In Ian Bogost’s “Video Games are Better Without Characters,” he states that games can be “non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves” when referring to the realization he came to when playing SimCity for the first time. He notes that although no one would consider it a good idea to make someone mayor simply because…
Among the most popular games I often play with friends are any of the various JackBox games. For those unacquainted with these games, they are a series of party games that you and your friends play by submitting answers via your phone. The main game is installed on a computer, the computer communicates with the…
After seeing the class’s reactions to live Never Alone game play, I thought back to the Professor’s comments on their rules for when their kids play video games, with the primary one being that they need someone else there as well. The experience of having someone else nearby, sharing the narrative of the game, as…
If I asked you to imagine what a brick block looks like in a videogame, chances are you might think of something like this. If I asked you to imagine a dirt block, you might think of something like this. If I asked you to list some level themes, you might think of sky, arctic, underground,…
I found Tim Wright’s article “Do Gamers Make Better Drone Operators Than Pilots” really interesting. He studied four groups of people; game players with flight simulation experience, general aviation pilots, professional pilots, and people with no video game experience who were not pilots, and analyzed their performance making decisions in stressful situations. He found that…
In Adrienne Shaw’s article “On Not Becoming Gamers: Moving Beyond the Constructed Audience”, there was one line that really stood out to me. She writes, “sometimes interviewees said they were not gamers because they did not play certain types of games such as games with deep narratives or games focused on killing.” For example, she…
I thought that the Alexis C. Madrical article “You Had to Be There” was very interesting. She writes that there are experiences people have that younger people would not understand because they never experienced it. These experiences people have are powerful because you are able to see how that experience changes over time due to…
I really enjoyed the interface project and had a lot of fun playing the games. However, while walking around and trying out other people’s games, I realized how hard some of the games were. The games itself, while using the controls on the computer, would have been relatively easy and in many cases beatable. But,…
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Michael Koloch’s The Old Man Club can help us understand the costs of certain representations. After reading The Old Man and the Sea I realized that there was some gendering in regards to animals and oceans. Typically, old man Santiago, the protagonist, would refer to the sea…
Wednesday April 11th, 2018, I attended an event called: “Coming To You From the Indigenous Future: A Showcase of Indigenous Women’s Digital media.” At the event I was introduced to the virtual reality (VR) headset. I found that it served as great mechanism to tell the story of Ramona Wilson (click here for documentary), a young native girl…
