neils clark

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 »

It looks like I’ll be an invited speaker at the [Games for Health conference], held next month in Baltimore, MD. I’ll hold off until after the conference to talk more fully about the presentation. As of right now it’ll be thematically very similar to my Gamasutra article from last week, [Gaming Addiction: Clearing the Air, Moving Forward], though will feature a handful of more concrete and easy takeaways. Among them will be the three most basic areas that can cause addiction and addiction-like symptoms; as well as where game devs and researchers most need to focus efforts in order to move our understanding forward in the short and long term.
I’m 100% excited.

Neils Clark :: Apr.15.2008 :: General :: 2 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 »

I must confess an unconventional love of spam email. When I see phrases like “BIGGER THAN EDISON! BIGGER THAN LIFE ITSELF!” I crack the hell up. It doesn’t have to be your bag, that’s fine. It’s just that these guys have a creative inspiration that occasionally lets the sun shine through on a cloudy day.

So I was jolted today when I read a popular Marshall McLuhan quote in the body of an email (you know, gmail gives you a little snippet of the beginning of emails). Though the sender had a believable name, he was not in fact a media theorist. He was selling \/ | a g r /\.

Please, a round of applause for the genius that is spam email.

Neils Clark :: Apr.14.2008 :: General :: 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 »