If you’re in the right area of California, there’s a First Person event in Santa Cruz this evening — 5:30pm, at the Literary Guillotine, 204 Locust St. I’ll talk a little about the genesis and structure of the project, and Warren Sack will talk about his experience with the response structure (especially his exchange with Jill Walker).

Speaking of First Person, since I last posted the FP thread has gone live on ebr.

In other news since my last post, I gave a talk to an interesting group at NYU on May 20th (who mean something else when they say “the Simms”). I’ve been involved in an active thread on GTxA, spawned by a draft of my paper “What Hypertext Is.” Also (as already mentioned at GTxA, Water Cooler Games and ludology.org) Wired News published an article titled “Playing Games with a Conscience” (local archive). Here’s the part I’m most surprised they included:

To Wardrip-Fruin, it’s just as important to look at how a game is built as it is to look at a game’s message.

“It’s important to think about the structure of the game,” he says, “not just from these hate sites, but from mainstream publishers, if we’re going to understand these issues.”

He thinks that hate groups are doing no more than exploiting a style of game — for example, first-person shooters — for their own purposes.

“If you think about what these people are doing on these hate sites, they’re taking a set of well-understood game mechanics that are about hating someone — about hating the Germans during World War II — and finding them and killing them,” Wardrip-Fruin explains. “So it’s very easy to just slap (on) the image of the group you hate. I would argue the message is the same: Find the group you hate and go and kill them.”

[...]

Wardrip-Fruin concurs [with Gonzalo Frasca's statement that "there are countless games that promote neither hate nor violence"], and says open-ended simulation games like The Sims do a very good job of encouraging constructive thought in game players.

“It’s very hard to imagine one that is about hating some ethnic or religious other,” he says. “I’d say that the fundamental thing about a computer game is the structure of what you do as a participant, and the structure of something like SimCity or The Sims is about understanding a system, and trying to make it grow in the way you want it to grow.”

Apparently this touched a few nerves (1, 2). If anyone wants to take up the conversation, come tonight if you can.