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!
Monthly Archives: September 2004
Illiterate Fools!!!
I’ve been having weird dreams lately. The other night I woke up from a dream about either a dissertation defence or a question and answer session after giving a colloquium. After I had finished waking up screaming and making sure there weren’t any professors hiding under my bed, I started thinking that so far in my graduate school career I’ve had to explain myself to people who had no experience with videogames. That is pretty crazy. When I get to the point of having to put together a dissertation committee I am going to force them to sit down and play some Counter-Strike.
But more than that, I have to think of how many pages I have had to fill with basic background information about videogames. As I lay there in be trying to fall back asleep, I realized that nothing is more of a testament to the fact that there really is a literacy to videogames than the fact that every time I go to write a paper for a class, I have to spend a few pages explaining what the hell it is that I’m talking about. So it is sort of a meta-commentary on the project that I am trying to make in and of itself. I’m trying to explain that there is a set of skills that one needs to develop to play most videogames and there I am having to give an education to my professors every time I write about it!
Associated with this act of explaining videogames to someone who doesn’t play them is the moral dilemma: do I have to write this crap again, or should I just cut and paste it from another paper? I like to think I have a pretty strict moral code, so I usually end up re-inventing the wheel every time, but hopefully there will come a time when I won’t have to do that.
Finally, since I mentioned a few posts ago that the videogames documentaries are creating a canon for the history of videogames, I am aware of the ways in which my constant rewriting of an explanation of videogames, I am engaging in my own canonization process in that I am canonizing what is a videogames and what people do in relationship to videogames. This, of course, has the risk of creating a narrow definition of videogames, gamers and the like, as well as putting blinders on to other forms of gaming. The moral of the story is that i’m sure I’m not the only one that goes through these dilemmas, and we all need to try to be aware of when we think of or write about videogames, we don’t do so in too rote or narrow a fashion.
Digra call for papers out
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!
I am l33t!!!!
I’m posting this on my l33t new system amd 64 3500+, ATI radion x800 pro. I’ve only got 512 ram currently since the other stick of 512 i have prevents teh machine from booting. So I need to order some of that “mached pair” stuff.
But my system is l33t enough to play Doom3! So yes, contrary to a prior post, I bought Doom 3 (unfortunatly, the Ban Doom site doesn’t seem to be up any longer).
The first thing I noticed about Doom 3 was how little I noticed the graphics. They because instantly naturalized for me. Of course I had seen lots of screenshots before playing it, but I was surprized that I wasn’t really wowed by the graphics. They are, of course, awesome, but the game comes on and that’s what it looks like, and I just sort of acccept that. It is only when I consciously compare it to other games, that I notice the graphics.
The second thing I noticed was the damn cut scenes! AARRGGGHHH!!!! Why? Why? Why? That was the first thing I was afraid of those years ago when we first saw some E3 footage. As of yet, aside from teh introductory cut scene, I really haven’t seen any reason why they have to go to these stupid cut scenes to either advance the plot or show the monster crawling out of the wall. If I care about teh plot, I will look at the people talking. There are planty of monsters jumping out that scare me. Perhpas the monster slowly coming out at me is supposed to be some sort of slow reveal/paralyzed by fear type of thing. Unfortunatly, the only thing it does for me is piss me off when I can see the damn (see, damn, demons. It isn’t cussing if they really are damned!) monster coming at me and I can’t shoot at it or back away from it and I have to act the isntant they give me back control. But I don’t know when they will deem to allow me to control the character again, so I’m constantly impatient and worrying it will take half a second for me to react to being a player and not a watcher and the stupid cut scene will cost me some health. CU7 5C3N35 R teh 5UCK!!!!
test post
testing this from my new l33t boxen
Happy Birthday to ME!
It is my birthday! I’m 31. Weeeeeeeeee!!!
Haven’t been playing many games lately. Been busy with the school starting again. Watched Video Game Revolution on PBS last night. Nothing that other documentaries haven’t gone over a million times before, but entertaining at least. Of course, we saw all the usual suspects interviewed: Steven Kent, Nolan Bushnell, Henry Jenkins and the like. So I guess since this is at least the 3rd Videogame history that has appeared in the past 5 years, we can see the canonization of videogame history being built. Atari, but they stole it from Baer, then they sold it to Warner brothers, then Nintendo came along, then there was Doom and some kids killed people and Grand Theft Auto is a great game but morally questionable (note: that is the ideology of these programs, not me. I have a hard time taking seriously claims from people who haven’t played the game, because every time i try to go on a killing spree in GTA3 the cops are on me in a heartbeat). While they did talk about violence a bit, at least our good friends Dave Grossman and Jack Thompson weren’t mentioned (and thankfully, neither was Robert Thompson) nor was there any talk of rape in Grand Theft Auto. However, there was a lot of minor errors, or deceits. Showing Vice City while talking about GTA3 and showing Super Nintendo games while still talking about the NES.
The most interesting thing about these docs though, is that they make it seem like the US is the main contributor to gaming. Even when they mention Japan, they don’t really mention the impact of Japanease games. And Europe and other parts of the world? Unless you are talking about Tetris, forget about it. I’m interested in getting some more of an international perspective. Besides the interesting Game Over is there anything about the history of videogames that isn’t explicitly about America?