Game Praxis is a game competition and a journal exploring the intersection between games, philosophy, and practice.
The goal is simple: generate more interesting content about how games can be used to explore bigger questions. For the first run of Game Praxis pre-existing games can be submitted so if you’ve already made a game that you think should be considered you can do so.
The Game Praxis mission:
Should you choose to accept it? Marx observed philosophers have interpreted the world when the point is to change it. Much the same could be said for the game industry. We need to build more than better worlds, we need to build a better world. We see crunch, the precarious careers of late capital, and a troubled and troubling apprehension of gender in game and the game industry as symptoms of an underlying pathology of the spirit. In the game industry, the measure of success is money. With all due respect to our invocation of Marx, we aren’t against the production of surplus value but we believe there are more creative ways to evaluate games, game industries and our lives in game.
The theme of the competition is ALEA JACTA EST. Any game or writing about around the theme can be submitted from now until June 1st.
We want to encourage more discourse and thoughtful analysis through the use off gaming. I say ‘we’ because I’m on of the founding editors of Game Praxis.
There is a fantastic list of people who will be reviewing the submitted games too. They are:
For September’s game a month challenge I was inspired by an episode of Spark about how mobile technologies are increasingly distraction us. The gist of the episode is that the more we use mobile tech the more hooked we get on it. There’s nuance in the episode which is worth listening to (Spark episode 258). The segment on notification vacation is what got me thinking:
What if we trained ourselves to ignore notifications?
Here’s Spark’s on why we should care:
The smartphone brings the world to our pockets, but can also bring an obsession with receiving and responding to notifications. Research psychologist Dr. Larry Rosen says the relentless barrage of notifications can have adverse effects on our mental and physical health.
With that in mind, I set out to create an app that will be difficult to ignore. That way one can train themselves to ignore some stimulus from their phone which – in theory – can ultimately help them relax. The less distracted you are by blinking lights and whatnot the easier it is to ignore your phone while it’s in front of you.
Of course, we’re hardwired to be distracted by the audio and visual effects our mobiles generate. So really in some way, this game is a modern version of Sisyphus.
How to Play
1 Select the number of players at the table (as in people). 2 Start the game. 3 First person to reach for the phone losses.
Winning The person with the highest recored score wins.
Losing A player either picks up the device or obviously motions for it. The gyroscope monitors for movement so be careful!
Designing the game
Making it was as simple as creating a little app that is visually noisy and can simulate standard notifications one normally receives. I did this using Unity although I’m sure there are better ways. First I looked into basic app making tools but none of them had the core function I needed of adding points based on time.
Why have points? Well, in order to make it feel more game-like I took the easy route and added a high score to the app. Hopefully this extrinsic motivation will serve as a motivator and as a metric for the player. To encourage play in a public setting the score increases faster based on how many people are around.
In play testing all the things that I thought would work did; it’s always nice when that happens. When testing it people had nifty ideas to further distract the player. One suggestion was to make it an alarm sound blare whenever the phone is moved.
Distractions
An early screen shot
Once the game begins the mobile is told to vibrate, change colours, display random text and so on. To make it more visually impactful I also made the app ugly (which turned out to be very easy for me).
There’s also a button labelled “PRESS” which is so very tempting to press. It’s worth touching it.
Due to the way I made the distractions I’m under the impression that the app goes against the Apple design guidelines, so there’s no way it would make it through the approval process. I could put it out for Android though…
Next Steps:
I don’t plan to continue working on this at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future, for now here’s what I would do the app:
UI-specific notifications
More pop-ups
Better math behind the scoring
Using Bluetooth to find other players running the app
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