It's already been said in numerous posts that the increased blogging activity in the last day has been quite interesting and amusing. This has been the first time that I have visibly seen evidence of shared procrastination, and yet again, is another sign that this class has done so much for me in changing the way I view academics and knowledge exchange. Also, coming to this blog the last day has given me seizures. I can't keep up with all the new posts! It actually forces me to skim everyone's entries just because there's so many, whereas before I actually read all the entries word for word.

I was reading this article about how A&E is using an online/out in the real world hybrid game to get people interested in watching the Sopranos reruns that A&E is set to play starting early January. So again it's this strategy of game as marketing tool, and I'm still curious as to how successful these things are and what kind of people are the ones who participate in these game/ads.

The article has the requisite quote from some person who will sound educated, in this case a quote from a professor at USC (the cali one): "They want to express themselves in a community,” he said. “In this case the community is of people excited about ‘The Sopranos.’ I think it is a natural flowing from this sort of participation age." People wanting to express themselves in a community...this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as people have been talking about identity online. The way in which games are serving as a way for people to express themselves within a community...this is something that I'm interested in but I don't really know where to go with it yet. And then when the game is also an advertisement, how does that factor in?

Has anyone been seeing the ads for Burger King video games? I ran across this post which sorta explains a lot about it, but basically Burger King's putting out three Xbox360 games that you can buy for $3.99 each with the purchase of a value meal. I'm wondering how much the game feels like a game and how much it feels like an ad...it seems so strange to pay someone money so you can watch their advertisements. Are there other brands out there doing the same kind of thing? I've seen silly little online games that are advertisements, but nothing this elaborate. Or maybe I've been missing stuff--is this becoming a common thing now?

We haven’t talked about video games in a little while, but I saw this article on MSN, and it was pretty interesting. It’s about a recent study of teenager’s brains before and after playing violent video games. The researchers’ did find that there was a definite change, but if you read the interview with the head researcher, it’s clear that he’s pretty reluctant to say that these findings mean anything concrete. That’s understandable because it’s one tiny study.

But as the writer of the article notes, there’s a serious lack of any empirical evidence about the effects of violence in games on children. Mostly there’s just a lot of yelling back and forth. And this study may spur on future studies, and change that.

Silversprung's entry about an encounter with a fellow student blogger over Thanksgiving break reminded me of two incidents I had over the break. Since taking this class, everything technology-related reminds me of this class. If I run across an article about videogames or blogging or anything remotely related, I suddenly think of this class. I'm beginning to get a little creeped out by this, it's literally everywhere! I wonder why I didn't notice these things before.

Anyway, onto the first incident. A good friend of mine writes articles for Escapist Magazine, a gaming magazine, and I told him about our class. He got super excited that we were actually learning about ludologists and all the theory behind video games. When I asked him about his thoughts on the gamer and academic divide, he confirmed a lot of what we'd discussed before. He said that in his experience, the more time a person spends gaming, the less time they devote to the theory and critique behind the games. I'd thought that perhaps there could be some kind of harmonious interaction between the two areas, but even he thought I was being naive. Hmm...I still remain hopeful, but I guess reality does make it hard to achieve.

After the discussion during the last class about majoring in video games, I decided to do some research and found out that lo and behold! There are MANY big universities that offer video game majors! This NY Times article from last year talks about how there are undergraduate and graduate programs in video game design and "interactive entertainment" springing up at bigger universities including the University of Southern California.

Although this field is not widespread in academia, I still think it's an exciting start. This short NPR audio file talks a little about video games too. USC enrolled its first class majoring in video game development this year. There are students in the clip who talk about video games in a very literary way too. One guy says how he's "very much a postructuralist, this is very much a Michel Foucault video game." Sounds pretty much like academic lit crit to me. The news commentator definitely makes the point that some of the students talk more like literary critics than game designers.

I talked a little before about format in GAM3R 7H30RY, and now I wanted to comment a little on the actual content.

I enjoyed reading the first few chapters in the "book," but as the author started getting overly theoretical with his ideas and new words like agon, alea, heterotopia, and atopia, I had a difficult time following along. I thought it was interesting that McKenzie chose to talk about these ideas in such an extensive manner and didn't actually concretely define what he meant by each term until the fifth section, "Atopia." By then, he starts defining alea as "chance" and agon as "competition," (card 115) and I literally had to write down all his definitions and constanty refer to them in order to remind myself of what he was referring to.

I don't know how many of you have seen the Honda Element commercials with the crab and stuff, but there is also a game (which my seminar class played with for, um, twenty minutes tonight).

It's a little online game where you drive a Honda Element around and find different animals and talk to them/help them. In a few instances, it gives you choices as to what you can say to/do with the animals.

Obviously, this game is pretty basic. But the idea of advertising as a part of an immersive experience is a common one (like all the blatant product placement in major motion pictures)--we're immersed, and therefore already in a state where we're accepting things we might not normally accept. It becomes even more powerful with something like a video game, IMO, because people aren't just being bombarded with ads while they watch a movie. They're actually choosing to play a game that IS an advertisement.

I've posted before about the idea of breaking the fourth wall in different kinds of media. This phenomenon is somewhat common in video games, but I just remembered an extreme and extremely effective instance of this.

Some of my friends went through a phase of playing this really silly video game. The name escapes me, but it involved killing zombies. It was basically a typical kill-all-the-monsters sort of game, with a twist: being in the same room with the monsters lowered your sanity levels. If your sanity got low enough, the game would start playing screaming in the backround, blood would drip from walls, imaginary monsters would start jumping out at you, etc. Everyone got used to these things, and some people even purposely played at low sanity because they found the effects so amusing. However, very late in the game, an additional insanity effect shows up: your computer/tv suddenly exhibits the blue screen of death. You really should have heard the screams that effect elicited.

Something has been bothering me a while, and I have finally figured out what it is. It might make me sound whiny, but I am okay with that possibility.

Basically, it's this: Why do we care what (if any) "difference" there is between narrative and games?

I don't know. Maybe I'm being narrow-minded (or an English major), here, but it seems really obvious to me that there is a narrative element to video games--duh, of course there is. That's what happens when people do things in fictional universes: in some form or another, stories develop--whether they're plot-based, character-based, or world-based, there is some kind of narrative. Even in that James Bond game. Even in snowboarding games. It may not be a traditional narrative, but to try to divorce games from narrative seems pointless.