Looking back at the blog entry I can’t get out of my head, it appears that there is a response to it from another member from within the same guild. A good read, if nothing else.

I don’t find this response particularly interesting. Perhaps it’s because of the different nature of the two people, but this article is far more laid back about the nature of gaming. “If you enjoy it, and you aren’t sacrificing things in your real life for it, then it’s fine” seems to be the gist of the argument, but the first comment points out the easy counter argument: simply by playing the game, you’re giving up analogue opportunities.

Despite my attempts to avoid it, my mind continually returns to this blog post. Why, I don’t know, but something about it really resonates with my experiences as a gamer.

I find it really hard when people make commentary about the gaming community and gamers when they have not experienced the community themselves, or have not bought into the idea of being a gamer. Commentary tends to come off as derisive or insulting at worst, and inept or incomplete at best.

Part of this might have to do with the idea that being a gamer, or being an integral part of a gaming community, is a serious time investment. A bottomless time investment one might say. Bottomless in that you can continue to invest more and more time into a game or a gaming community and, if it’s a good game, the game will continue to defeat your efforts to limit it, to end it, to defeat it.

I find it really hard to understand why gaming in the US carries the stigma that it does. From my parents’ reactions to my gaming when I was young to comments in class about the value of gaming as an academic discipline, I don’t really understand why people dislike seeing gaming as anything but a waste of time.

Slashdot always has interesting articles on gaming, and I find it interesting that scientists are asking for funding to look at gaming. Annoying, however, is the distinction that the scientists draw in the difference between educational games and entertaining games. Given that they cite team building as a potential benefit of gaming, I find it hard to believe that they would disregard games such as Counterstrike or Starcraft (which are undoubtedly built solely for pleasure) as educational.

Take a look at this Washington Post editorial called "The Rise of Gaming." It uses Nintendo's weekend release of Wii, its newest video game system, to tentatively ask whether video gaming is, in fact, a legitimate form of entertainment-- not just one for geeky teenage boys.

The editorial says that 'social observers' (who are these mysterious observers? paid stalkers?) "are beginning to deem video game design an emerging art form, especially as companies ratchet up production values. Games now come in a range of genres -- from World War II simulators to strategy games to brain exercises. Creating one is almost like producing a film." It's true that as production values improve and there are more different kinds of games produced, games will probably gain even more legitimacy in the cultural world. The Post is almost endearingly hopeful that the present generation of gamers "will eventually demand more than just shoot'em-ups on its Wiis," and I do think that it has the right instinct. The Post just probably doesn't know that things like Facade and other interactives, which make an entirely different use of games and play than shoot'em-ups do, already exist.

I've been thinking about the idea of a contract between reader/player and text/story/game, which several people have made brief reference to in class and on the blog. It's a pretty generally accepted notion that readers enter into contracts with books, and it seems equally plausible that a player enters into a contract with the game she chooses to play. I'm wondering if the contract that a reader makes with a text is substantially different from the contract a player makes with a game.

A reader expects that a story will make some sort of coherent sense (unless we're talking about highly experimental stuff)-- that she'll be able to follow along to a certain extent, that even if she doesn't understand every single paragraph, she'll be able to draw some meaning out of the whole.

In discussion groups today, silversprung asked who ended up winning the great game debate: games as games or games as stories?
We didn’t answer the question perhaps because it required too much thinking for the beginning of class. But I’m still thinking about (well sort of) because it’s evidently a sore spot for people even outside of the academic world.
One of my friends is pretty into gaming (from a non-academic standpoint), and when I told him about the tensions over narrative in games, he immediately insisted that most good games are serious stories. Obviously, by intimating that games were not stories, I was somehow threatening their value, and belittling people who play them. But insisting that games are stories doesn’t really help ludology become its own distinct thing if it so wrapped up in other fields.