Roots of Toxic Online Game Culture

Streamers behave badly as a way to increase their views and likes, which in turn maximizes their profits and those of their company sponsors. Game companies cannot fully control who plays their games, despite Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings. Younger players play mature games and learn through their interactions with older and often toxic audiences. Cultural stigmatization of gaming leads to a lack of educator involvement in supporting prosocial and educational gaming sp...

 Sirlin's Traits That Make a Gold Medalist Gamer

• Familiarity with tournaments • Deep knowledge of the game at hand • Love of the game • Mental Toughness • Mental attitude toward winning, losing, improving • Technical skill (usually dexterity) • Adaptability • Knowledge/ability in other games of that genre • Yomi • Appraisal

 Variable Ratio Schedule for Getting Kids Addicted to Boar...

In light of the above, here’s a solid Variable Ratio Schedule for playing board games with your kid: the first time you play a particular game, let the kid win. thereafter, let the kid win some of the time. 60% of the time is good to start (you can dial it down slowly as the kid improves if you want). make the sequence of wins and losses as random as possible. critically, make the outcome as close as you can every time, especially when the kid loses. She should always feel like she bare...

 A Quantum Game

Bell came up with “nonlocal” games, which require players to be at a distance from each other with no way to communicate. Each player answers a question. The players win or lose based on the compatibility of their answers. One such game is the magic square game. There are two players, Alice and Bob, each with a 3-by-3 grid. A referee tells Alice to fill out one particular row in the grid — say the second row — by putting either a 1 or a 0 in each box, such that the sum of the number...

 Metagame

Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai...

 Developing Child's Understanding of Games

During the first stage, beginning around age 5, the child does not yet understand there are fixed rules to the game. Children of this age will play Marbles in an improvisational way, possessing a vague notion of rules but not yet understanding the idea of fixed rules. In the second stage, around ages 8 to 10, the child comes to know that there are rules, and will regard these rules with a near religious reverence. The rules are felt to have their own implicit authority, which cannot be quest...

 The Pleasure of Entrainment

If entrainment is a form of pleasure, it is a pleasure at once structural and experiential, both mathematically regular and playfully flexible. Entrainment is not a phenomenon completely unique to games, but it does come very close to identifying the curious structural pleasure that all game experiences seem to contain: the meditative patterns of Tetris; the turn-taking, clacking cadence of Billiards; the rhythmic shooting pattern of Space Invaders; the pulsing flow of cards, hits, and chips ...

 Verbal Tennis

Verbal Tennis is an unusual game in which two players carry on a conversation, taking turns making statements. The only rules are that each statement must be in the form of a question and cannot repeat another statement that has already been made. If a player gets stuck and cannot make a coherent response to the previous statement, he or she loses. A game might begin as follows: PLAYER 1:Are you feeling well today? PLAYER 2:Don't I look well? PLAYER 1:If I knew that, why would I have asked y...

 Defining Play and Transformative Play

Transformative play is a special case of play that occurs when the free movement of play alters the more rigid structure in which it takes shape. The play doesn't just occupy and oppose the interstices of the system, but actually transforms the space as a whole. A cyberfeminist game patch that creates transsexual versions of Lara Croft is an example of transformative play, as is the use of the Quake game engine as a movie-making tool. Although every instance of play involves free movement wi...

 Degenerate Strategies and Cheating

Why isn't using a degenerate strategy considered cheating? Degenerate strategies take advantage of weaknesses in the rules of a game, but do not actually violate the rules. What kind of player would play in this way? The answer is both a dedicated player, who is overzealously seeking the perfect strategy, and an unsportsmanlike player, who has found a hole in the rules to exploit, even though he understands that he is not playing the game the way it was intended. These two kinds of players ca...