If you're interested in Pac-Man, you might have heard of K.C.MunchkinThen again, maybe you haven'tK.CMunchkin had a brief existence, perhaps due to the fact that he infringed the copyright in the much more famous Pac-Man, according to the 1982 decision of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Atari vNorth American Philips Consumer Elecs., 672 F.2d 607.
They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at usIt was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations
After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even strangerSomeone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted pointsIan made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic researchWhile I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developersAnd there are huge gaps in what we don't knowWhere is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from itI hope the audience did as well
But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companiesMaybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet
And there are huge gaps in what we don't knowWhere is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Would like to experience wonderful life in MMORPG, here you need to buy some World of Warcraft Gold are on hot sale on all servers, especially on American serversYou can Buy WOW Gold from us, a professional, loyal and reliable SWG Credits exchange corporation work group.Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from itI hope the audience did as well
But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companiesMaybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet
"Yes, we know that Tom Cruise, whom we watching in "The Last Samurai" is that same guy from "Mission Impossible." But if, at the critical moment in the 19th century, Japanese film he were to whip out a plastic-explosive, pull off a latex mask and say, "Show me the money, $#%!" we would run screaming from the movie
"There's plenty interesting to say about where online gaming convergence is goingCross-over of "stuff" from game-to-game ain't itFor some reason (perhaps related to the ultimate outcome?) Pac-Man does not take his proper name -- he is a gobbler, just like K.CMunchkin, with a "V-shaped aperture which opens and closes in mechanical fashion like a mouth." The court's close reading of the two games is set forth below. In its attempt to essentialize the creative core of Pac-Man, isn't this an early piece of video game criticism?
Here's how the court describes Pac-Man:
The copyrighted version of PAC-MAN is an electronic arcade maze-chase gameVery basically, the game "board," which appears on a television-like screen, consists of a fixed maze, a central character (expressed as a "gobbler"), four pursuit characters (expressed as "ghost monsters"), several hundred evenly spaced pink dots which line the pathways of the maze, four enlarged pink dots ("power capsules") approximately located in each of the maze's four corners, and various colored fruit symbols which appear near the middle of the maze during the play of the game.