Interview with Moritz Eggert

[dougo]

Rick Heli of Spotlight on Games did a great interview with Moritz Eggert about the German gaming culture (do they really sell board games in department stores?) and connections between game design and music composition. Coincidentally right before I read this I heard mrmorse mention that John Cage had done some dice-based composition, but it turns out Mozart did too.

Comments

Thank you.

[nosrialleon.livejournal.com]

I'd been looking for a web reference on that for years, but had no idea how to spell "Musikalisches Würfelspiel".

I had a composition professor that told me about that, and that was the point at which my little musical dice games went from 'a weird thing that I did' to 'a serious way to compose'...

Germans and games

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3600065

Re: Germans and games

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Premium content. Do you have a copy?

Re: Germans and games

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

“WHAT IS wrong with Germans?” asks Gerhard Florin, European boss of Electronic Arts, the world's largest games-maker, as he laments his compatriots' lack of enthusiasm for video games. Games consoles are twice as popular in France and Spain, and around four times as popular in America and Britain (see chart), as they are in Germany. Whatever the reason, it is not technophobia: Germans are keen users of mobile phones and broadband internet connections.

The ailing German economy is partly to blame, says Nick Parker, an independent games analyst, but the main reasons are cultural. Germans spend less than other Europeans not just on games but on other forms of entertainment too. In 2003, they went to the cinema an average of 1.8 times, compared with 2.8 visits per person in Britain, 2.9 in France and 3.4 in Spain, according to figures from Screen Digest, a market-research firm. Similarly, German spending on DVDs was €1.4 billion ($1.7 billion) in 2004, compared with €3.4 billion in Britain, which has a much smaller population. Germans have a different attitude to entertainment, says Mr Florin. They feel they need excuses even for going to a football match.

More important is the unusually tight control that German parents maintain over their children's consumption of media and technology, says Mr Parker. An industry rule-of-thumb, he says, is that a 12-year-old German boy is as media-savvy as a nine-year-old British boy. Selling more games, then, involves changing the attitudes of parents. “We have to convince German mothers that playing games instils necessary life skills,” he says.

That could be tricky. The educational value of the internet is obvious; that of gaming, less so. Even in game-mad America, the idea that it might be educational (by promoting strategic thinking, for example) is not taken very seriously.

Yet there are signs of change. In 2002, Electronic Arts overhauled its German marketing strategy in an attempt to convince opinion-formers of the merits of gaming. Sales of Sony's PlayStation 2 console grew there last year by 11%, faster than anywhere else in Europe except Switzerland. The proportion of homes with PlayStations rose from 6% to 8%. Raising the popularity of gaming in Germany to the levels seen in America and Britain could increase sales of games software by $2 billion a year. No wonder Mr Florin is keen for his countrymen to become more playful.

Re: Germans and games

[dougo.livejournal.com]

That is a preposterous article. Do they really not know that there are other games besides video games? The thought of needing to "promote strategic thinking" to the most prominent makers of strategic games is colossally ignorant.

Eggert mentions that there is a stigma against computer games. And about Germans avoiding the cinema and football matches:

Why do Germans like games? I think there are several factors at work here. One is the German concept of Gemütlichkeit [difficult to translate, but roughly, "hospitality, coziness"], which means that being invited over and spending an evening with your neighbours or your friends is seen as a socially desireable. [...] But there is also what I would call the "North/South"-factor at work. If you walk through a small German town on a weekend you will see very few people on the street. Most either stay home, spend time in their "Schrebergarten" (a little private garden that you can rent in colonies) or do a specific activity like sports or washing their car. But the "home" is the center of your life. Therefore it makes sense to make your time spent at home as varied and interesting as possible, for which games are very good. [...] I've known modern Romans who lived in the worst imaginable appartments, without central heating, the wallpaper coming off the walls... who spent a great deal of their money on the finest clothes and great dinners and lunches instead. The typical German rather stays home in his ugly jogging suit (I'm exaggerating here, folks) and spends money on a big TV, a big freezer, on his Hobbykeller (hobby cellar) and ... on games!

Letter to the editor from the next issue

[jtemperance.livejournal.com]

SIR – You conclude, from low sales of digital games, that Germans are uninterested in games of all kinds (“Reasons to be playful”, January 29th). However, Germany is the world leader in board games: sales per person are higher than in any other country. Enthusiasts elsewhere look with envy on the highly competitive excellence of German board games. The key is in the culture: board games have the advantage that they are playable by the whole family, while most video games are solitary exercises. As networked digital games that enable multi-player scenarios begin to spread, it is likely that German enthusiasm for playing those games will rise.
Greg Costikyan
New York