate that rewards are good in simple tasks, but the performance drastically drop when a reward is introduced if the task requires reasoning (I cannot find the references now, but some are mentioned in Dan Pink’s talk).

I hope I am wrong here, because if these concerns are valid we are misdirecting our scarce resources.

Note for myself: read this:

Fernandez Vara, C. (2009). The tribulations of adventure games: integrating story into simulation through performance. Doctoral Dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology. URL=http://hdl.handle.net/1853/31756.

A study reports enhanced attentional resources of action game players:

This work further documents the enhanced attentional resources of action video gamers and establishes faster reaction times in that population without a notable loss in accuracy. These effects were seen throughout the age range studied suggesting similar effects of action game playing from the early school years through to adulthood. While causality can only be inferred with a training study, the findings are in accord with attentional changes that have been previously trained in NVGPs using action video games.¹

Study also site several other studies showing similar results.

Notes

1. Dye, Green & Bavelier (2009). The development of attention skills in action video game players.  Neuropsychologia 47(8-9), pp. 1780-1789, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.02.002.

My paper Player Character Engagement in Computer Games was accepted to Games and Culture. Here is the abstract:

This article argues how players can control a player character influence interpretation and facilitate engagement within a game. Engagement with player characters can be goal-related or empathic, where goal-related engagement depends on affects elicited by goal-status evaluations whereas characters facilitate empathic engagement. The concepts of recognition, alignment, and allegiance are used to describe how engagement is structured in games. Recognition describes aspects of character interpretation. Alignment describes what kind of access players have to a character’s actions, knowledge, and affects. Allegiance describes how characters elicit sympathy or antipathy through positive or negative evaluation of the character.

Tavinor, Grant (2009). The Art of Videogames. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Tavinor looks at games using tool-set from the analytical philosophy of art,using especially the philosophy of fiction.

As the book is drawing on analytical philosophy, the discussion of the definition of videogame is inevitable. Fortunately, Tavinor does not just start a definition project, but discuss the different kinds of definitions and their uses. Definition offered is well-developed, but it trust the idea of intended use that makes skeptical (this is not fully though-out, but a hunch).

A big part of the book deals with games as fiction and character-based games. Again, the treatment of fiction start with a closer look of concepts used in game research. Aarseth’s argument that functional game objects are virtual, not fictional, is rejected. Tavinor present a compelling argument why the game objects are fictional and videogames are usually virtual fictions (I have criticized  Aarserth’s fictional–virtual–real dichotomy earlier, see http://mlab.taik.fi/~plankosk/blog/?p=6). After that Tavinor discusses what kind of fiction games are using Walton¹ theory as a stepping stone:

Modern, fictively rich video games … allow their players to step into a visuospatial fictional world in the guise of a player-character. The player character is the player’s epistemic and behavioral  proxy in the game world, allowing them to discover the many facts of the fictional world, and to act in the world. (p. 84.)

Tavinor also discusses narrative in, emotions in, and ethics of videogames, as well as games as art. Tavinor’s emotion theory seems rather close to what I have proposed in my paper Goals, Affects, Empathy in Games.  Tavinor writes:

Big Daddies in BioShock are so threatening that the players must steel themselves before encounter. … This is because, fictionally, the player-character and the BigDaddy do “exist” in the same ontological game world. (p. 142.)

I partly agree with this, but I see that BigDaddy can be frightening, because it threatens the players real goals at the same time BigDaddy fictionally threatens the  player-character.

This is a book worth of reading. The arguments are well-presented, and hopefully we will see this same kind of rigor in argumentation more in game research.

References

1. Walton, Kendal (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

The Digra Conference 2009 Proceedings, Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Play, Practice and Theory, is now available at digra digital library.

Methods seminar at University of Tampere, 8-9 April, 2010:

What are the approaches and methods that are useful while studying games, play and related phenomena? The dynamic nature of interactive game form, the changing strategies adopted during actual play, as well as the multiple research questions that surround the design, implementation, distribution as well as the social uses of games all present their distinctive requirements for the methods that are suitable for their study.

Full CFP is available at http://gamesmethods.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/call-for-papers-games-research-methods-seminar/

Now, after handling in the dissertation manuscript, I have really started to read and seek new things. Now on my table is following books:

• Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten, The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design (Lone Eagle Publishing Company, 2007). The book, so far, is a very practical and though-provoking look at writing and designing  action games.
• Wendy Despain (ed.), Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing (AK Peters, 2008). I have read seven first chapters and found them bit shallow.
• Pernard Berron & Mark J.P. Wolf, The Video Game Theory Reader (Routledge, 2009).  16 essays looking at video games on various perspectives.
• Grant Tavinor, The Art of Video Games (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Tavinor, using the framework of analytical philosopohy, studies video games. The content of the book (by looking at the table of contents and Tavinor’s presentation at the Philosophy of Computer Games conference) ranges from defining video games to relations between fiction and games, as well as emotions in games.

There are at two of books I like to get:

• Miguel Sigart, The Ethics of Computer Games (The MIT Press, 2009).
• Alva Noe, Out of Our Heads (Hill and Wang, 2009).

Inger Ekman and I wrote a chapter, Hair-Raising Entertainment: Emotions, Sound, and Structure in Silent Hill 2 and Fatal Frame, for the book Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play edited by Bernard Perron (published by McFarland Publishing). The book should be out early October.

Many publishers ask researchers to secure copyright owners permissions for screenshots for academic works. However, typical academic use falls under fair use. Jesper Juul writes that following argument (that permissions is not needed) can and should be used when publishers ask the permissions:

1. Precedent: Video game reviews, commentary, as well as a large body of academic scholarship uses video game screenshots under assumptions of fair use.
2. The court decision of U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals SONY v BLEEM 9917137v2 ruled that screenshots can be used under fair use (http://laws.lp.findlaw.com/getcase/9th/case/9917137v2&exact=1)
3. To assert the copyright of the game developers, we have added game developer and publication year under each image.