So I should totally be writing a paper right now, but I’m taking the night off. I have to write about 20 pages, do some heavy revision on one paper, and probably interview someone for that paper before Monday. So of course, I’m taking the night off. I’m ever so tired!
Writing a paper about legal systems that influence gaming on campus. Hope is that it will be a dissertation chapter.
Also writing a paper about videogame commercials. Back in the Atari games they used to have tons of people in the commercials playing the games. Now, if they are featuring the latest FPS or whatever, they rarely have the players. In the Atari days they didn’t show the games very much. Now, the game itself is nearly all they show. Watching some old commercials I notice that in some they even show people actually plugging the console in so that people would know that it took electricity.
Regarding Roger Ebert, it is nice to see that Mia Consalvo has my back. It’s glad to know that I’m not the only one who isn’t interested in videogames as art! In all these conversations people mention Myst as an art game. Are there really that many hardcore gamers that would rather play Myst again than Doom? Don’t get me wrong, I like Myst a lot back in the day. I bought Riven as soon as it came out. However, since they came out, I haven’t had the urge to play them again. Not even once!
Last night IU had a preview of Grandma’s Boy. It is a film about a 36 year old videogame tester who gets evicted and has to move in with his grandmother and her friends. It’s produced by Adam Sandler’s production company and so, even though he doesn’t appear in it, it could easily be one of his early films. As I said in an email to one of my friends, it was the best movie about a videogame tester I’ve ever seen. It is also, coincidentally, the only film about a videogame tester I’ve seen. If it wasn’t about videogames, I wouldn’t have bothered seeing it. Basically, there’s some There’s Something About Mary-style humor about bodily fluids, some pot jokes, some intergenerational partying, a couple predictable hook-ups, a bad guy who tries to do something bad to the hero, and a grandma who saves the day. I wrote a haiku about it:
Office Space was good
I also liked Golden Girls
This is both of them.
There are some good jokes. There is also some objectification of women which I found oddly out of place. I give it only 4 thumbs up. (Remember I gave Doom 7 thumbs up. And of course my bastardization of what is surely a registered trademark of a certain movie critic adds to my delight!)
Finally, it looks like I’m going to be heading off to Vancouver again next year. This time for the SCMS conference in early March. I’m convinced that the only reason I got in is that I’m giving a paper with a sexy title of, “Post-Colonialism in Civilization“. Then in April it looks like I’m going to the CSA in Washington D.C. I’m convinced that I only got into that one because of the stellar efforts of the other people on the panel we put together. But I’ll be talking about professional wrestling, and not videogames, so I won’t be talking about that paper here. But you will respect the verbal artistry of professional wrestling or I’ll kick your ass! (Which just so happens to be the title of the paper I’ll be presenting at the CSA!)
Now it is time for sleep.