neils clark

Superb nerdery.

I just watched a screening of the sequel to the cult gamers movie, The Gamers. The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is pretty awesome. While a 5x backstab damage multiplier is not to be had by any ballistae, the movie has its hooks: undead rotisserie, player/character gender confusion, a bard with both a high seduce modifier and personal body count, and, yes, a paladin aching to butter the dark toast of evil with some kind of light spread. Pairs well with Mazes and Monsters.

Neils Clark :: May.14.2008 :: Games :: 4 Comments »

This was the suggested reading that I couldn’t distribute after the talk (note that this was intended as a handout - hyperlinks were added to the version below, where full-text versions are freely available):

1. Secondary worlds: J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘On Faerie Stories,’ located in the Tolkien Reader. Published by Del Ray.
2. The texture of game worlds: [Dr. Thomas Malaby's Beyond Play] published in Games and Culture but freely downloadable from ssrn.com.
3. Physical immersion: Anne Marie Barry’s chapter from the Handbook of Visual Communication. Published by Routledge.
4. Game-influenced pathologies: [Dr. Jerald Block's Pathological Computer Game Use], available at jeraldjblock.medem.com. Note: Pathologic Computer Gaming is a similarly titled but different piece of research on that website.
5. Google [Dr. Ivan Goldberg’s criteria for “Internet Addiction Disorder].” Compare those to the criteria available at [Dr. Kimberly Young’s website] netaddiction.com. Each of these criteria certainly has some relation to addiction in the more universal sense, but it’s important that we look at how normal non-harmful, even therapeutic gaming structures could be picked up by this sort of a definition.
6. For a great look at the effect of real-world culture, check out [Florence Chee’s “The Games We Play Online and Offline: Making Wang-tta in Korea].” Published in Popular Communication 4 (3), 225-239, 2006.
7. [Nick Yee’s Daedalus project] and [Richard Bartle’s MUD player archetypes].
8. To follow that up with some theoretical definition, check out the idea of structural characteristics in Wood et al’s ‘The Structural Characteristics of Video Games: A Psycho-Structural Analysis.’ Published in CyberPsychology & Behavior 7 (1), 2004.

Please let me know if this posting was useful. I’ve been meaning to actually organize a more detailed list of good resources - if there’s enough interest then I will.

Neils Clark :: May.09.2008 :: Games :: No Comments »

I’m making my slideshow and personal notes for the talk available under a Creative Commons license to use and modify, under the provision that you note Neils Clark as the original author and the Games for Health 2008 proceedings, where this talk was first given.

Notes | Slides

I haven’t made any alterations for readability (they’re just notes to myself, many of which were 86ed before I gave the talk) - feel free to email if you want clarifications on any of it.

Please, please also note that none of this is clinical advice whatsoever. This talk is based off of an academic piece that looks at the more subtle elements of how game addiction may operate - but one of the major points is that none of the work out there is the gospel truth.

Most of all, I appreciate any and all feedback. The piece to go up on SSRN is still being put into a first draft - so critique is more than welcome.

Neils Clark :: May.09.2008 :: Games :: 2 Comments »

After 26 years and 3 months, I now own a cellphone.

Visual Evidence:

Neils Clark :: May.06.2008 :: Games :: No Comments »

I was surprised and fired up to see that [Terra Nova], an academic blog that I’ve off-and-on read for a few years, brought up this month’s [Clearing the Air article].

I left a comment there that glosses over the theme of my current project: Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), how IAD relates to the problems in the ‘gaming addiction’ discussion and the new ground that Through the Eyes of the Players could break. I want to get a lot of different opinions once there’s a fleshed out first draft, so check out the .pdf once it gets thrown on SSRN.

There are also some print articles that the gears have been turning over (albeit way slower than I’d like) about the changing shape of gaming. I’m working to get some big names in music and celebritydom to cast in their lots with regular gamers for at least two pieces that represent gaming’s increasingly mainstream face.

So look for more in the next few weeks.

Neils Clark :: Apr.22.2008 :: Games :: No Comments »

A quick update on my intrepid co-author, the gaming therapist Shavaun Scott. She put together a small conference series directed towards therapists looking to get educated on how games can interact (in good, bad and ambiguous ways) with other mental health disorders and overall bodily health. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had some cheeky exchanges. One of the funniest and/or saddest was that most of these therapists she presented to “didn’t know anime from avatar.”

Where I’ve been standing on this is a pretty basic statement: games are experiences. We all go through our lives experiencing different things - for the people who play, gaming is just one more venue where we can experience. It’s also a venue where we can have entirely different lives, at times divorced from reality altogether; meaning that it poses unique benefits and challenges for the people who venture boldly across the digital plains. So Shavaun and I were both a bit put off by the ignorance exhibited by the therapist in [this blog] from Shavaun’s site.

With Shavaun’s not-inconsiderable talents usually being spent in giving help to a broad variety of people with problems, I can’t help but hope that she gets to the point where the bulk of her time is spent training the other ground-floor therapists out there. The people with the unique, all-too-often unseen compounding factor of game addictions.

/end tired rant babble

Neils Clark :: Apr.15.2008 :: Games :: No Comments »

What’s most perplexing, wonderful and horrible about this article is the feeling that I get having quoted Gary Gygax just days before his passing. The fact that ‘Master of the Game’ was integral to this article wasn’t even on my radar, until when scrolling down that first page I saw the picture with hexagons and twenty-sided die. And I was as shocked as any nerd when he died, it’s just that the pieces only came together just now.

On some level, I think that I was really hoping to meet Gygax someday. I had always mulled over the idea of having him as an interviewee for my book, thought about little excuses to just sit down with the man and have a conversation. I wondered what Gygax would say about gaming’s juxtaposition with “games,” especially of the online and massively multiplayer online variety.

I think I’ll be curious for awhile.

But I’m allowed to guess. I think that there’s an essence to console games like Rock Band and Wii Boxing that portend an enormous potential, co-existing with the pure experience of new kinds of real “worlds.” You can jack yourself into the latter, but the former opens up more the soul of a relaxed get-together. When you play a single player game, you’re having an experience, when it’s an MMO, it’s a shared experience, and more fun when you add a level of creativity and spontaneity with the people that you enjoy.

Don’t forget to love and respect your fellow players. You can’t keep them forever.

Neils Clark :: Apr.03.2008 :: Games :: No Comments »

I just wanted to come in and comment that creating the content for the wesite is going to take awhile. We’re waiting on some outside forces, so I may be back here blogging. A lot of really interesting things are happening - like another article out on Gamasutra.

You can find that here

Neils Clark :: Apr.03.2008 :: Games :: No Comments »

This is another few words about a recent death; these words are about somebody whom I had wanted to meet since I was young. Gary Gygax, a hero to all real gamers, has died at age 69.

You can read wired’s comments here.

Neils Clark :: Mar.04.2008 :: Games :: 2 Comments »

Non-substance addiction researcher Sabine Gruesser-Sinopoli passed unexpectedly at age 43. She was passionate, creative and effective at bringing attention to different elements of gaming addiction.

You can see her obituary here.

I only knew her through her work and her gracious giving of time to people looking to better understand addiction. To anybody involved in a gaming addiction, on any level, this is a serious loss.

Neils Clark :: Mar.03.2008 :: Games :: No Comments »