Category: general

Apparently not, even though I’ve got 3 papers due in two weeks and 20+ papers to grade by tomorrow (what do my students think? It’s my job to teach them or something? Kids these days!) I’ve managed to finish Half-Life 2 in less than a week and put in some record length sessions with Civilization 3.
At least the last one is for a paper. I writing about depictions of Imerialism and colonialism in videogames for a class on Empire and colonialism. Funny how you can shove videogames into any class.
My post about videogame girls continues to get comments. It is interesting to see the reaction to it. I got over 1000 hits one day with people reading it. I also got linked to by some porn blog, which caused some interesting reactions from people who came here from that site I would guess.
OK, time to grade. Weeee!!! A grad student’s work is never done…

In anticipation of the release of the big games, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, I’m going away from the FPS games. I’m preparing to write a paper about depictions of colonialism and empire in gaming and so I am starting to head towards wargaming for the first time. On the way there, I found a cheap copy of Civ3 and I’ve became 100% addicted to it in just the same way I was addicted to Civ2. Not really related to colonialism, but it will do until the “H” games come out.

Of course, if anyone knows of any games that deal with colonialism (apart from the Civ spinoff Colonization, that is), drop off a comment. There is always a lot of talk about “Why can’t games be about broader topics” and yet here we have some games that are about something as complex as colonialism and yet tends to treat the topic in rather black and white terms (with all the racial coding implicit in that statement).

But the Digra proposal deadline is just a couple weeks ago, so I need to get that taken care of first!

As we get to the middle of the school semester, the stresses of life as a graduate student are piling up. Students are giving me assignments, like it’s my JOB to teach them or something! And I have my own assignments due. I’m only writing one paper about videogames this semester, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not submitting to conferences. The PCA deadline is November 1st and the DiGRA is soon after, so if you want to submit to either, you better get a move on. Oh, and write me a proposal too while you are at it!

Since I do have my new computer, I am making time to continue to play videogames. Painkiller is taking up most of my time, but I’m also still getting killed by people online in CounterStrike. It is interesting how I manage to make time to play games, but not going to the recycling center… I guess I have my priorities in order! The big news is of course the new GTA game coming out soon. Just wait until our good friend Jack Thompson rears up his head to condemn it. I know he is busy suing people in England, but I’m sure he’ll find time to talk to some lazy journalist who doesn’t know anything about his credibility (or lack thereof in my eyes…)

Oh well, time to go grade some more student papers…

I broke down and did the old Steam pre-order of Half-Life 2. I know I’m such a sucker.
So even though I’m hip deep in Painkiller (I hate that swamp monster so much!!!) I couldn’t resist trying out the Source Engine version of Counter-Strike.

Guess what? I’ve put in 2-3 hours and haven’t seen any trash talking or people just acting like asses yet. Wow! Now I’m sure they are out there, but it is certainly refreshing to be alb e to play CS without jerks.

That most jerks don’t seem to be on the new version yet is an interesting phenomenon. Basically, the group of people playing CS:S right now are the hardest of the hard core and who have the money to spend to buy the pre-order. Which raises the question of who lamers really are. Are they really 13 year olds? Are they people who don’t have the computer to run the new version? Are they casual gamers? It will be interesting to see how the new CS community develops and what will happen when Half-Life 2 finally hits the shelves.

On a related note, CS:Condition Zero came with the Steam package I bought and while I was waiting for the Source version to download, I started playing it. It is fun to play with the bots, but boring as heck when you die. What I found interesting though was the fact that CS has one version of the maps, CS:CZ has another version and CS:S has a third. So we have a constant process of remaking the same maps (not to mention the older versions of some maps that have evolved through the betas of CS). It is an interesting process which has some similarities to Lucas’ constant tweaking of Star Wars. What is interesting, however, is that I haven’t found anyone lamenting about how the old versions of the maps are better, unlike the constant lamenting of the original versions of Star Wars.

Whether this is, again, a case of only the hardest of the hardcore playing the game at the moment, with criticisms yet to come, or somehow revisions of levels seem to function in a different way for players than revisions of films do for watchers is yet to be seen.

Despite the fact that CS:CZ comes with “Deleted Scenes” I wonder if some day there will be a “Special Edition” of Counter-Strike that features tons of various versions of the Dust and Office. If they reinstate the jailbreak and VIP modes and include Jeepathon2k you can count me in!

I was going to go teach Monday and I saw something interesting on a bulletin board. There was a flyer for a Halo tournament. That is far from unusual, but was unusual was that it was hosted by the campus Christian Student Fellowship house. I guess they are trying to use videogames to convert people?

Of course to show how much gaming is naturalized in my mind, the fact that Halo was chosen by a group of Christians was probably not accidental did not even occur to me until a friend pointed it out to me!

As the title says, the DiGRA 2005 Call For Papers is out. Deadline is in November. June can’t come soon enough!

I guess this means I need to finally finish up this damn incomplete so I can try to present it at the conference!

Well, I’m trying to ease off of the instant buyer’s remorse of buying a new computer. I just put my orders in for the parts and although my current desktop is old (Athlon 1900+) the thought of spending the money shocks me. Oh well, I ordered some l33t components. Athlon 3500+ (with the fancy new socket) Radeon x800, gig of ram. Watch out all you lamers, i’m coming after you!

But I was surfing around over at water cooler games and saw the link to the interesting Gamespot article, Redefining Games: How Academia is Reshaping Games of the Future, which is the longest article I can remember ever seeing on Gamespot. Despite not having a printer friendly link that I can see, author Lauren Gonzalez does a good job of covering the bases. It links to several game blogs, but of course not mine! (But then again there are tons of gaming blogs that don’t link to me even though they link to any other fly by night blogs… but I’m not bitter or anything…;-)

The article ends on the interesting note of asking people what person unrelated to the field of games–famous or not, dead or alive–they would chose to be a game developer. The answers are pretty interesting and revealing of a persons theoretical standing. Of course, that begs the question of who I would choose. Honestly, I don’t have a solid answer to such a question because I spend so little time theorizing games (and most of my time theorizing players and the appeals of playing, which is of course related, but as my high school principal once said, “It’s the same, but different.”). Musically, I think I might pick Led Zeppelin from the height of their careers, or the Flaming Lips. I think it might be interesting to have the guy who makes up the New York Times Crossword puzzle make a game. If I were cruel, I would suggest that it would be great if the makers of Final Fantasy made a game, but I’m not cruel enough to say that… 😉 From art, I would second Salvador Dali or Escher. But it would also be a very tranquil experience to have Bob Ross rise from the grave and design a game. From the realm of literature? I seem to be drawing a blank on that one… Man, I am just grumpy today.

On that note, I will wrap this up. In the past couple days I’ve ran into a couple of people that say they read my blog. I just want to give a shout out to my peeps. Thanks for reading!

No posting latly since my lease on my old apartment ran out last Friday and my new apartment isn’t available untill noon this Friday. So I’m homeless, I’m homeless.

However, just a quick tip. I don’t know if I’m just dence, or what, but I’ve been going to Shacknews pretty frequently for a while now. However, it is only recently that I’ve started taking notice of their “Latest Interesting Comments” feature at teh top of the main page. It turns out that is where the REAL late breaking news often occurs. People will find out about it, post a message and often it will be news that won’t show up untill the next day, or it will be a link to some interesting pic or freeware.

While not entirely game related, it is a good way to keep track of the pulse of the gaming world. Also a study of it would be facinating in that it would show the spread of news and information that the internet allows.

A little while back I asked for some German-language references for a paper I have to write for my German class. Thanks to some helpfull posters as well as the kind people on the DIGRA mainling list, combined with my own research skills, I was able to find some articles that seem fairly interesting. I thought I would share them if any readers of German are curious:

Bruns, Karin. “Game Over? Narration und Spannung im Computerspiel.” Kulturrevolution. 45-46 (2003): 85-89.

Fritz, Juergen. “Action, Lebenswelten und Transfer.” medien+erziehung (merz), 47:1 (2003): 7-21.

Fritz, Jürgen and Wolfgang Fehr. “Identität durch Spiel: Computerspiele als Lernanreize für die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung.” Medien Praktisch. 4 (1999):30-32.

Gunzenhäuser, Randi. “Darf ich mitspielen? Literaturwissenschaften und Computerspiele.” September 22, 2003. July 20, 2004 .

— “Raum, Zeit und Körper in Actionspielen Max Payne.” dichtung-digital. March 31, 2002. July 20, 2004 .

Mathez, Judith. “Von Mensch zu Mensch. Ein Essay über virtuelle Körper realer Personen im Netz.” dichtung-digital. November 7, 2002. July 20 2004 .

Müller, Jörg. “Virtuelle Körper. Aspekte sozialer Körperlichkeit im Cyberspace.” 1996. July 20, 2004 .

Schindler, Friedemann. “Von Super Mario und Super Marion.” January 29, 1999. July 20, 2004 .

Suter, Beat. “Computerspiel und Narration.” netzliteratur.net. April, 10 2003. July 20, 2004 .

Wenz, Karin. “Computerspiele: Hybride Formen zwischen Spiel und Erzählung.” netzliteratur.net. March 5, 2003. July 20, 2004 .

— “Computerspiele und Kulturwissenschaften.” netzliteratur.net. April 3, 2003. July 20, 2004 .

I guess this means I have to work on translating them now…!

It has been a bit longer between updates than typical, but I’ve been busy. TV won’t watch itself!

And there is some interesting stuff on TV occasionally. On the otherwise dreadful G4TechTV one generally great and always interesting show is Icons, which features short half hour documentaries about videogame related topics. Friday they had a pretty good show on about DooM. Like all things on cable it will be on again soon. Bluesnews posted links to various videos of the episode.

One thing that I gathered from the episode was that Steven Kent, author of The Ultimate History of Video Games, among other things, is writing The Making of Doom III, which should be an interesting companion to David Kushner’s Masters of Doom.

OK, time to watch some more TV. I think this might be the one where Gilligan messes up their chance to get off the island!