Here are my thoughts and comments related to me my research on videogames and culture.
Bryan-Mitchell Young aka jccalhoun


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So it seems that the heirarchy of blame comes out into the open. In the sniper shootings, now that the witness who claimed to have seen "an olive skinned" man turns out to have been lying, we turn to blaming videogames. From CNN,"Florida lawyer Jack Thompson speculated on NBC's Today show Friday that the shooter might be a gamer. Thompson surmised that an inscription on a Tarot card found near one of the shootings -- "Dear Policeman: I am God" -- might have links to gaming.
"You go to video game chat rooms and you have the proclamation 'I am God' all over the place," said Thompson, an advocate of regulations to keep violent video games out of the hands of minors.
The expression is sometimes used by gamers to declare victory and players commonly say they're in "God-mode" when their characters shield themselves or don protections that make them invincible. "
so when we can't blame non-whites, we blame gamers. never mind that this lawyer seems to be proud that he was part of the 2live crew obsenity case, and represented an oliver north funded group and currently "represents the parents of three girls who were shot and killed in the Paducah school shootings in our federal lawsuit against entertainment giants whose violent products, including video game Doom, encouraged and trained Michael Carneal to kill." but most of what he said is totally wrong.
"I am God" is a popular phrase among gamers? since when? and since where are gamers really into chat rooms? aren't they playing games?(oh I'm sorry killing simulators...) I thought they made us anti-social, so how can we be chatting? and of course the explanation of "God mode" is completly off target. God mode, for anyone that does not know is a cheat code that makes one invinsible. but it has nothing to do with sheilds or doning protections.

but why do did he say chat rooms, rather than the more plausible in game chat? because chat rooms are a scary hot button issue too. remember chat rooms are where people seduce your children. or at least that is what the majority of non-computer people (of which it is probably safe to assume make up the majority of an early morning show like Today) think of when they hear about chat rooms. so this lawyer managed to masterfully put both videogames and chat rooms into a sentence in order to maximize his scare tactics. Which of course was all a plan to help increase his chances of winning that court case.

but none of this stops nearly every major news outlet from picking up on it and reporting it. lies mistruths and moral panics. over and over.

There are also other articles that can be found at google's news search about "sniper games." of course with the exception of counterstrike, i've either barely heard of them or never heard of them at all.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 4:09 PM

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First-Person Shooters Aren't Like Movies and That is a Good Thing --A paper about why Shooters aren't like films and how comparisons to them do a disservice to what Shooters are.

That paper was presented at the 2002 PCA under the title "More Than Moving Pictures: Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games. The presentation version can be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.

Identification in First-Person Shooters

Flow in Multi-player FPS gaming (.rtf file)

my reviews

here are a couple of reviews I wrote for joystick101.org

Mark J. P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game.
Arthur Asa Bergers Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon.