Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one about new ways of understanding casual games. I propose an alternative to the tired "easy to learn hard to master" design value for casual games:

Read the whole article over at Gamasutra.

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Zach Whalen writes today about a letter he received from Left Behind Games threatening legal action, received in response to his several posts about Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a controversial game about the army of God after the rapture. Zach posted the letter itself, and notes that it is a form letter sent to a number of people, including Tim Simpson, Radical Congruency, Raving Atheists, and left-wing uberblog Daily Kos. GamePolitics has a mention of the letters and I'm sure many comments will follow over there.

I haven't read all the articles in question, but the cease and desist is the same in all cases, suggesting that the company is fishing.

Zach's far more cordial than I would have been, inviting readers to suggest possible legitimately false statements he may have made in his many posts about the game. I wrote a few pages about Left Behind in my book Persuasive Games, focusing on the ambiguous religious representation rather than the more incendiary features that others have raised a torch over. I met with the Left Behind crew at E3 a few years ago when I was researching the book, before the game was released, and asked a bunch of questions, some difficult. They seemed rational and understanding of the inevitable criticism of their work then, so I'm a little surprised to see this festering lawyer strategy. I don't know how the game has sold, but maybe they are just acting out their own disappointment that it didn't move as absurdly many copies as the namesake book.

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Today our pals at Grand Text Auto open their exhibit at the Beall Center in Irvine. At the same time, the The Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia, is opening the exhibition Play Cultures. The exhibit features work by WCG's own Gonzalo Frasca and Persuasive Games, as well as friends Molleindustria, Serious Games Interactive, and Tale of Tales, plus a number of other accomplished artists I haven't had the pleasure yet to meet. I wish I could have been there for the opening today. The exhibition runs until October 25.

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Brian, Alice, and Leigh all wrote something snarky about Ubisoft's newly announced Imagine line for girls. They are right to point out the explicit, troubling, simplistic gender roles the games endorse. But none of them manage to locate these games historically.

Videogame critics, bloggers, players, and journalists have a very short memory, and little sense for history. This makes it hard to remember that Babyz was first released in 1999, created by PF Magic, the same company that did the original pet sims Dogz and Catz (collectively Petz) in 1995. Ubisoft bought the rights to the Petz line in the late 90s, and they've been releasing a jillion titles of this sort, from Hamsterz to Horsez.

Petz and Babyz were software toys for adults, not for kids, at least not explicitly. They ran in a process on top of the Windows desktop, and the pets and babies literally moved around in the foreground, as you worked. They were little creatures and characters you could interact with.

Andrew Stern, one of the creators of Babyz, went on to co-author Facade with Michael Mateas, which draws on some of the procedural animation and living creature simulation features of the former title.

And the "misspelling," which both Leigh and Alice point out, comes from the original PF Magic titles. They first created a game called Oddballz, which had these procedural ball critters, and they kept the Z around after that. This was a pre-Google world, but I'm sure Ubisoft has retailed the spelling to insure better searchability, since apparently the brand value is entirely gone :/.

I have previously marveled at how everyone forgot about Petz entirely when Nintendogs came out, assuming the latter was entirely original. I feel that way again, although admittedly Babyz wasn't as popular as Dogz and Catz. This is 10 years ago, folks. Are our memories really that short? For those of you in Southern California, Babyz and other related works are being exhibited at the Beall Center for Art and Technology as part of the Grand Text Auto exhibit, which opens tomorrow.

None of these observations change Ubisoft's strange assertion that girls want shopping and childcare, but the history of the titles make other observations possible. For example, Ubisoft is also just recycling old IP rather than reinventing these games from whole cloth.

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An interesting installation from Northern Ireland, called Block H. It features a FPS game built as a Counter-Strike mod, which uses environmental cues from Northern Ireland, including the sectarian murals that are fast disappearing from that landscape. The installation also hopes to ask questions about media, memory, and "militainment."

Here's how the game works: via local network or Internet connectivity, teams are split into Loyalists and Nationalists. Players wear Celtic and Rangers jerseys, denim jackets and anoraks. The game is set in a housing estate split by a peaceline and watchtower. Each side has its own versions of sectarian symbols: murals, bonfires, flags, drums, graffiti etc. Details were based on hundreds of reference images to create a composite environment of Belfast and Derry. The game is projected on two sides of a translucent white tent, whose insides are projected with television footage of "The Troubles."

It's always a bit hard to tell how high-concept installations like this really work without seeing them in person, but there is additional documentation on the website that makes it a bit clearer. You can also download the Counter-Strike mods and the like.

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Despite their interesting features, Alternate Reality Games like The Beast and ilovebees really got their start as marketing campaigns. Since World Without Oil, there has been growing interest in using ARGs for serious purposes. Game community Unfiction is sponsoring a one-day event, Embrace the Chaos, to help people understand how to use these games. The cost is $175 before Sept 30 and $200 thereafter.

I think it's a bit unfortunate that the organizers have positioned the event toward marketers ("Alternate Reality Games and online experience marketing when done correctly create a powerful connection between the audience and you"), but I guess it is the advertisers who would pay to attend an event. The organizers have also told me that there will be an audience seminar for players to give creators about their games.

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University of Colorado student Devin Monnens sometimes sends around thoughts by email about topics of interest to a few of us. Recently he brought up New York Defender. In a part of that discussion, Josh Fishburn asked if you could conjure a terrorist attack in new versions of Sim City. There are aliens and monsters, but as far as I know, there are no terrorist attacks available. It would be an interesting addition both from a cultural and a planning perspective; one of the things I talk about in Persuasive Games is how government emergency response simulations fail to take into account cultural forces like race, assuming that everyone will automatically be treated equally. I wonder if it would be possible to add terrorist attacks to Sim City or a game like it without drawing the usual cries of trivialization.

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Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on the Manchester Cathedral controversy in popular PS3 shooter Resistance: Fall of Man. I take a fairly different position than

You can read the whole thing over at Gamasutra.

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There's a good interview up at Gamasutra with Chris Ferriera, lead designer of the forthcoming EA Montreal shooter Army of Two. Fans might know the game for its innovations in collaborative play, but Ferriera discusses the title's political content and inspiration -- private military contractors (PMCs) -- in encouraging detail.

I also appreciated Ferreira's discussion of researching the topic through books and newspapers, and defending a modern-day politically-inspired game rather than one that relies on analogical futuristic or fantasy settings (e.g. Bioshock, Haze, BlackSite).

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For my fellow Atlantans, I'll be doing a reading and book signing for Persuasive Games tomorrow (Sept 5) at the Barnes & Noble in Midtown, right by Georgia Tech (48 5th St. NW). Starts at 5:30pm, and refreshments will be served.

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