Only a Game

Pokémon GO Update: The Highs, the Lows

Over at ihobo today, yet more Pokémon GO reporting, this time looking at how the player community is adjusting to the update after a week.

Why so much on this game? Well, partly because this update is a big deal for Niantic and I want to chip in some professional perspective on it. Mainly because it’s a rare case of something having happened in the games industry that I’m actually interested in, so it’s a good opportunity to rebuild my blogging momentum. I have other blog pieces in production at the moment, but I’m struggling to get the time to work on them. Conversely, cranking out a thousand words on the game I’m playing with my kids is relatively easy win for me... it keeps me blogging, at that’s valuable to me in and of itself.

Pokémon GO Raids: First Weekend

My ongoing coverage of the recent update to Pokémon GO continues on ihobo today, focussing on the first weekend of Raids.

Pokémon GO Gym Update

Over on ihobo this morning, a report on the first night of Niantic’s new gym system. It was indeed a colossal land grab, although the gym defence meta-game is going to be shaken up in good ways by the new setup. Not so sure about the players’ opinions of Niantic after the cash-strangle, though… Check out Wave Goodbye to the 3,000 CP Overlords if you have an interest in the game.

Why Niantic's Gym Gamble Could Pay Off

Surprised myself this morning by writing something about game design, specifically, the imminent update of the Gym system in Niantic’s Pokémon GO. Check it out on ihobo.com!

Interview for Pop Philosophy

Delighted to report that the Russian website Pop Philosophy has an interview with me, in both Russian and English, talking about games, philosophy, Discordians, and cyber-squirrels. Here’s an extract:

There are those who suggest we are living in a golden age of videogames, and if you look at the volume of titles today there is certainly a huge amount out there. But for me, really interesting or engaging titles are few and far between. On the one hand, the upper end of the market, AAA console games, feels constricted by the size of the audience they need to court. It is amazing what is being made now, but we’re deeply into iterating upon the existing player practices. If you wanted to find original concepts, AAA would be the wrong place to look. But then I look at what the indie community delivers and, unsurprisingly, they are making the games they want to play, which are mostly just iterating on the existing player practices too but with less budget and so more rough edges. There’s greater emphasis on puzzles, some ugly violence in the corners, a lot of half-executed retro sensibilities…it’s not lacking inventiveness so much as it has no aesthetic ambition. It’s too safe. It mostly bores me.

Check it out over at the PPh website!

Shouty Men in Hats

I can only applaud this analysis by Nicholas Lovell about the use of Shouty Men in Hats on Apples’ app store. I too had noticed this – but it took Nicholas’ keen business sense to turn that observation into a salient summary of a trend. Check it out at Gamesbrief!

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

Announcing the Publisher

It gives me great pleasure to announce that The Virtuous Cyborg will be published by Squint Books, the cultural and political imprint of renowned poetry micro-press Eyewear Publishing. We are planning for an Autumn 2017 release date.

You can read the blurb, and a short introduction for the publisher and author, over on the new book blog at cyborg.ihobo.com.

Check it out!

Cyberamicable Game Design

Is it possible to design videogames to encourage friendships? This is a question about whether cyberamicable games are a possibility, and it’s one that

Earlier this year, Dan Cook published a long report from his November 2016 Project Horseshoe visit, entitled Game Design Patterns for Building Friendships. This is precisely a discussion about what I have been calling cybervirtue, in the context of games, and I want to suggest that games that are designed to encourage friendship would be cyberamicable, since we call ‘amicable’ a person who gets on well with others, or who forms friendships easily.

Here’s an extract from Dan’s piece:

Games that lack the tools for disclosing personal info between two people will never facilitate deep relationships. They may never even facilitate shallow relationships since players see that there will never be a long term future for any relationship they form in the game. However, disclosure is a highly risky action and teams will often try to cut it from their designs. Sharing information before a relationship is strong enough can result in broken or antagonistic relationships.

There’s a ton of useful and thought-provoking ideas here, and it’s well worth a look for anyone working in the space of multiplayer games. Check it out!

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

The Cybervirtues of Elections?

With a General Election here in the UK this Thursday, I have been wondering about the cybervirtue of the election process. This question could be framed: does as any good come out of the mechanisms we currently use to vote? This seems strange at first blush, but the point is that different technologies (including something as apparently simple as paper stuffed in a ballot box) has moral influence upon us both individually and collecively.

In terms of virtues, the typical election process supports our anonymity and thus as the cyborgs engaging in voting we display something akin to cybertact in so much as our political position is kept to ourselves. Yet the bluntness of the process sometimes seems to push away from any virtuous engagement with the electorate. It has the sharp terminal quality of a game of bingo, which terminates abruptly and delivers a victor in a manner approaching random.

Could there be a technology (paper or digital) that encouraged more virtuous engagement with politics during the election process? What would that look like? Which countries have developed electoral processes that seem least likely to be enmired with the debilities of the ‘winner takes all’ systems? Or is there some hidden merit to First Past the Post, a system that invites every election to be reduced to hot button issues, and buries any sense of political nuance?