“Frankly all the evil quests in the game were much more boring than the good ones, but that just goes to show you crime doesn’t pay, right?”
– Comment on Orrin Lewis website on Baldur’s Gate II: Shadow of Amn
«The ideology of a game is in its rules, its invisible mechanism, and not only in its narrative parts. Thus a global innovation of this medium will be very difficult.»
(…)
“Nearly all computergames are political, because they deal with cultural or ideological givens.”
– Paolo Pedercini from Molleindustria (translated from German, original at Telepolis (2008) “Gegen die Diktatur der Unterhaltung”)
“Is the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist simply that the person using the terms believes, in one case, the cause is right and not in the other? In these games, such thoughtful questions are not abstractions, they are part and parcel of the fun and interaction of playing.”
– J.P.Gee (2004) in Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2005): “Beyond Edutainment. Exploring the Educational Potential of Computer Games.
«Interactivity is one of the core features that differentiate games from passive media like film. In a game we play a role. Most of the time, the roles we play in games are roles of power. Space marine, world-class footballer or hero plumber. Isn’t it about time we played the role of the weak, the misunderstood, even the evil? If videogames remain places where we only exercise juvenile power fantasies, I’m not sure there will be a meaningful future for the medium.»
– Ian Bogost, Watercooler Games
“Games are perhaps the only medium which allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters.”
- Will Wright (“The Sims”), quoted in Henry Jenkins (2003), “Meaningful Violence”
«The gap between those who want games to entertain and those who want games to be art does not exist. Because both entail posing questions – tough ones even, ethical ones, even. And games will never mature as long as the designers create them with complete answers to their own puzzles in mind.»
– Raph Koster, “Theory of Fun”
“With ‘Fable’ something fantastic happened: One administration official in some european country got one copy of the game to rate it, and it came back as ‘Of moral value for all ages’ – and I thought to myself, that couldn’t be, they’re chopping off people’s heads in the game! We sent it in again and it turned out that this man had played the game well behaved and good, he never came to see these gruesome things! He just saved people and was nice!” (translated from German)
– Game designer Peter Molyneux on ‘Fable’
“If your only tool is a hammer, all problems will look like nails.”
Dijkstra, Maslow etc.
Ted: We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that’s not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it’s a game everybody’s already playing.
– David Cronenberg, ‘eXistenZ’, 1999
„Zur Pädagogik der Postmoderne gehört, daß man sich nicht bei Fragen aufhält, die man sich bei einigem Nachdenken auch selber beantworten könnte. Wenn man schon fragt, dann so, daß die Frage eine neue, noch unentdeckte Schicht der Wirklichkeit freilegt und dann gar keiner unmittelbaren Antwort bedarf.“
– Heinrich Kupffer (1990), „Pädagogik der Postmoderne“, S.29
“As a kid, I was obsessed with 1984 and Logan’s Run. I love exploring what happens when good ideas fall apart.”
“I started to wonder, what happens when you stop questioning yourself? It becomes a set of accepted truths, instead of something you’re constantly using in the lab of reality.”
– Ken Levine (Entwickler) über Bioshock
http://kotaku.com/354717/no-gods-or-kings-objectivism-in-bioshock
“Speaking to a packed audience at the Game Developers Conference, 2K Boston’s creative director confessed that he “underestimated” the impact that solving the mystery of Andrew Ryan in the game’s second act would have on the player. Once players knew the truth of Ryan’s identity and purpose, he said, they lost an important and compelling emotional connection with the game. The lesson to be learned, says Levine, is that “answering questions is not as interesting as asking them.”"
– Susan Arendt (2008): “Ken Levine: How I Screwed Up BioShock’s Story”
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/02/ken-levine-how.html
“Ich mag Geschichten über das Scheitern”, sagt Ken Levine ruhig. Auch kurz vor der Fertigstellung des Spiels wirkt er nicht hektisch oder nervös. Gelassen bringt er jeden seiner Gedanken zu Ende: “Das ist eine der ältesten Geschichten der Welt. Wir Menschen ziehen los und erschaffen tolle neue Welten. Aber wir nehmen uns immer mit. Und wenn wir das Verderben an einen Ort gebracht haben, dann folgt es uns auch zum nächsten.”
– GEE Mag, Ken Levine über Bioshock
“We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us.”
– Andrew Ryan (fictional character), in his intro to Rapture (Bioshock)
Joshua (Wargame Simulator) “Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?”
David Lightman (young male Hacker) “Later. Right now lets play Global Thermonuclear War.”
Joshua “Fine.”
(…)
WOPR: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play”
– “Wargames”
“Discovering the object of the game is the object of the game.”
David Finchers “The Game”
“Vor vielen Jahren haben ROSENBERG/SUTTON-SMITH an vielen hundert Collegestudenten Minnesota-Multiphasic-Inventories verteilt und herausgefunden, daß diejenigen, die weniger als fünf Stunden in der Woche Spiele spielten oder sich anders unterhielten, ein depressives klinisches Profil hatten. Hysterisch waren die Personen, die mehr als 35 Stunden in der Woche spielten. Für die Mehrheit dazwischen schien das Spiel mit einer gesunden Selbstbehauptung zusammenzuhängen.”
– Brian Sutton-Smith (1978), “Dialektik des Spiels”
“Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) on Tuesday reintroduced the Truth in Video Game Rating Act, first proposed last September. It calls for requiring video game rating organizations to play all games “in their entirety” before issuing labels and prohibiting game developers from withholding any “hidden” game content from raters. It would also punish ratings groups that “grossly mischaracterize” any game’s content.”
– CNET-News, 14.2.2007 on the “Truth in Video Game Rating Act”
„Spielprogramme, die grausame oder sonst unmenschliche Gewalttätigkeiten gegen Menschen oder menschenähnliche Wesen darstellen und dem Spieler die Beteiligung an dargestellten Gewalttätigkeiten solcher Art ermöglichen.“
Gesetzesantrag des Freistaats Bayern vom 2. Februar 2007 (Drucksache 76/07), Definition von „virtuellen Killerspielen“
“In (…) World War II games, where is the liberation of the concentration camps? I am looking for the motivation rather than just shooting a bunch of human figures.”
– David Franzoni, Screenwriter, on the DICE-Convention 2006
“Up to about its primary school days a child thinks, naturally, only of play. But many a form of play contains disciplinary factors. “You can’t do this,” or “that puts you out,” shows a child that it must think, practically or fail.”
Ernst Vincent Wright (1939) “Gadsby” [a 50.000-word novel without the letter "e"]
„Man möchte immer so viele verschiedene Dinge tun, ist aber so verdammt selten an der Reihe. Also ist es die Kunst des Lebens, sich aus den vielen Dingen, die man tun möchte, die besten und wichtigsten herauszupicken.“
– Reiner Knizia
“Twenty years ago, my geopolitical game, Balance of Power, was criticized by conservatives because it didn’t take into account the moral superiority of the USA over the USSR. Both sides had the same set of policy options: sending weapons to support governments or insurgencies, providing economic assistance to weak governments, and so forth. Both sides pursued their geopolitical goals using the same methods. And conservatives were indignant about this symmetry. They seemed to want the USA to have some special “Moral Superiority” magic wand that it could wave to make evil communists cringe in defeat. None of them ever articulated any suggestion as to how the fundamental moral superiority of the USA should be factored into a geopolitical simulation game. They just complained that I hadn’t done so.”
– Chris Crawford, in his political Blog at Feb 15th 2008;
http://civildiscussionbetween.blogspot.com/
“And yet Monopoly’s dominance of family board-games is almost total. If you want a picture of the future of games, imagine a small metal miniature of a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
– Kevan Davis (2010), “The Board Game Remix Kit”
“There is a vast literature and overwhelming evidence on the evolution of play throughout human development: children’s play is manifestly different from adult games, and several authors speculated that such difference is neatly captured in English by the distinction between ‘play’ and ‘game’ (among others, Huizinga, 1949;
Bateson, 1956; Caillois, 1961). According to the dominant wisdom, play in childhood is mainly symbolic, that is, involving pretence and make-believe, while playing adults incline to comply with precise rules, as in card games, board games, society games, and sports. Some developmental theorists (e.g., Piaget) put an even
stronger emphasis on presence/absence of well-defined rules in human play, as a characteristic feature of different stages in cognitive and social development. In this
view, young children do not engage in games with rules not simply as a matter of taste, but because they lack some of the necessary socio-cognitive skills to manage
well-behaved cooperation under normative constraints – in other words, they are still too egocentric to understand and make use of shared values and common rules.”
– Fabio Paglieri (2005), “Playing By and With the Rules: Norms
and Morality in Play Development., p.149″
“From the moment that children really begin to submit to rules and to apply them in a spirit of genuine cooperation, they acquire a new conception of these rules. Rules become
something that can be changed if it is agreed that they should be, for the truth of a rule does not rest on tradition but on mutual agreement and reciprocity. […] Now, in so
far as constraint is replaced by cooperation, the child dissociates his ego from the thought of other people. For as the child grows up, the prestige of older children diminishes,
he can discuss matters more and more as an equal and has increasing opportunities (beyond the scope of suggestion, obedience, or negativism) of freely contrasting
his point of view with that of others. […] So that cooperation is really a factor in the creation of personality, if by personality we mean, not the unconscious self of childish
egocentrism, nor the anarchical self of egoism in general, but the self that takes up its stand on the norms of reciprocity and objective discussion, and knows how to submit
to these in order to make itself respected. Personality is thus the opposite of ego […]. Cooperation being the source of personality, rules cease, in accordance with the same principle, to be external. […] In this way autonomy succeeds heteronomy.”
– (Piaget, 1997: pp. 95–96).
“(…) 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance. “They’re detached from reality and suscepitble to influence,” the army [the Israeli Defense Force] says. (…) So if you like fantasy games, go see the military psychologist.”
– Hanan Greenberg (2005) “Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons”, Israel News
“Another thing I realized in the second year of playtesting really surprised me. Magic turned out to be one of the best economic simulations I had ever seen. We had a free-market economy and all of the ingredients for interesting dynamics. People valued different cards in different ways—sometimes because they simply weren’t evaluating accurately but much more often because the cards really have different value to different players.”
– Richard Garfield (1993): “The Creation of Magic: The Gathering” in Tracy Fullerton (2008), “Game Design Workshop. A Playcentric Approach to creat innovative Games.” p.196
„Die Einheit des ästhetischen Gegenstandes ist gar keine wirkliche Gegebenheit. Das Kunstwerk ist nur eine Leerform, der bloße Knotenpunkt in der möglichen Mehrheit von ästhetischen Erlebnissen, in denen allein der ästhetische Gegenstand da ist. Wie man sieht, ist absolute Diskontinuität, d. h. Zerfall der Einheit des ästhetischen Gegenstandes in die Vielheit von Erlebnissen, die notwendige Konsequenz der Erlebnisästhetik.“
- Hans Georg Gadamer (1990), “Hermeneutik 1. Wahrheit und Methode. Gesammelte Werke 1″, S.101