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Oops, I did it again…

It seems like my last post has created a tempest in a teapot. Unlike the last time I got into a flamewar, I didn’t think anyone would react so negatively, and I didn’t even imply anyone was an elitist bastard this time!

While some of the comments are reasoned and sound, some sound like they protest too much. Sorry I implied that it was wierd to want to look at half naked videogame characters. And I’m sorry that my parents gave me a name that doesn’t fit in with your normative idea of what a name should be.

I’m glad that Tore over at vesterblog sympathises with me, because from the comments I thought I might be the only one who thinks the whole deal is a little weird.

Seriously though, someone explain the appeal of half naked videogame characters when pictures of real people are so easilly available. Please.

Ashamed to be a Gamer

I was in the local bookstore today looking through the magazines and for the first time in a long while I became ashamed to be a gamer. While looking through the rack of gaming mags I saw the following:

Girls of Gaming Magazines

 

Now I had heard about the things with videogame characters appearing in Playboy, but a whole magazine devoted to videogame women? That’s just sad. And a gaming mag using a woman to sell their mag? Is the game mag industry that competitive? So is there anyone out there willing to admit they bought either of these without a sense of shame or irony?

Playing to wait and Waiting to play

In anticipation of the release of the big games, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, I’m going away from the FPS games. I’m preparing to write a paper about depictions of colonialism and empire in gaming and so I am starting to head towards wargaming for the first time. On the way there, I found a cheap copy of Civ3 and I’ve became 100% addicted to it in just the same way I was addicted to Civ2. Not really related to colonialism, but it will do until the “H” games come out.

Of course, if anyone knows of any games that deal with colonialism (apart from the Civ spinoff Colonization, that is), drop off a comment. There is always a lot of talk about “Why can’t games be about broader topics” and yet here we have some games that are about something as complex as colonialism and yet tends to treat the topic in rather black and white terms (with all the racial coding implicit in that statement).

But the Digra proposal deadline is just a couple weeks ago, so I need to get that taken care of first!

I Don’t Really Love Gold(en Eye 2)

I got the chance to play a bit of the new GoldenEye yesterday. Now, I’m not some big hig muckety muck or anything, there was a booth set up on campus and had it, the new prince of persia, and a couple other games that aren’t out yet. Unfortunatly, I was running late for class and was only able to play GoldenEye2 for like 5 minutes.

5 minutes of pure hell! Now this won’t be a real preview or anything, but a mini-rant. I pretty much play FPS games every day. But I play them on computers. You know where this is going, right? IT took me the entire time to figure out how to control the damn game. FPS games simply aren’t made for controlers. I never got the hang of Halo (especially driving the damn vehicals) and I certainly wasn’t able to get the hang of GoldenEye2 in five minutes. I know the first one as well as Halo are insanely popular, but you can put it right up there with the Sims on the list of things about gaming that I don’t get. If you get it, more power to you. I don’t get the appeal of CSI or Law and Order either, so what kind of judge am I?

Other than that, the game pretty much looked like crud as well. It looked like is was using a first generation Lithtech engine. I only saw one level, so it might have been just that level. The rest may be beautiful as any other game on the market, but that level certainly wasn’t.

so much to do and so little time…

As we get to the middle of the school semester, the stresses of life as a graduate student are piling up. Students are giving me assignments, like it’s my JOB to teach them or something! And I have my own assignments due. I’m only writing one paper about videogames this semester, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not submitting to conferences. The PCA deadline is November 1st and the DiGRA is soon after, so if you want to submit to either, you better get a move on. Oh, and write me a proposal too while you are at it!

Since I do have my new computer, I am making time to continue to play videogames. Painkiller is taking up most of my time, but I’m also still getting killed by people online in CounterStrike. It is interesting how I manage to make time to play games, but not going to the recycling center… I guess I have my priorities in order! The big news is of course the new GTA game coming out soon. Just wait until our good friend Jack Thompson rears up his head to condemn it. I know he is busy suing people in England, but I’m sure he’ll find time to talk to some lazy journalist who doesn’t know anything about his credibility (or lack thereof in my eyes…)

Oh well, time to go grade some more student papers…

online gaming without nubes? Is it possible???

I broke down and did the old Steam pre-order of Half-Life 2. I know I’m such a sucker.
So even though I’m hip deep in Painkiller (I hate that swamp monster so much!!!) I couldn’t resist trying out the Source Engine version of Counter-Strike.

Guess what? I’ve put in 2-3 hours and haven’t seen any trash talking or people just acting like asses yet. Wow! Now I’m sure they are out there, but it is certainly refreshing to be alb e to play CS without jerks.

That most jerks don’t seem to be on the new version yet is an interesting phenomenon. Basically, the group of people playing CS:S right now are the hardest of the hard core and who have the money to spend to buy the pre-order. Which raises the question of who lamers really are. Are they really 13 year olds? Are they people who don’t have the computer to run the new version? Are they casual gamers? It will be interesting to see how the new CS community develops and what will happen when Half-Life 2 finally hits the shelves.

On a related note, CS:Condition Zero came with the Steam package I bought and while I was waiting for the Source version to download, I started playing it. It is fun to play with the bots, but boring as heck when you die. What I found interesting though was the fact that CS has one version of the maps, CS:CZ has another version and CS:S has a third. So we have a constant process of remaking the same maps (not to mention the older versions of some maps that have evolved through the betas of CS). It is an interesting process which has some similarities to Lucas’ constant tweaking of Star Wars. What is interesting, however, is that I haven’t found anyone lamenting about how the old versions of the maps are better, unlike the constant lamenting of the original versions of Star Wars.

Whether this is, again, a case of only the hardest of the hardcore playing the game at the moment, with criticisms yet to come, or somehow revisions of levels seem to function in a different way for players than revisions of films do for watchers is yet to be seen.

Despite the fact that CS:CZ comes with “Deleted Scenes” I wonder if some day there will be a “Special Edition” of Counter-Strike that features tons of various versions of the Dust and Office. If they reinstate the jailbreak and VIP modes and include Jeepathon2k you can count me in!

KISS the Painkiller

OK, I’ve been rather busy with school. However, since I built a new computer a month ago, I certainly have found some time to give it a workout.

I’ve finished Doom 3. It was enjoyable. I jumped quite a bit. Perhaps I am all id (ha! I made a joke!) but I found it satisfying. At least one review I read lamented that the horror was only jumping out of the closet at you style and not psychological in nature. Too bad. I like things jumping out at me. Maybe I’m jaded from killing so many sprites and polygons, but psychological horror doesn’t creep me out that much. I like gore.

Unfortunately, I hate cut scenes. Why? Why? Why? I don’t want some damn cut scene to show me the monster. I want to see the monster myself.

I have moved on to Painkiller. I enjoy it. The pure mayhem is fun. The gameplay is a bit simplistic and arcade-y, which is a nice change of pace. There ain’t no reading of memos or combinations to remember, just monsters to chop up. Sorry story people, there is something to be said for just running around killing bad guys. I don’t know what the bad guys in Painkiller are supposed to be, and I don’t really care. I mean there are skeletons in suits of armor. What is their motivation? What is their backstory? I don’t care. They are tying to kill me, ergo I will shoot and chop them into little bits.

While some have compared Painkiller to Blood or Serious Sam, it reminds me most of KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child. The KISS game was actually really fun — even if, like me, you don’t wish to rock and roll every night and/or party every day. The mayhem and weird weapons and shooting are all good mindless fun. I give them both nine thumbs up. Now, don’t ask me what the story of the KISS game is, because I have no idea.

g4m3rs 4 gØd???

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?
g4m3rs 4 gØd???
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!

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.