Ask Gaming [Designer, Professor, Gadfly] Ian Bogost 57
Ian Bogost is a professor of game theory at Georgia Tech, a game designer, a prolific writer, an entrepreneur, and a bit of a prankster. These roles which sometimes overlap, notably in his surprise success satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker, which you can think of as the Anti-Zynga. Wired has a fresh article up about Bogost (which cleverly embeds a sort of micro version of Cow Clicker). It also mentions another game — my favorite of his projects — that should be on the mind of every TSA employee, the 2009 release Jetset. Ask Ian about clicking cows, being an academic provocateur as well as a participant in the world of gaming, and breaking into the world of social gaming. (Please break unrelated questions into multiple comments.)
Start with a 'facebook' game or a regular website? (Score:4, Interesting)
I lead an enthusiastic clan of RuneScape players, and they tend to have a pretty broad interest in gaming and game development. As the lead programmer/IT guy for the clan, I'm frequently asked about programming and how to go about doing it.
I'm considering setting up a fairly basic "mafia wars" type of game for them to expand and update, coded in python/html5 and running on google app engine for simplicity's sake. Python has a huge amount of self learning resources out there, and putting a python project on GAE is my go-to method for getting a project up and running quickly.
Should I encourage them to move into building a facebook app, or should I encourage them to keep it a standalone website?
On the one hand facebook gives better potential for expanding their user base, but on the other there's the 30% fee for using facebook credits and their horrible API documentation. While I want to keep things as straightforward as possible for them, I would like to see their game accumulate a decent number of players so they can show it off.
Procedural Rhetoric in morally-gray big name games (Score:4, Interesting)
What do you think of AAA studios exploring more moral grey areas (e.g. hostage shooting airport level in COD:MW2) as a form of procedural rhetoric? Do you think players' natural tendencies of (in this case) non-violence toward innocents is solidified or shaken by simulating such acts?
Summary wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
The summary needs to be fixed, game theory is not the study of video games. (Bogost doesn't describe himself as a "professor of game theory", whoever wrote the summary does)