Monthly Archives: December 2007

Is the emotional content of videogames underrated?

For several years there has been that lingering question, “when will videogames make us cry?” and while I think that is a totally loaded question second only to “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” the ability of videogames to create emotional reactions in the players is something that a lot of people are concerned about. However, I have been wondering later if videogames are already causing players to feel emotions. Besides feelings of pride, joy, and frustration which we feel while playing, there is also the emotional attachment that we feel long after we have finished playing the game.

I haven’t played a Thief game since the last one came out in 2004 but I still have a strong attachment to those games and the character of Garrett. People have tons of Mario merchandise. Lara Croft was a huge phenomenon. While playing GTA: San Andreas I was pissed when the game forced me to detour away from the relationship between the main character and his friends when you were forced to flee from the city. I wanted to interact with them more, not go off and learn to fly a plane or deal with the running of a casino.

Why else would the new game consoles have the ability to play old games? Why else would I still have my Atari? It is the emotional attachment to the games and the experiences we had playing them. While these aren’t the same kind of emotions that we experience when watching some movie about someone dying of cancer just when they find the love of their life but it sticks with you and you feel attached to the game and the characters.

Those are emotions of a different kind. Just because games aren’t very good at making us cry doesn’t mean that they can’t make us feel something.

I’m done with it even if it isn’t done!

So I turned in my draft of my prospectus a week and a half late. Oh well.

I did a bit of pruning and adding to the blogroll so check it out.

I always like checking out new gaming blogs and it is sad when one stops updating or disappears. There are a couple I left on the list that haven’t updated for about 6 months and I just can’t make myself delete them. I keep hoping that they will update again some time. I know I’ve gone a month or two without updating so I try to cut them some slack. I’ve been blogging on my own website since January of 2004 and on on geocities since around mid-2002 and I know it is tough to keep updating so I’m hoping that the blogs will come back to life. (which reminds me, I’ve got some old posts over on geocities somewhere I should import. I guess that is what winter break is for…)

Prospectus

So my first real draft of my prospectus was due last friday. I still haven’t turned it in. I’ve got something but I still don’t feel comfortable turning it in.

I think the biggest problem is that the only time we read a prospectus is when we are writing one. So I don’t really know what a prospectus actually looks like so I don’t really know if I’m doing it correctly.

grrrr….. I guess I’ll hack around on it a bit more and email it off Sunday before I leave town.

must resist urge to start playing new game…

I’m no Rock Band All-star but I am a little slow…

A week and a half or so ago there was a Rock Band contest held on campus. I had played Guitar Hero 2 a little but and I was in a band back in high school so even though I had never played Rock Band I figured I would go and check it out. Well, it turns out that I ended up on the drums and even though I had messed around on our drummers drum set playing drums in Rock Band ain’t the same as playing a real drum set (for one the drum pads that take the place of the cymbals are at the same level as the ones that are supposed to be drums which means that it makes it hard if not downright too hard to bother with to hit the “snare” with your left hand and the “high hat” with your right so you end up doing the snare with your right hand and the high hat with your left). Needless to say we did not win.

This week I had an interview for a teaching fellowship so I went to get a new suit. While I was at it I figured I would go to Radio Shack to pick up some stuff I needed. One of the things I was going to get at the shack was watch batteries. You see, I had got this little key chain sound maker thing out of a gumball-style vending machine and I pressed the button on it and it didn’t make any noise. So I’ve been meaning to get batteries for this thing since I came back from Tokyo so I go to Radio Shack and tell the salesperson I need batteries for it and she looks at it and pulls out this little plastic tab sticking out of the back and it works.

So I’ve had this noise maker thing for something like two and a half months and all I had to do was pull the tab out so the batteries would make contact…

Can you digg it?

This is mainly for anyone who reads this stuff through rss, but I thought it would be useful to give a heads up. Lately I’ve been making an effort to submit and digg any interesting stories I come across that are gaming related. If you go to the main page you can see them on the right but if you really care you can put my digg rss feed into your newsreader http://digg.com/rss/jccalhoun/index2.xml
I’m trying not to digg stories like “OMG teh trailer for GTA4 is out!!!!” but rather stories that are a bit deeper and have something more to them than simply posting the latest press release and when I run across what I think it a particularly good blog post I try to submit it to digg so it will show up in that fee as well. …and that feed is probably the only place anyone will see it since I think the most any of my stories has gotten is like 6 diggs or something…
So if you care, subscribe to the rss. If you don’t then subscribe anyway!

Interesting week for reviewers

So there’s quite the controversy over the firing of a reviewer at gamespot.com with allegations that he was fired for giving a bad review to a game that was an advertiser for the site. This comes a couple weeks after pne of the Penny Arcade guys says that game reviewing is essentially broken. Overall, I think I kind of agree. Think about it, game reviewers are almost always under pressure to be the first one to review something so they have to rush through the game. Movie reviewers don’t have to watch a movie on fast forward nor do music critics. But most movies are 90 minutes and most albums are even shorter than that. But even short games are 10 hours and the Half-life episodes are something like 4-6 hours. So it really isn’t fair to review a game in the same way you review a film.

Game reviews need to stop being so focused on getting out first, and certainly need to stop worrying about pissing off the advertisers. Moreoever, reviews need to change their content. Most reviews are the same format: gameplay, graphics, multiplayer. Sure those are interesting but isn’t there more to it than that?

On a somewhat related note is the fact that at the heart of this is the competition to be the first and the pressure is double for gaming magazines. They have lag time between writing in publication of months compared to a websites potential to have mere minutes between writing and publishing. They can’t compete with websites for exclusives forever. They need to stop trying. They need to offer things that more websites don’t do. There’s the saying quality over quantity but I think in this case the phrase should be quality over quickness. Do something different and maybe your reviews won’t stink and maybe you won’t have to rush through a game and maybe just maybe you won’t be so dependent on preview access to games so you won’t have to worry about pissing off gaming companies.