A Report Media effects on minors – review of international research and practices of media education and regulation (Salokoski & Mustonen) has been recently published.

Sonja Kangas has already made some insightful comments on it. I choose to comment the report from the other point view, as I find some premises and facts in the report problematic.

Salokoski and Mustonen, e.g., allege that the children learns the grammar of pictorial media between 3 and 6. As an example they mention that children starts to understand that when camera zooms to a target, the target does not grow (Salokoski & Mustonen, 2007).

Why the children would have that kind of conception of zooming? Their everyday experiences does not support that: in everyday life when something grows suddenly, that thing gets closer. There are multitude of research that argue, and present evidence for support the argument, that presentations (schemas, or scripts) of the possible actions (e.g., touching the target) influence the perception and judgments. (See, e.g., Niedhental et al, 2005; Noë, 2004; Gallagher, 2005). Is there any empirical support for the claims posited by Salokoski & Mustonen on the grammar of visual media?

In addition, Salokoski & Mustonen (2007) seems to assume that understanding requires concepts: e.g., understanding that things are persistent (something exists even it is hidden) requires understanding the concept of persistence that is developed around the age of two according to Salokoski and Mustonen (2007). This is very problematic if I assume that Sthey use the term concept to refer to linguistic constructs. Again, I think that is no reason to assume that one require a concept persistent to understand persistence. Moreover, Meltzoff & Moore (1995) discuss experiments where an object moves and in the middle it is a short while hidden. They repost that 5-month old infants trace moving objects with their gaze and respond violations, such as object that the object is a ball before occlusion and square after occlusion, differently than without a violation. They also assert that 9-month old children responds to violations of permanence (Melzoff & Moore, 1995). This research contest the timeline of the children’s development asserted by Salokoski & Mustonen.

Above mentioned assumptions (by Salokoski & Mustonen, 2007) seem to be invalid. Thus, arguments presented in the report may also (at least partially) be invalid.

References

• Gallagher, S. How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Melzoff, A. & Moore, M. (1995) Infants’ understanding of people and things: From body imitation to folk psychology. In Bermúdez, J. Marcel, A. & Eilan, N. (eds.). The Body and the Self. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 43–69.
• Niedenthal, P., Barsalou, L. Winkielman, P., Gruber, S. & Ric, F. Embodiment in attitudes, social perception, and emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review 9(3), 184–211.
• Noë, A. Action in perception. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
• Salokoski, T. & Mustonen, A. (2007). Median vaikutukset lapsiin ja nuoriin – katsaus tutkimuksiin sekä kansainvälisiin mediakasvatuksen ja -säätelyn käytäntöihin [Media effects on minors - review of international research and practices of media education and regulation]. Available http://www.mediaeducation.fi/publications/ISBN978-952-99964-2-1_taittamaton.pdf.

Steven Poole’s book Trigger Happy is downloadable at his site for limited time. The book is worthy to read.

Laramée has written small piece on character-based game design. He writes:

A [player] character is only interesting if:

• He or she wants something badly;
• And he or she can’t get it without a struggle.

And

Spend as much time giving motivations to your bad guys as to your heroes!

An insightful but really short peace.

Laramée, F. (2000). Character-Based Game Design. Available http://www.gignews.com/fdlcharacterdesign.htm.

We hereby invite scholars in any field who take a professional interest in the phenomenon of computer games to submit papers to the international conference “The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008″, to be held in Potsdam, Germany, on May 8-10, 2008.

Further details at:

http://www.gamephilosophy.org/

Petri Lankoski
Media Lab
University of Art and Design Helsinki

Staffan Björk
Interaction Design Collegium
Chalmers University of Technology & Göteborg University

In GDTW2007 Proceedings
Fifth International Game Design and Technology Workshop and Conference
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
14–15 November 2007

ABSTRACT
This paper explores how games can be designed to make the social networks of characters as part of the gameplay. We start with a premise that game characters and social relations between them are import in games. We examine several games and derive gameplay design patterns from those games. Models from social network analysis, actor-network theory and Egri’s model for dramatic conflict is used to focus the analysis. In addition to isolating design patterns from existing features of the games, we look situations where game structures do not support social networks or conflicts as proposed in above-mentioned theories. Patterns identified include Competing for Attention, Gain Allies, Social Dilemma, Internal Conflict, and Social Maintenance.

Keywords
Gameplay Design Patterns, Gameplay, Narration, Non-player Character, Computer Games, Gameplay Design

1. INTRODUCTION
As social creatures, humans easier to engage in a game and narration when characters portrayed in these have social relations to each other, or in other words that the relations between characters form a social network. This is common knowledge within scriptwriting theories for theatre and film (see, e.g., [6, 7, 17, 19]), and these theories are also applied to creating games. However, social relations in games are typically part of the storyline (see, e.g., Thief II: The Metal Age [34], Dead or Alive 3 [44], Silent Hill 3 [45], and Half-Life [48]) and games typically do not let players directly act to influences those relations, instead letting them be consequences of other (most commonly physical) actions that are shown through cut-scenes. One example of this can be found in Quake 4 [22] where the relation between the player character, Matthew Kane, and the other characters in the Rhino squad are only changed in the cut scenes. No possibilities to do so are available during gameplay, including making it impossible for the player to terminating the relationship by killing the other team members. When players are given direct choices to influence the relationship this is typically done as explicit choices between a limited set of alternatives, and the effects of these are localized and seldom have the complexity of nuances of real social relationships, including how one change in a relationship can propagate through a whole network. Although these limitations typically make sense from gameplay or storytelling point of views, we think that the above-mentioned ways limits the design space of games, and having further alternatives would expand the expressive design space of games.

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My university decided to outsource the email system and management, and transfer took place at last weekend. The consequence of the transfer is that I am not currently receiving any emails. I hope that that the email service will be up soonish. Meanwhile, I can be contacted by phone or facebook.

Update: it seems that I started to receive emails (send today after nine); emails from weekend hopefully arrives at some point.

DiGRA 2007 Situated Play Conference papers are now available at the digital library of DiGRA (http://www.digra.org/dl/order_by_author?publication=Situated%20Play)