In class we have discussed how violence in video games can affect the minds of people, and how oftentimes games can desensitize people to such violence. In recent years, there are several games that come to mind that actually use violence as a way of criticizing it. One of these games that comes to mind…
Why I love Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel. As a young kid, I was obsessed with any sort of creature. I used to tell my mom that my dream job was to be a zoo keeper and constantly wished that scientists would somehow reanimate dinosaurs so I could see one in person. With my fascination in mind,…
The 2021 film Free Guy focuses on a non-playable character (NPC) named Guy in a popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and his “awakening” from his assigned code. He figures out that as a bank teller, he was only a background character in an open-world game with real-life people as the main players. The…
[Warning: Some minor spoilers ahead for the movie Happy Death Day if you have not watched it yet. The ending and specific intricacies are not spoiled!] While watching the film Edge of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, a few moments in the movie reminded me of another movie that also took the Groundhog’s…
Sometime over the past few years, I stopped buying new games, and for a while, I found myself purchasing a lot of “old” games through the PlayStation store. Games like Beyond Two Souls (2013) and Heavy Rain (2010) were some of my new obsessions at the time. I bought these games in a bundle with…
“I suck at this game”. I don’t know how many times I have told myself this in the ~12 years I have been playing video games; and no matter how much or how little I mumble these words under my breathe, my performance at whatever game I happen to be playing never gets any better.…
A couple of years ago, I read a tweet that said, “girls play the sims cuz they love to control and manipulate people and also decorate things.” Though the user was “joking”, and this statement is a tad bit misogynistic (which I won’t get into because this post would be way longer than it should…
Recently, there have been a lot of conversations about video games in relation to horror and terror. Particularly in the case of horror games where the effect is intended. However, I want to talk about a slightly different subject: when non-horror games unintentionally have “horror” or otherwise “scary” elements. First of all, it is important…
Cheating. Undoubtably, this is one of gaming’s biggest taboos. Hardly anything is worse than a cheater in a video game. But you likely have read the title for this post and wonder: how is it then that I am writing in defense of cheating? Before getting into this perspective on cheating, let’s establish when cheating…
During class on Tuesday as we were discussing Stephen King’s differentiation between horror and terror, one of my peers brought up Edward Berger’s 2022 film adaptation of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front as an example of a truly terrifying piece of media. As I’ve been haunted by the film ever since I…
VG boundaries 1 