If I remember from my time in Video Game Law several years ago, this is the time of year when there is lots of time to spare. Law students, having done all their studying and completed their papers weeks in advance, long for something to occupy their time.
There is hope! Here is a five part YouTube documentary on the evolution of graphics technologies since the dawn of video games. The first four episodes each focus on specific graphics technologies, while the final episode looks at today’s state of the art before asking where games are headed in the future.
While the documentary does not discuss the many legal issues surrounding graphics, the technologies and games featured are industry milestones that are discussed throughout the course. If nothing else, the documentary provides a historical context to inform discussion of game graphics and games more generally.
Professor William K. Ford of The John Marshall Law School just sent me a link to the latest episode in his excellent video series on games. It is an interview with a past guest in our course, Patrick Sweeney, on the very interesting and somewhat fraught subject of “The Video Game Industry and Hollywood”.
The addition of badges to the Video Game Law website has no doubt been one of the more pleasant surprises of this academic season. It was only in late August 2014 that the possibility of the course being included in the Open Badges UBC Project even emerged. In that context it is perhaps a bit surprising and gratifying that Video Game Law became the first UBC course to implement a badging system on the website. Even better, given that badges and badging are not part of grading in the course it is wonderful how reinforcing the early results have been. They can be found in this post: http://videogame.law.ubc.ca/2014/11/16/ubc-open-badges-initial-pilot-project-results/
The Open Badges UBC Project now would like your help in providing additional feedback which may be useful to the UBC community and to the badges project moving forward. There are only 10 questions so it won’t take very much of your time.
Finally Erin Fields and David Vogt must be thanked for inviting our participation, as well as Associate Dean Benjamin Goold for supporting the idea. Will Engle, Novak Rogic and Richard Tape of the UBC Centre for Teaching Learning & Technology must be mentioned as the technological braintrust behind the project. Richard Tape in particular deserves to be called out for his passion and diligence in getting badges on-line for our course so incredibly quickly. Everyone has been wonderful to work with.
Anoop Desai will be our final guest speaker for this video game law cohort. Anoop is Director, Business Affairs/Development at Electronic Arts (Canada) Inc. and has been with EA since 2007. Previously he was with Next Level Games and practiced law with Alexander, Holburn, Beaudin & Lang from 2001 to 2005.
At EA Anoop is responsible for distribution and publishing partnerships for digital platforms in established and emerging territories. He has also been pivotal in defining EA’s business strategy and negotiating deals for new and emerging platforms including cloud computing. Anoop’s professional strengths include identifying and evaluating partners, exploring and analyzing various business models, establishing corporate standards and negotiating deals.
Anoop is a lawyer who traverses territories that encompass both business principles and legal issues. As such he has a real perspective on the diversity of ways legal training can be relevant in a creative business environment. He will be talking to us about negotiating video game deals and the industry landscape. As well, Anoop will address the always looming question of how those who want to be part of the video game industry can most effectively pursue their goal.
South Park has covered and brought light to a large number of topics over 18 seasons. While always hilarious, and sometimes offensive, they can also be surprisingly informative. Few weeks ago South Park tackled the topic of freemium games. Since it relates closely to the course, I took upon myself to watch the episode, for research.
In the episode, Prince of Canada and Minister of Mobile Gaming explain the basic concept of “freemium games”.
Specifically, the Minister lists the five principles of a successful freemium game:
entice the player with a simple game loop
use flashing ‘chachings’ and compliments to make the players feel good about themselves
train the player to spend the fake currency (you may have noticed donuts and clams on the whiteboard – the fake currency used in Simpsons Tapped Out and Family Guy Quest for Stuff)
offer the player a way to spend real currency for your fake currency (so they forget they are spending actual money)
and make the game about waiting – and allow players to pay not to wait
And another, important principle: make the game just barely fun, because if the game was too fun, there would be no reason to micropay.
South Park also make the connection between freemium games and drug/alcohol addiction.
Drug addiction: Jimmy pushes the game to Kyle and others like a drug dealer because he needed the money to pay for another freemium game he is addicted to.
Jimmy: How do you get people addicted to crack? You give it away for free. You give away a little taste and then..and then some people…can’t stop themselves.
Alcohol addiction: Minister of Mobile Gaming admits to targeting the heaviest users of game and extracting the most amount of cash from them.
Minister: Here is a fact – 80% of alcohol sales are paid for by alcoholics… You think the alcohol industry cares?! They don’t care that 10% are gonna get addicted, they’re counting on it
There are other great nuggets from the episode and I highly recommend everyone to watch the episode!
There are many thank you’s due after this past weeks class which involved an unprecedented amount of technology.
First thanks to Jas Purewal for joining us from London England to talk about international video game law issues. Jas’ perspectives on video game law are regularly at his popular site at http://www.gamerlaw.co.uk
Huge thanks also to Jesse Joudrey and Graham Gaylor of vrchat.net, a VR platform people can build their own social VR experiences onto, for all the work they did to set up the Oculus experience and for obtaining seven Rift headsets for the use of the class. Thanks also to Associate Dean Benjamin Goold and Maria Erhardt of the Faculty Law for their help in making this happen.
That this technical tour-de-force all ran as smoothly as it did is thanks to Dan Silverman of the Faculty of Law. Dan has provided incredible support for the course and all its experimentation from the inception of the 2.0 version three academic seasons ago. Am so very thankful for all Dan does on a regular basis for the course. He has truly become integral to its design and execution.
Video and slides below (including a YouTube video of the class as you might have seen it with a Rift, minus 3D immersion of course).
I cannot class myself as a hard-core gamer, yes when I was younger I owned a play-station 2 and did play lots of formula 1 racing games among other things (I owned a steering wheel and pedals), but today I am part of that ever growing group many “real” gamers seem to dislike, the casual gamer. I, unfortunately, am one of those people who cannot stop playing Candy Crush, and Disney’s equivalent Frozen game and have to openly admit have spent money buying extra lives when I just cannot wait half an hour to play again. As in the article Jon posted in the most recent New of the Week, http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/casual-surveillance/,I still believe that the category of gamers I am a part of has not received the academic attention it needs. Many still view casual games and gaming as simple and inconsequential, but with its ever growing popularity (and profitability) surely more attention needs to be given to it, especially with regards player privacy which seems to be a huge issue across many different digital media forms at the moment, not just in games.
It still slightly freaks me out that suddenly after searching for possible Canucks tickets that all ads, whether than be on Facebook or that are incorporated in a game, are to do with tickets for NHL matches. The fact that casual games such as Candy Crush use information you give them, or they can gather from your playing, needs to be discussed at greater lengths. As mentioned in the article, your age, gender, consumption activities, the hours you play, the people you play with: are all elements along with many others that are seamlessly gathered behind the scenes and used to develop new levels, new items, and new games that can then be sold back to you at a premium. With such a high amount of personal data being gathered and the amount of money this industry is now making, my question is why more attention is not being given to the protection of us casual gamers?
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