Lea's Links

After our discussion in the last class about virtual worlds, Lea sent me two related articles. The first was great piece by David McRaney called The Sunk Cost Fallacy. McRaney argues that the addiction to Farmville is based in quickly getting new players to invest a few hours and then in making them feel compelled to return to avoid a perceived loss of the original investment. This is also sometimes called the irrational escalation of commitment. If someone in our class decides to write a final paper about factors that make video games addictive, this certainly should be on the list.

Lea also sent in an article from Game Informer, The Gender Gap, about the relative lack of female lead characters in video games. One thing that jumped out at me was a statement by James Cope, producer of Crackdown.

“It’s a really frustrating thing, because in concept it is so simple, you don’t expect the difference between a male and a female character would have such an impact,” begins Cope. “But it really touches almost everything that you do as part of the game. It changes the way the player interacts and the way the AI interacts and changes graphic production. It essentially doubles the cost of the whole game in many respects.”

Indeed, many of the games that do allow a choice between male or female protagonists do little more than create a different skin and voice due to cost considerations. This is to some extent true even for the games that allow relationships with NPCs. In our last class, I mentioned the recent news that a Dragon Age II took some flack from a fan for allowing bisexuality. An article in Rock, Paper, Shotgun summarized the response by one of BioWare's writers, David Gaider. showing the absurdity of a the player's request for a "no homosexuality" button.  I'm not certain exactly what the draw of NPC-relationships is for people but it might be an interesting project to make a list of games that include them and rate which ones were compelling.