video games

On Playing Video Games in Iraq

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Simon Parkin, writing in The New Yorker, chronicles how video games have become a welcome refuge in the war-torn Iraq. For many kids, it’s a way to spend significant time at home and staying safe in the process:

The rise of video games in Iraq is a relatively recent phenomenon. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, it was difficult to buy them, and only relatively well-off, professional-class families like Mohammed’s could afford to import titles from Europe. Until the advent of disc-based video games in the mid-nineties, it was too difficult to pirate game cartridges. “The industry is still in its infancy in Iraq,” said Omar M. Alanseri, the owner of the Iraqi Games Center, one of only a small number of dedicated video-game retailers in Baghdad, which opened sixteen months ago. “But each year, more people get involved. I’ve seen the audience vastly increase, especially among teen-agers.”

Nevertheless, finding stock for Alanseri’s store shelves can be a challenge. “It’s not easy for me to get new games,” he said. “Mostly we import from online sites like Amazon.” Relatively few video games have been created by Iraqis. “Many games created here are not good enough to be published,” said Abdulla. “There is one title called Labaik Ya Iraq, which means ‘Iraq, We Answer Your Call.’ It is a strategy game, but not as good as, say, Command & Conquer.” Consequently, piracy remains rampant, and many copied games can be purchased for around a dollar.

This is unsurprising:

Some of the most popular video games in Iraq, as in America, are military-themed shooters, in which the player assumes the role of a soldier and blasts through waves of virtual enemies. “Almost all of my friends play video games like World of Tanks [and] Battlefield 3,” said Abdulla. “In fact, we have some of the top-ranked players in the world here.” The interest in military games stems from the local environment as much as, in the case of many players, male vanity. “Growing up, my life was completely military-focused,” Abdulla said. “It is the way we are raised. For example, I was taught how to use an AK-47 when I was in elementary school. Younger players who are not so affected by Saddam’s agendas play other game types more easily than we do, like Minecraft and other non-military games.”

Many of these first-person shooters, often created with input from U.S. military advisers—a handful of Navy SEALs was punished for consulting on the 2012 video game Medal of Honor: Warfighter—are set against the backdrop of fictionalized real-world conflicts, often within Middle Eastern countries. Some have entire sections set within Iraq, like the Battlefield series.

Read the entire piece here.

The Stock-Trading Platform in Grand Theft Auto V

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Two interesting posts by Kevin Roose on a mini-game within Grand Theft Auto V: description of the stock trading platform there (which allows the buying and selling of individual stocks in fake companies) and how some fans have decided to manipulate the virtual markets in the game:

To understand what’s happening, a few background data points might be necessary:

• There are two playable stock exchanges inside GTA V: LCN and BAWSAQ. On each of these exchanges, you can buy and sell stocks using the virtual cash you amass during the course of the game. (This cash has no real-world value, but it can be used to buy houses, airplane hangars, and other cool things inside the game.)

• Most of the time, these stock prices appear to move randomly. But in certain missions, your character is given a tip that, due to an in-game event (usually, an assassination of a CEO), a company’s stock is about to rise or fall precipitously. When this happens, you’re supposed to load up on the stock (or its competitor’s stock), kill the CEO, then profit from your trades.

• Rockstar Games, the makers of GTA V, have hinted (but never confirmed) that BAWSAQ, the second exchange, might be dynamic — in other words, it might move in response to the actions of other GTA V players, whose trades feed into a central online database. If thousands of players around the world happen to buy a bunch of guns simultaneously, the theory went, the BAWSAQ might reflect that activity by raising the price of Ammu-Nation stock (Ammu-Nation being the store where guns are purchased).

• There is no penalty for insider trading or securities fraud in Grand Theft Auto.

Neat. Too bad it’s not possible to short stocks in the two markets of GTA V.

Myst, Twenty Years Later

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Grantland looks back at the iconic game Myst, on its twenty year anniversary:

The premise was deceptively simple: You are The Stranger, a person of inconsequential gender, race, or origin, minding your own business when a book falls into the black starlit void you call home. When you open it, you are transported to a mysterious island, and as you explore it you begin to uncover its history; the story of its caretaker, Atrus; his art of creating worlds, called “ages,” including Myst Island itself; and his two sons, Sirrus and Achenar, who beg you to release them from the confines of their prison ages, where they have been entrapped for some unknown crime. This sets you off on a journey to four more ages, unraveling innumerable (some might say infuriating) puzzles and gradually piecing together, almost entirely from environmental clues, what happened to this family, and whom among them you can trust. You do this entirely by yourself. You encounter nobody else and you are neither helped nor harmed — though that doesn’t keep a creeping sense of dread from permeating these otherwise benign worlds. You have no weapons or tools at your disposal aside from the physical journal that came packaged with the CD-ROM. When you “win,” there are no fireworks or rewards. You are merely told the island is yours to wander for as long as you like. For nearly a decade, this was the best-selling computer game of all time.1

Twenty years ago, people talked about Myst the same way they talked about The Sopranosduring its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium. It certainly felt like nothing in gaming would or could be the same after it. If you remember the game, you remember that feeling of landing on Myst Island for the first time, staggeringly bereft of information in a way that felt like some kind of reverse epiphany, left with no option but to start exploring. This was a revolutionary feeling to have while staring at your PC screen. And the word-of-mouth carried — people who had never gamed before in their lives bought new computers so they could play Myst. “It is the first artifact of CD-ROM technology that suggests that a new art form might very well be plausible, a kind of puzzle box inside a novel inside a painting, only with music,” came the impassioned, if grasping prophecy from Wired’s Jon Carroll. “Or something.”

I remember playing this game on my first PC. And I agree with this, even if I wasn’t a hard-core gamer:

[M]any hard-core gamers found it obtuse and frustrating, its point-and-click interface slideshow-esque and stifling. Maybe Myst wasn’t for hard-core gamers. Maybe it wasn’t even really a game.

The author’s leap that Myst lead to Grand Theft Auto V is a bit far-fetched, but I do like the overall theme of Myst leading to games that embraced the open-world environments.

Minecraft as an Education Tool

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I’ve observed my younger cousins playing the game of Minecraft, and this New York Times article espouses the benefits of this video game:

Earlier this year, for example, a school in Stockholm made Minecraft compulsory for 13-year-old students. “They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future,” said Monica Ekman, a teacher at the Viktor Rydberg school.

Around the world, Minecraft is being used to educate children on everything from science to city planning to speaking a new language, said Joel Levin, co-founder and education director at the company TeacherGaming. TeacherGaming runs MinecraftEdu, which is intended to help teachers use the game with students.

A history teacher in Australia set up “quest missions” where students can wander through and explore ancient worlds. An English-language teacher in Denmark told children they could play Minecraft collectively in the classroom but with one caveat: they were allowed to communicate both orally and through text only in English. A science teacher in California has set up experiments in Minecraft to teach students about gravity.

Also, could Minecraft make better doctors? Apparently so:

A study by S.R.I. International, a Silicon Valley research group that specializes in technology, found that game-based play could raise cognitive learning for students by as much as 12 percent and improve hand-eye coordination, problem-solving ability and memory.

Games like Minecraft also encourage what researchers call “parallel play,” where children are engrossed in their game but are still connected through a server or are sharing the same screen. And children who play games could even become better doctors. No joke. Neuroscientists performed a study at Iowa State University that found that surgeons performed better, and were more accurate on the operating table, when they regularly played video games.

If you want a movie recommendation, I watched Indie Game: The Movie on Netflix the other day. It is a very interesting documentary that goes behind the scenes of Indie game developers and how their lives have been affected as they’ve spent (typically) years working on creating games like Braid, Minecraft, and Fez.

How Gang Members Helped Create Grand Theft Auto V

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I’m not much of a gamer, but this news of real gang members being used in the upcoming (on what’s bound to be a hit) Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V is fascinating:

Contributing writer, talk show host, and in-game DJ “Lazlow” Jones revealed the information on Chicago’s WGN radio station, explaining: “We get these guys in to record the gang characters because we don’t want a goofy LA actor who went to a fancy school trying to be a hard gang member. There’s nothing worse than that, so just go find the real terrifying people and say ‘can you come in here please?'”

Rockstar recruited a person to find the criminals, including “El Salvadorian gang dudes with amazing tattoos, one of which literally had gotten out of prison the day before.” Jones says this lets the game get closer to reality than otherwise possible, with the actors often given free reign to improvise. “They look at the lines and say, ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ so we say, ‘OK, say what you would say.’ Authenticity, you know?”

Read more here.

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Disclosure: I’ve pre-ordered the game from Amazon for my PS3.

MoMA Says: Video Games are Art

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The Museum of Modern Art in New York City recently acquired 14 video games to their permanent collection. From their blog post, and perhaps much to the chagrin of Roger Ebert:

Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity. Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design. In order to develop an even stronger curatorial stance, over the past year and a half we have sought the advice of scholars, digital conservation and legal experts, historians, and critics, all of whom helped us refine not only the criteria and the wish list, but also the issues of acquisition, display, and conservation of digital artifacts that are made even more complex by the games’ interactive nature. This acquisition allows the Museum to study, preserve, and exhibit video games as part of its Architecture and Design collection.

The list of games in MoMA’s permanent collection:

• Pac-Man (1980)
• Tetris (1984)
• Another World (1991)
• Myst (1993)
• SimCity 2000 (1994)
• vib-ribbon (1999)
• The Sims (2000)
• Katamari Damacy (2004)
• EVE Online (2003)
• Dwarf Fortress (2006)
• Portal (2007)
• flOw (2006)
• Passage (2008)
• Canabalt (2009)

Of those games, I’ve played Pac-Man, Tetris, Myst, SimCity2000, The Sims, Portal, and Canabalt (this was a surprise addition to the collection, I think). How about you?

Read the rest of MoMA’s post to discover the criteria for admission of these video games into their permanent collection.