2011/09/17
Since I last wrote about "social gaming", my term for gaming as a medium for socialization (as opposed to gaming for the sake of gaming), my opinions on the topic have changed quite a bit. For clarification, I am still talking about video gaming, and my goals are still more or less the same: to use video games as a medium or an excuse, really, to bring people together and create social bonds. Video games are already quite successful at doing this- the aim is to make explicit this desired effect and therefore be able to optimize our gaming activities toward this end.
2008/12/27
There's been a lot of talk recently about why PC gaming is "doomed", mainly because of the ever-growing amount of PC game piracy. I don't necessarily think that PC gaming is doomed at all, although I do think there will be a significant shift in the way the PC game market works - towards a more controlled distribution model, perhaps, like Steam.
This is what I think about piracy, however. It's a self-sustaining cycle, in a way: high video game prices encourage gamers to pirate games instead of buying them, "forcing" video game manufacturers to raise prices or keep prices high in order to not lose revenue. Those high prices in turn continue to encourage piracy. This loop is not necessarily unbreakable, though there are several factors that, in my opinion, contribute to its sustenance:
2008/11/18
Last time I wrote about trying to find casual games for medium/large-group social events. We can split multiplayer video gaming into a couple of vaguely-defined categories; I'm going to use the term "casual" or "social gaming" to refer to medium-scale social gatherings that involve video gaming; hardcore gaming, of course, is all about the game; and we might perhaps call the last group "LAN party gaming" to indicate a middle ground between casual gaming and super-intense gaming.
It is for the first category, social gaming, that I suggest a game today: Heroes of Might and Magic III.
2008/09/05
I found today that I was having problems launching Call of Duty 2 on Windows Vista. I could not start either the single or multiplayer: both would crash and the Vista "this program has stopped working" dialog box would pop up. A quick search on the Internets told me that this was definitely a common problem, and with the help of some pretty obscure forum posts, I finally figured it out. I'm going to summarize my solution here for future reference:
System environment:
- nVidia graphics card
- Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
- 2 GB RAM
- Integrated "HD" audio
The solution for me:
