So as I was watching the Colbert Report the other day, his guest was the guy who invented the Sims and came up with this new game, Spore. He was talking about the Sim games, and the more he talked about it, the less I liked the Sim games.
He was talking and he was describing the reasons that people would want to play these games, they seemed pretty sick. For example, he said, if kids "had a bad home life" they could essentially "make a new life for themselves" Except in this game, the kids get to play God. Not bad son or daughter, like usual.

I've never played these games, and I'm not really into computer games in general, but I don't see the fun in creating a world filled with robotic people and making them interact.

When I was just a wee lad, I got a brand new Super Nintendo from Toys R Us. It was one of the happiest days of my life. Another one of the happiest days of my lives was when I got my nintendo 64. I remember hounding my parents for weeks leading up to Christmas whatever year that was. When I actually opened up that beautiful package, I was on top of the world. I can't really remember what year it was, but it was probably around 1995. Or so.
But that's not important right now. What is important is that I have rediscovered my Super Nintendo. The most impressive part about some of the early super nintendo games is the fact that they can be so fun yet so crappy.

In honor of the awesome new video game I got yesterday ("X-men Legends II," yes!!) I thought I'd see what new games are coming out now (esp. since my game is already a year old. But I don't care because it's fun!). I came across two interesting ones that have religious themes. The first was "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," which is based on the "Left Behind" book series. From what I gather, it's premise is kind of similar to my X-men game. But instead of finding new mutants to join your fight against Apocalypse and his evil clone army, you're out recruiting and converting people in your fight against the Anti-Christ and non-believers. Critics of the game have described it as "a violent video game in which born-again Christians aim to convert or kill those who don't adhere to their extreme ideology." That's from this article on cnn.com. One of the groups against the game is petitioning to have it removed from the shelfs at (where else) Walmart. In response the the critiques, the CEO of Left Behind Games, Inc. says that "The reality is that our game perpetuates prayer and worship and that there is no killing in the name of God". He then goes on to contradict this, saying that "There is killing of course, it is a video game. But the basis of the game is spiritual welfare". Ummm okay. I think I'll stick to X-men. Everyone can agree that Apocalypse is a bad guy, especially when paired with evil clones.

I've never actually played this game, so some of what I tell you in this blog may be slightly incorrect, but part of me is simply wondering if anyone has played this. In my Race Theory in the Media course, we have to do a final paper and present what we are discussing to the class. A fellow student in my course recently presented about an interactive video game called Indigo Prophecy (XBox). It is also known as Fahrenheit. My classmate described it as a combination of narrative film and video game.

Basically, the player is the main character (Lucas) and makes decisions for the character which change the outcome of the narrative. The game starts with Lucas waking up from a trance after just killing someone. He has to figure out why he killed them before he is arrested. So the opening scene has the player (as Lucas) cleaning up the crime scene. However, the amount of clean-up the player does effects the outcome of the story after that. The person playing the game has several different choices about what to do in each scenario and each choice effects the outcome of the game. Like I said, I've never played, but it sounded pretty interesting. And pretty relevant to our discussions about narrative and video games. According to my peer it received a lot of praise for attempting to reinvent this genre of video games and it is pretty interesting. Just wondering if anyone has ever played before or knows anything about it...

I wrote this post back in September as I mistakenly reviewed Manovich earlier, but I'd like to post it again since this time it's more relevant to our upcoming discussion (yes I can be a little bit slow times).

Being a videogamer since I was a wee little kid, it was really nice to read about the scholarly merits of computer games as a true form of "new media". Manovich writes how "In short, the computer database and the 3-D computer-based virtual space have become true cultural forms- general ways used by the culture to represent human experience, the world, and human existence in this world" (215).

I meant to blog about this a couple weeks ago when it first game to my attention, but I think it’s fitting that I’m doing it now, since we just finished discussing gaming. Anway, in my Sociology of Popular Music class, people sometimes bring in music to share with the class. One guy showed the class a website called 8 bit peoples, which is basically a site for a group of people who make music using sound cards from old gaming systems. Commodore 64 and Gameboy seem to be the most popular ones to use. For Gameboy, someone even developed a cartridge called “Little Sound DJ” that allows users to program their own songs, using the sounds of the Gameboy itself along with electronic drum kit samples.

i found this reading particularly impossible to wrap my head around, as i kept coming back to the basic thought that video games and narratives are not so easily combined, and for good reason. i can understand a desire to look at narratives in a critical context, and for game studies/ludology to develop as a theoretical approach to a growing medium... but after a while, i realized that this need to combine digital/video games with a narrative was like having your cake and eating it, too.
so it was interesting to see where the class discussion led to tonight, but at the same time i feel like there is this obvious disconnect between computer studies and narratiology, and that this gray area was exactly what "First Person" focused a lot of energy on (or at least the parts I managed to plow through...)

After watching the clip where the stationary bicyclist navigates throughout the city, I began to wonder, if this is art, why don't I think of video games as art? I'm sure a lot of people already do assign (at least certain) videogames as pieces of art but the idea that they would be put in this category has actually never occurred to me. Admittedly, I'm a bit prejudiced against video games and this has probably colored my perception of them as art or non-art pieces. How could Doom possibly be put in the same category as a David or Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Seeing how similar the look of the letter city world we saw in the stationary bicycle piece was to certain video games, however, I was forced to reevaluate.

Simon Penny's article "Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation" had some points that really caught my attention. First of all, on page 77, the word phallocentric appears, which instantly validates the article. Phallocentricity, by the way, is climbing the ladder of my favorite words. It's in my top 8 for sure.

On page 77, Penny quotes David Grossman who says that kids are essentially practicing to kill with these videogames. Much like a flight simulator does for pilots, videogames teach children how to kill every target in their visual field. The most fascinating part of this was note #8 at the end of the article on page 83. Essentially, the point was that the kid who opened fire in a school in Paducah, Kentucky was an unusually good shot. He fired 8 shots, hitting 8 different children, 5 of which he hit in the head, and 3 of which he hit in the upper torso. They were trying to imply that because this kid played shooting videogames for hours each day that he was that much better of a shot. I disagree with this. While I do think it's a n interesting coincidence, a child's mastery of up, down, up, left, right, start is not going to help him pick up a 3 pound piece of steel and aim it with his eyes and steady his hands and squeeze a trigger 8 different times. One skill has nothing to do with the other.

I was doing research for my thesis, reading the forums on Afropunk.com when I came across an interesting thread that had a connection to our readings on videogames this week. People were talking about an article about racism in videogames, and specifically the Grand Theft Auto series. While most people agreed with the article (which condemned games like these for perpetuating racist stereotypes), a couple of poster were avid players of the game and felt that since there were stereotypes or everyone in the game, that made it okay.

Personally, I find the games very problematic, in particular “San Andreas”, which is the one I’ve seen the most/heard the most about. If games are a form of cyberdrama and powerful new storytelling tool, it seems that when it comes to representations of people of color in mainstream media, the form may have changed but it’s the same old story. I wonder who the intended audience for these games are. What does it mean for a white surburban kid to play as a black inner-city gangbanger? It will be interesting to see how larger systems of domination continue to affect (and limit) what kinds of stories games will tell.