Jonas Heide Smiths notesblog

Playing the Field: An interdisciplinary game researchers’ summit
ITU; Dec. 6th, room: Aud. 3, 2nd floor.
14:00 Edward Castronova: “Why is this talk so boring?”
14:40 Bart Simon: “Digital Gaming and Local Practices of Social Imagination:
A Report from the Montreal GameCODE Project”
15:20 Coffee break, machine in 2D
15:40 Ian Bogost: “Platform Studies: computers and other neglected topics in
game research”
16:20 [...]

Turns out that penalty kick behaviour conforms beautifully with game theoretical predictions.
Economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta of Brown University has studied thousands of penalty kicks. Penalty kicks are theoretically wonderful since they constitute 2-player zero-sum games where players have very few available strategies and where the outcome is decided immediately after the initial action.

Palacios-Huerta found that no [...]

An article (intro article) in today’s Politiken describes the development of real-world markets for virtual world items (and such) including statements from yours truly, Espen, Miguel, Edward Castronova and Julian Dibbell (website down).
Among the more noteworthy features, well-known orc warlock and my former WoW avatar Garrg lights up the very front page of today’s [...]

Open publication – Free publishing

Download Plans and Purposes: How videogame goals shape player behaviour (4.5MB PDF).
On 7 December 2006 I succesfully defended my PhD dissertation Plans and Purposes: How Video Games Shape Player Behavior. My main supervisor was Anker Helms Jørgensen and my co-supervisor was TL Taylor. The official opponents were Edward Castronova and Bart [...]

GDC 2005 has played itself out. It did so with great pomp, some fascinating talks, some entertaining talks, quite a bit of mingling, immodest amounts of high-quality coffee and a considerable number of visits to Lori’s.Most distinctly the air was loaded with some trepidation over the coming console generation and particularly buzzing with energy [...]