Dolphin Hero: Agent Duski to the rescue! now available on the App Store.

Six weeks of development later and I have my first iPhone and iPod Touch game available on the iTunes App Store!! You play as a dolphin and save drowning people. The game is a balancing act between getting a high score, saving people and dodging enemies. I’m really happy with the result, especially since it is our first title as a company and on this platform. Buy it now!

Check it out http://www.thevoxelagents.com/dolphinhero/

Follow us on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thevoxelagents/
Read about our development process: http://www.thevoxelagents.com/agentlogs/

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For years I struggled with waaay too many game controller cables, and I dreamed up a better solution than the old “ignore-the-pessimists-and-wind’n’stash-anyway”.

The results (after being roughed up by a couple months of use):
half artwork, half convenience, bonus half just cool.

Thanks to Archer Davies for the organic collaborative additions...

More photos [1], [2], [3].

And just recently we were invaded down here in Melbourne!

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I make these for fun, and now … I have a little collection growing.

Flamingo Crash’s necklaces:

Tron logo:

works well on a necklace

Soph’s Combi:

and the bead version is hanging in the combi!

Once I have permission to post people’s photos, I will post my growing family of pixel friends.

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Finally I’ve uploaded the fix for Vista. You can find it on the projects page. I’ve also updated the actionscript so that the XBOX360Manager is now a singleton.

Really I didn’t do much to add support for Vista. Grant Peters provided the knowledge and the Vista PC to debug and fix the code. Thanks Grant.

Also, thanks to Dean Loades for pointing out a bug that made it impossible to compare a previous gamepad state to the current state. This is now fixed.

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Western society has developed an obsession with the Protestant work ethic; a desire to work harder and longer to attain greater social status through the accumulation of material possessions. As the ethic slowly drains the life from the Western world, it harms even some of our most jovial and free forms of entertainment, namely; computer games. Play should be a light activity, with no material interest or profit, yet the Protestant work ethic is often used as a driving motivator for games. This needn’t be the case. The computer games industry has a unique position as an entertainment industry to help Western society loosen its focus on this rhetoric of progress prescribed by the Protestant work ethic.

Being hard-working has not always been an admirable trait. The Greeks believed that a person’s morality, prudence and wisdom could be determined by the amount of leisure time a person enjoyed [1]. The elite should “engage in pure exercises of the mind–art, philosophy, and politics” [2]. To the Romans, physical labour was beneath any citizen’s dignity [3]. During the Medieval period (approx. c400 AD – c1400 AD), a mélange of existing conceptions and that of Christianity formed focusing on being self-sufficient, thus avoiding the need for charity of others, but amassing material possessions was still frowned upon. Similar to the Greeks and Romans, social status was linked to the ability to engage in spiritual activities and those related to nature [4]. Up until the Enlightenment, work was not positively perceived; humans were expected to chase high level personal interests and material possessions were of little interest.

The current attitude towards work was initiated by the work of Martin Luther and John Calvin, and put into practice by the Protestants during the Enlightenment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. Martin Luther preached to the world that work formed the base of society; professions were useful and through them people could serve God. John Calvin took this notion further by forming the belief that some people were born into the elite class that would be accepted into heaven – the Elect. However those who showed success in their own personal endeavours might also be accepted into the Elect; “a person who was active, austere, and hard-working” [5] showed that they were a worthy child of God. Materialism began here; one’s value to society was derived from one’s possession. Thus the attitude towards work and life as a whole had changed. Working hard became a religious pursuit, and the Protestant work ethic prescribed the notion that progression was for a greater purpose.

Capitalism springs from the Protestant work ethic, and its characteristics permeate society so heavily that it is strangling us. “American life-styles, for all the material acquisition and the seeking after comforts and pleasures, are plagued by boredom, loneliness, alienation” [6]. Americans spend on average, as little as three-quarters of an hour per day socialising. [7] Progression motivates us so strongly that we have forgotten how to live our own lives. In our society forms of play that are perceived to not carry the ideology of progress are disregarded as worthless. Paradoxically this is the exact problem faced by the games industry as the social elite do not perceive games to carry the progression ideology. Already computer games have had a major effect on society; they are continually in the media, they rival the economic turnover of Hollywood, we agonise whether they insight violence in children and they have created a giant sub-culture of ‘gamers’. Fortunately games, regardless of perception, harness a power that other forms of entertainment do not posses and its future is brightly illuminated with the power to change the world.

Typically people have three places they frequent: the home, the workplace and ‘the third place’. The third place is an informal social location that offers diversity, novelty, emotional expressiveness, perspective, colour, and provides the opportunity for extra-community friendships to exist [8]. Recently, due to major technological change, a trend is forming for people of many diverse demographics to move their third places online [9], into online games, namely Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) in a very big way. However these online third spaces are still in their infancy and cannot offer the same fidelity and freedoms of the physical third places they replace. The third place was typically a relaxed social environment, and unfortunately MMORPGs are often the worst examples of the proliferation of the Protestant work ethic. MMORPGs are heavily focused on a levelling system strikingly similar to that of the Protestants. MMORPGs are guilty of requiring players spend hours performing repetitive complex and tedious activities in the name of ‘fun’ [10]. On a regular basis millions of people return from a day’s work to participate in MMORPGs that resemble factory like settings, performing complex tedious tasks for ever diminishing returns.

There are many games that do not use the rhetoric of progress as a primary player motivator. Electroplankton [11], designed by the world renowned artist Toshio Iwai, includes no form of progression and incites play primarily as notions of frivolity and the rhetoric of the self. Electroplankton has no central character that needs to be ‘levelled’, no material items to collect or tasks to perform. Instead the player is encouraged to experiment with a series of varied auditory and visual toys. The gamer plays in their own time and for their own personal pleasure, relaxation, and escape in another world. The game encourages play performance, creativitiy and improvisation. Unfortunately the game stands with a select few in the industry and has received average sales in the marketplace. Hopefully the rhetorics present in Electroplankton continue to be explored further and designed into games more successfully, eventually providing players a third space that is a complete escape from their lives driven by the Protestant work ethic.

Games have a unique ability to alter our culture. Games embody social culture, they are a place of meaning, nature and social relations [12]. Games reflect many cultural aspects of our society, they are worlds full of symbols imbued with cultural meaning, and a place of social activity. By practicing a particular way of life, even a virtual one, patterns form in the mind that alter our beings: “changes in knowing become changes in being” [13]. Games have the power to teach players new ways of being, to ontologically transform players [12]. Therefore video games can ultimately enable us to explore other motivations in life that aren’t related to work and progression, and as a result gain more balanced lives.

Games are a powerful medium, but they have a long way to go. The attitude towards work in contemporary Western society originates from the Protestants, an attitude that places importance on working hard. This attitude, whilst good for productivity, is not conducive to relaxation, leisure and whimsical fun, yet it remains a dominant rhetoric in modern computer games. The computer game industry has a unique opportunity to break the spell cast on Western society and remind us that there is more to life than work. Perhaps once computer games have mastered the entire playful palette, and altered the course of Western society, it too will have earned its place on the pedestal reserved for the arts. After all, “all play means something” [14].

References

1. Braude, L. (1975). ‘Work and workers’. New York: Praeger.
2. Tilgher, A. (1930). ‘Homo faber: Work through the ages’. Translated by D. C. Fisher. New York: Harcourt Brace.
3. Lipset, S. M. (1990). ‘The work ethic – then and now’. Public Interest, Winter 1990, 61-69.
4. Rose, M. (1985). ‘Reworking the work ethic: Economic values and socio-cultural politics’. London: Schocken.
5. Roger B. Hill (1996). ‘Historical Context of the Work Ethic’, http://www.coe.uga.edu/rhill/workethic/hist.htm (retrieved September 20th, 2006)
6. Oldenburg, R. (1999). The Great Good Place: Cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts at the heart of a community. New York: Marlowe & Company.
7. Longley, R. (2004). On an ‘Average’ American Day: BLS reports latest American Time Use Survey. Retrieved Oct 2, 2004 from http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/averageday.htm
8. Oldenburg, R., & Brissett, D. (1982). ‘The third place’. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 265–284.
9. Steinkuehler, C., and Williams, D. (2006). ‘Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as “third places.”’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/steinkuehler.html
10. Nick Yee, ‘The Blurring of Work and Play’, 2006, http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000819.php?page=3 (accessed 20th September 2006)
11. Nintendo. Electroplankton, (2005) [cited 2007 april]; Available from: http://www.nintendo.com/.
12. Dourish, P. (2000). ‘Embodied Interaction: Exploring the Foundations of a New Approach to HCI’. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
13. Gee, J. P. (1999). ‘An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method.’ New York: Routledge
14. Huizenga, J. (1949). ‘Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.’ London: Routledge & K. Paul.

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