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…
Author Treaandrea M. Russworm, UMASS professor of English, wrote the chapter “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last Of Us” in the book Gaming Representation. In this chapter, Russworm calls attention to dystopian games like Last Of Us and The Walking Dead because of their representations of…
As of recent, virtual reality experiences have been increasing in popularity across the globe, especially within the gaming industry. Some of the most recent advancements have been made by the company Disney, as they created a VR force feedback jacket. The jacket also comes along with a VR headset and two motion sensitive controllers that…
The introduction of video games began with simple 2D games, such as Pac-Man and Frogger. Now a days, with the use of newer technology, developers have managed to create incredibly realistic games. Recently, Epic Games (the developers of Fortnite) teamed up with a few other graphic design companies in attempt to make video game characters…
As we have learned over the course of this class, violent video games can lead to improvements in both cognition and reflex abilities. In November of 2017, ScienceDaily released an article stating that multiplayer online battle arena (MOBAs) games can be a significant predictor of intelligence, essentially acting as an IQ test. The researchers tested…
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…
Yesterday, BBC released an article stating that a code gang in China was arrested for the production of cheat programs. Specifically, these cheat codes were created for the game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), allowing players to have a competitive advantage during gameplay. For those unfamiliar with PUBG, it is a multiplayer online battle royale game in which 100 players…
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…
