Chinese personality and online gaming

While poking around the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting website to see who's doing what & what's shaking in the world of, well, Asian studies, I came across an interesting panel entitled "Digitalized China: Internet Politics through Multidisciplinary Perspectives", which is way far afield from what I study, but interesting nonetheless. I was particularly interested in the abstract of someone at the Communication University of China:

The high prosperity of online gaming industries in Mainland China parallels its “reported” social problems occurring in the youth groups by the media. The potent organizations advocate the danger of online games and at the same time establish the cause-and-effect relations between teenagers addicted to the Internet and “electronic heroin”. Thus, the mainstream opinions on online games come to a negative extreme. However, from a dialectic view, when we emphasize too much on the negative sides of Chinese online gaming case, the unique Chinese personalities represented in this case is always neglected.

This project is based on my field observation in Beijing Youth Internet Addiction Treatment Center, which is dedicated to rectify those youngsters who are frenetic about online games by medicine, psychological and physical treatments. This paper aims to explore the unique Chinese personalities represented in online gaming activities and explain the cognitive conflicts between the digital natives (youngsters generally) and the non-natives (adults generally) by the methods of field observation, in-depth interviews and document analysis.

Lots of academic jargon, but after the recent spate of Chinese gamers in the news, I'd love to get my hands on this paper & see what an 'academic' study has yielding. I'm all for studying games & gaming in the Ivory Tower, and it's especially cool to see it from a perspective that I have a better grasp on than, say, the complicated psychology behind game design.

Wiimote Beats

Not exactly game related, but I think it's cool to see what people are doing with the Wiimote:

This weekend I finished the Wii Loop Machine software that I started a few weeks ago. It's a system for using the wireless Wii remote to sync, control, and manipulate loops in real time.

Video, application download, and some samples available at Wii Loop Machine [The Amazing Rolo via MAKE: blog]

Designing & marketing games for female players

Over at Joystiq, they have a roundup of a panel held at SXSW on "getting girls into the game". Actually, it was a nice step away from a lot of typical talks on women & gaming. I admit that I've been roped into writing more than one piece on my thoughts - as a gamer with boobs - on "women and gaming" or attracting more women to gaming. Like a lot of people, men and women alike, writing on the same subject, I tend to yowl that just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I need games made for or marketed towards me & the fact that I don't like playing Halo has nothing to do with me being a girl, just that I don't like first person shooters. Etc. etc. It all seems horribly cliched at this point & I think it did when I was writing it, too. I think it's the nature of the subject matter: none of us are saying anything that hasn't been said before in a thousand different forms by at least a thousand other people.

Anyways, the panel (and Joystiq's commentary) had some good points:

The majority of game publishers and developers are male, and when they try to make games for female gamers, they use things like focus groups and research numbers. As a result, they usually miss the target and develop games for them that suck. Then the games don't sell, so the publishers say, "Well, women don't play games."

They conclude a lot of this is more a marketing problem than not having a market or product problem. I just wonder when the industry is going to finally hit the target between two extremes of "women don't play games" and "they need games designed for them." Shouldn't people just concentrate on developing good games in general that everyone would like to play? ... And there I go, falling into the cliched girl gamer commentary trap again.

SXSW: Getting Girls Into The Game: Designing and Marketing Games for Female Players [Joystiq]

"Is Console Gaming Over?"

There's an editorial piece over at Business Week by David Ferrigno explaining why he thinks console gaming is going to be swept away by PCs.

The right combination of cost, portability, performance and ease-of use will allow the PC to re-shape the gaming landscape. The technologies are out there to make the PC fun and easy to use for all forms of media and living room entertainment.

I hate these sorts of arguments. I don't want my PC (well, in my case, Mac) to be "living room entertainment," and besides, the fact I have a Mac cuts me off from a ton of software support - and I'm not going back to a PC just so I can take full advantage of products designed for "casual gaming." I use my PC for two main things: internet and word processing. I don't like playing games with other people, which means most of the MMO draws are a non-issue for me & while I have a handful of "casual games" like he refers to in this piece, I don't want to spend a couple of hours immersed in Diner Dash.

I've always liked my consoles because I plug them in, stick a disc in, and know that it's going to work, and there's a wide variety of games I like to spend a few hours with. While this piece argues that PCs are become ever easier to use (I guess ...), and there are a number of good points (easier dissemination of the game equivalent of indy movies), and more people have PCs, I bristle at the thought of my computer as a complete jack of all trades that can do everything well and/or being able to magically replace my consoles (or handhelds). I have games in my library that simply don't have PC equivalents & probably never will, because they're just not popular enough in America.

The casual gaming market isn't going to shell out for a spendy Xbox or PS3 package, but they're not going to replace the people who are also console gamers. If I felt like my computer could do everything, I wouldn't have bothered shoving my PS2 in a suitcase and dragging it half way across the world with me. I notice these articles never point out the people who spend incredible amounts of money on a machine 'appropriate' or set up for gaming, or on hardware upgrades and so on and so forth ....

Is Console Gaming Over? [GameDAILY via Business Week]

Jack Thompson claims Take Two at the center of vast RICO conspiracy!

Just when I thought the crazy couldn't get any crazier, Jack Thompson steps in to prove me wrong! Game Politics reports that Thompson is alleging Take Two is, among other things, a bunch of "thuggish pornographers" and in a vast conspiracy to deprive Thompson of his civil liberties:

Take-Two has, since July 2005, been at the center of an effort to violate Thompson’s civil and constitutional rights… In addition to… extortion (intimidation) of Thompson… Take-Two has committed other predicate RICO acts, including but not limited to fraud, distribution of obscene and/or sexual material harmful to minors…

Additionally… Take-Two, through its Blank Rome lawyers, sought in Alabama to tamper with a witness in a pending criminal case, according to that witness’ lawyer.

This man just makes my brain hurt. His crusade against the gaming industry has been bizarre enough, but alleging that Take Two and some third parties like Game Politics, Kotaku, Joystiq, et al. have“collaborated and conspired with third parties to commit these racketeering activities” is moving into a whole different territory: paranoid delusions and conspiracy theories.

In Countersuit, Thompson Claims Take Two at Center of Vast RICO Conspiracy [Game Politics]

Parallels in games & social networking

Over at getlucky.net, there's an interesting three parter on Understanding Avatars in Games and Social Media (plus parts two and three). Drawing from sources like Xbox Live, WoW, and MySpace, the author examines avatars & related elements, from the obvious like your onscreen persona in a MMO to what's in your signature line on a forum.

I found that if a system didn’t provide the ability to automatically describe or summarize pertinent achievements or possessions, users often care enough to list them on their own.

Lots of shiny examples & interesting (if involved) discussion, and goes to show that people like their achievements out there for all the world to see.

Shanda liscenes Korean MMO for the Chinese market

Gamasutra had a really interesting piece up a few days ago entitled The China Angle: All Sins Forgiven, in light of the news that Shanda Interactive Entertainment was licensing the third online game of Korean company Wemade for the Chinese market. It's the second for Shanda, and the continuing relationship is proof that the huge potential market of mainland China is too much for companies to resist.

Despite Legend of Mir 2's popularity, Actoz terminated Shanda's license for the game in January 2003. Shanda continued to operate the game without a license and without technical support. In February 2003, Wemade started an investigation of World of Legend, a new MMORPG Shanda was developing in-house that shared many similarities with Legend of Mir 2, including name, content, and playing style. A month later, Wemade licensed the next game in the Mir series to Guangdong based Optisp. Wemade's legal battle against Shanda dragged on for another two years.

"Intellectual property rights? What intellectual property rights?" is a point of view that runs pretty deeply in China (and to a slightly lesser extent, Taiwan), and has incurred the wrath of some very big companies. But considering the potential goldmine waiting to be tapped, and Shanda's position as the most prominent game operators on the Mainland, it's not surprising that Wemade would come back for a (hopefully more productive/less lawsuit heavy) third round with Shanda.

And proving just how seriously Chinese gamers take their gaming, the article has this nice little side note on an incident surrounding accounts on a popular MMO being suspended for cheating:

Two days after Moliyo's announcement, a group of gamers stormed into and vandalized Moliyo's Shanghai office. In the aftermath, it appeared as if a tornado swept through the office. Graffitied on the office walls were phrases like "reactivate accounts," "return money," and "deceived gamers." Three were led away by the police.

Oh, China. Never a dull moment.

The China Angle: All Sins Forgiven [Gamasutra]