I ran across a few interesting blog posts recently and I thought I would share them.
The first is an old post about Goffman and Portal. For a Goffman fan like myself this was a fun article looking at the ways in which Glados’ dialog moves between on-stage and back-stage. It is a bit long but still fun.
I found that post via a post from brainygamer.com where he discusses how he managed to get Portal as a required text for a class at Wabash College. I hope that he posts some updates on this once the semester starts. I’m curious as to how well a videogame was integrated into a class that isn’t about videogames. I’m especially interested to hear how some of the instructors of the course who might not have played a modern videogame before manage with Portal. I suspect their experience will reflect that of a writer for the New Yorker trying to play modern videogames for the first time. He found that “video games—especially the vivid, violent ones—are ridiculously hard to play. They’re humbling. They break you down. They kill you over and over.” I can see some of the faculty in my department having this same reaction and that really having a negative impact on how they teach the game.
Next, in the past I did some research early depictions of videogame players in advertising and early news coverage of videogames so I found this blog post about how back in 1983 OSHA got a game called Hard Hat Mack pulled off the shelves of a store to be particularly interesting.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I had found most of these stories from the Twitter feed of Game_reader. Finally, I find something useful on twitter!