Winding down from the end of the semester rush, and getting reaquainted with my tv and computer.

Not specifically related to videogames, I found a few new tools invaluable for modern researchers.

The first, and everyone is talking about it, is Google Scholar. Sure, there are limitations to it, as some have noted, but when you are doing research on a topic like videogames but don’t care about violence, google’s quality sure cuts down the amount of time it takes to find stuff. And that, for me, is what I’ve been waiting for, is better quality in academic search, not quantity. Ebsco and jstor are cool and all, but sometimes they can be impossible to use effectively. Best of all, there is a search plugin for Firefox that lets you search just google scholar rather than have to go to the url to search it. I’ve found several articles that were in the traditional academic databases but didn’t turn up untill I used google scholar.

Another great tool for academic life is Abbyy’s PDF Transformer, which as one might imaging, turns PDF’s into text. There’s nothing that frustrates me more about writing papers than having to retype block quotes. With this, you just convert it to a .rtf file and cut and paste quotes to your heart’s content. Most classes use e-reserves now, which are just articles scanned into pdf files, and the converter makes it a lot easier. (most OCR software will do this as well, but the PDF Transformer is cheaper).

Amazon.com’s Look Inside the Book and Search Inside the Book feature which is great if you can’t remember where inside a book a certain quote was. If you are looking for a good quote, or a source for it, A9 is pretty good because is uses google’s database and also lets you use the “search inside the book” feature at the same time. There is also a Firefox search plugin for A9 too.

This next is kind of a dark tip, but related to PDF Transformer, at least in the way in which I use it is, because if you work at it a little, you can get access to page Amazon shows you (that file is on your computer somewhere if you look for it!) and using pdf transformer turn it into text. You can also look at more than just the 3 pages in a row that Amazon lets you by just “searching inside the book” for the page number. There is a limit to the total number of pages Amazon will let you see per day, however, as I found out when I tried to get a whole article from a book that way once…

LIke I said, none of those have much to do with videogames, but they certainly made my life easier and saved me a few trips to the library when I was writing about videogames

I was flipping through my copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly and saw an ad for something I don’t remember ever seeing an ad for in a gaming magazine before: a book! Of course it was for a novelization of Splinter Cell, but still, it was interesting to see in a gaming mag. Also of note was although it uses the logo for Splinter Cell, it doesn’t have a picture from the game on it, but rather a fairly generic picture.

On another note entirely, count me as a big supporter of Valve’s Steam. I’ve never had any problems with it that I know many have had, but the number one reason I am for it, is no more damn cd checks. Having built a new system and only gotten around to putting one cd drive in it, I have to say that cd switching sucks ass. The issue of switching cds was so irritating that I attempted to delve into the world of no-cd hacks, to no success.

One thing that I was originally in favor of regarding Steam was that on the older games like Counter-Strike in its various versions, Source and Condition Zero, didn’t have one of those stupid splash screens that tells you who made the game. So imagine my anger when HL2 had their stupid Valve screen. We know who made the game! Why do you need to remind us every single time we start the games? At least there is only one, I’m playing Deus Ex 2 and it has at least 3. Note to game developers: stop pissing off your customers! Seriously, does that stupid splash screen really help? Does anyone really think of Neversoft when they think of Tony Hawk???

I just submitted my final grades to the university, so my semester is officially over! Of course to celebrate, I have been playing lots of games. I still haven’t noticed any real trash talking on Counter-Strike:Source, so maybe trashtalkers really ARE 13 year old kids? It will be itneresting to see if lots of kids get Halk-Life 2 for Christmas and the ammount of crap in CS:S goes up noticably.
I’ve been trying to get into Deus Ex 2, but I just can’t seem to do it. Too much takling and the gun feels too wimpy. Continuing my long running hatred of the Unreal engine, Deus Ex 2 has already crashed once on me and this new computer never crashed on Doom 3 or Half-Life 2,,,
I’ve also been playing a lot of Civ3. It was all research, I swear! I got an A on the paper, so I guess I might try to publish it at some point. Below is a portion of the first page. Anyone interestested in the rest can drop me an email.

The Civilization games have been lauded as “The Best Game of All Time” by Computer Gaming World magazine and the “Greatest Computer Strategy Game of All-Time” by Time magazine, won countless other awards and is responsible for a slew of both spin-offs as well as knock-offs (Friedman, Civ3.com). It has even been the subject of numerous studies into the educational potential of videogames having been declared by one scholar as, “a particularly intriguing tool for studying world history in that it allows students to examine relationships among geography, politics, economics, and history over thousands of years and from multiple perspectives” (Squire 9). Despite these accolades, the Civ games have not gone uncritiqued by scholars who have noted some of the Imperialist choices that have influenced the game designs.
While many traditional forms of explicit colonialism have fallen to the wayside, and historians have reexamined the way in which histories of colonization is presented, to a large extent, historically-inspired popular entertainments have failed to rethink the history which they purport to present. In wargaming and in historical simulations, issues are presented in a simplistic good vs. bad format which almost always either depicts the European as good while those whose lands were colonized as bad or they are depicted in such a manner that all civilizations have the same goals and structure. In this paper the ways in which Sid Meier’s Civilization videogames present a highly simplistic notion of colonization, imperialism and empire will be discovered. Also explored will be the ways in which the game reinforces traditional notions of good civilizations vs. bad (or barbaric) civilizations, what it means to be civilized, as well as the ways in which the game makes other civilizations appear either completely western or so inscrutably Other that the only way to deal with them is through eradication. The purpose of this is not to condemn the Civilization series, its creator, or players as “bad” but, rather, to demonstrate the ways in which the legacies of colonialism and classical liberalism continue to play themselves out in places as seemingly benign as our entertainments and how our current culture remains a Civilization of Colonialism.

Apparently not, even though I’ve got 3 papers due in two weeks and 20+ papers to grade by tomorrow (what do my students think? It’s my job to teach them or something? Kids these days!) I’ve managed to finish Half-Life 2 in less than a week and put in some record length sessions with Civilization 3.
At least the last one is for a paper. I writing about depictions of Imerialism and colonialism in videogames for a class on Empire and colonialism. Funny how you can shove videogames into any class.
My post about videogame girls continues to get comments. It is interesting to see the reaction to it. I got over 1000 hits one day with people reading it. I also got linked to by some porn blog, which caused some interesting reactions from people who came here from that site I would guess.
OK, time to grade. Weeee!!! A grad student’s work is never done…