Night and the City (and a note for next week)

Great story on Eurogamer about Rockstar's recreation of 1940's Los Angeles in L.A Noire, from the point of view of a man and his father who lived in LA at the time.

Modern technology has allowed game designers to create increasingly accurate depictions of real spaces. How might the gaming experience change when the place depicted is somewhere the gamer has actually been? Does the same "uncanny valley" effect we see with virtual representations of humans apply to virtual representations of locations known to the player?

Next week: Mike Hanus and I hope to have some preliminary data from our ad study.

Can Dungeons & Dragons Make You A Confident & Successful Person?

How do we measure confidence and success?

Possible venues:

• Academic performance, academic Engagement, motivation and honesty (?)
• Books, books and books 
• Media habits and preferences
• Narrative simulation, understanding, (topics that we can pry out of Dan's class)
• Big Five Personality Traits, pretty sure openness to experience is a big positive
• Creativity, adaptability to novel situations, problem solving abilities
• Coping skills (emotion-focused versus problem-focused)
• Uncertainty tolerance (I don't know how)
• Civic engagement (clubs, political discussion, etc.)

Speaking of D&D, what can we say about Fantasy Football?

Economics in video games

Here's a great blog post at the Washington Post on economics in video games. There are interviews with the economists on staff at CCP (producers of the MMO game EVE Online), and Valve (Team Fortress 2), as well as comm researchers including Dmitri Williams at USC. Great discussion about economic behavior in video games as well as the difficulties of studying such behavior academically. I'd love to talk about this at our Oct. 8 meeting.