Now that the semester is winding down I’ve got a bit of time to blog (and write my last couple dissertation chapters and then revise all of them and write the intro and conclusion chapters…). A couple things have happened (and are in the process of happening) that have the gaming world buzzing: Roger Ebert wrote about videogames again and the Supreme Court is taking up the case of California’s law forbidding the sale of videogames to minors.
Regarding Ebert, he ends by asking, “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” which echoes my own call for all of us to stop caring about “art.” Tons and tons of people have tried to convince him he’s wrong — so many in fact that I don’t even want to bother hunting down links to some of the stories that do it. I’m not interested in arguing with him because I don’t really care if he thinks games are art or not.
However, it is very disconcerting that he seems to think that he can judge games by looking at screenshots. Would he write a review of a film based on the text on the back of the dvd box? That’s pretty ignorant to think that he can judge games in that manner.
Unfortunately, this is just the top of the iceberg because look at the picture at the top of his post. Now I have no idea if he picked that picture or not. I would say that he probably didn’t but he did pick the rest of the pictures in the post so perhaps he did. Regardless, the picture didn’t just appear by itself. Someone chose that picture. What is in that picture? A kid. So someone whether it was Ebert of just some random web guy, wanted to pick a picture of a gamer and they picked a kid — once again perpetuating the stereotype that games are for kids and in this instance also seemingly indicating that games are in and of themselves childish. Wow. That’s pretty sad.
OK, now onto the Supreme Court…
I’m pretty confident that the Supreme Court will say this law is unconstitutional not only because lower courts have consistently ruled that laws regulating videogame sales are unconstitutional but also because of the recent Supreme Court decision declaring a law banning animal cruelty videos unconstitutional.
Today the Diane Rehm Show had a segment on the Supreme Court taking on the Videogame law regulating videogame sales and had Leland Yee, the California politician behind the bill, Craig Anderson, the guy who has never met a form of media that didn’t cause aggression, and a couple other people I don’t remember. Now, I’ve previously criticized Anderson’s vague use of the term “aggression” so I was pleasantly surprised that Diane Rehm’s first question to him was “what is the difference between agression and violence?” Anderson initially tried to avoid answering the question but then Rehm re-asked the question and Anderson admitted that while violence is generally understood as an extreme form of aggression, it is very rare for aggression to actually turn into violence. I think that it really key because in that statement Anderson (who also in this CNN video says that videogame-caused “aggression” isn’t really any worse than film or television-causes “aggression” ) says that videogames don’t really make kids violent.
If the most well known person who thinks videogames cause aggression doesn’t think they make you violent then that makes the case that they are so bad that we need laws against selling them much harder to prove.
Personally, I look forward to the SCOTUS shutting down these kinds of laws once and for all.
…well that and Jack Thompson getting involved and saying some crazy things…
Related
Halo is lame actually(it’s a veritable swirl of cool colors vomited into the disc tray), but don’t let that fool you into thinking the consoles are totally inferior. Sure with things such as DX10, and the ability to easily swap gear in and out on the fly the PC is the go-to platform (and my favorite genre, the point-and-click adventure, while on the Wii in the form of Sam and Max, will never hit a 360 or PS3)
However, think in terms of Goldeneye. Remember in the 64 era when people screamed “ludicrous!” and “witch! Burn the witch!” at the thought of a first person shooter on a console. That turned out rather well.
Sometimes I have that “I just want it to work” attitude. While I certainly love to crowd around my Radeon 4800, 4GB ram, dual core processor machine… half the fun in the PC gaming community is messing around with the features. I don’t so much like that on certain games.
Example: Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC is a wreck of a port… my PC is AT LEAST as powerful as a 360 if not more so…and GTAIV chugs on high settings, and the game goes to “very high”…to get a somewhat playable game I have to either play my 360 copy, or turn everything off on my PC version.
Console FPSs on the other hand take some time to get used to, for sure. It’s all in taste really. I own Fallout 3 for PC and 360, and found myself playing my 360 version much more abundantly due to the constant connectivity that Xbox Live allows. If I’m stuck I can usually “phone a friend” over the head set, and they will be like “Oh yeah, I do remember that…here is how to work around it”
Sure you can do it on PC, but not with the quick access a 360 has.
What I’d be more concerned with is how they expect to get away with RTS’s on consoles… I’ve yet to play a good one… most are sloppy port jobs, with poor controls.
Hmmmm. Come over to the dark side. 🙂
I still think PCs are better for gaming, and PC gaming a more rich, varied experience than the console side of things can be. However, I switched over due to cost reasons. I was continually updating PCs, spending hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, a year on near-bleeding-edge videocards, CPUs, & RAM.
I jumped over to the Xbox 360 for cost reasons, and all my friends had switched over to the console, leaving me behind.
One thing made it possible for me (well, 2 things): the XIM and the XFPS Sniper keyboard & mouse adapter. After some tweaking of the software configs, the experience is virtually identical to what I used to get gaming on the PC… Cost: Around $90 for a pre-built XIM (but the plans are out there to build your own, if you’re tech-inclined & good with a solder gun), around $90 for the XFPS Sniper keyboard/mouse adapter, & around $40 for a Logitech wired controller which allows the gismo to synch up to my Xbox 360. Throw in an el cheapo Xbox 360 VGA cable & I’m gaming on the same monitor, keyboard, & mouse that I use for PC games.
I think Halo is an excellent game for the sheer quality of the online experience. The matchmaking system beats any other game hands down in terms of ease, fairness and reliability. Add to this the endless number of game types that can be created thanks to the wonderful variety of options (grifball anyone?) and you are left with an excellent game. Halo may not have the aesthetics of many modern FPS’s but in a market filled with Unreal Engine pallid greys and browns it certainly stands out. One cannot forget the single player either, a story filled with moral relativism and religious fanatacism, very contemporary in many ways, whilst retaining some of the key features of traditional sci-fi. Also the feat of having a hero that we never see below the mask of, yet still feel empathy with, is not a small one. Console pads are not as sensitive as mouse and keyboard but there is something pleasing about the ‘3Dness’ of using the analog sticks and lets be honest how long are we going to be using pads to control consoles? Especially in the light of the infra-red technology recently acquired by Microsoft. Consoles are accessible, Xbox live is accessible and a console lasts for five years rather than five minutes,as with PCs!