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


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I mentioned in a previous post that I have been accepted into a PhD program. Well, it is after the April 15th deadline for acceptance, so I am proud to announce that I will be part of Indiana University's Department of Communication and Culture My dissertation will be an ethnographic based study on gamers. I will be taking a subcultural approach and looking at the ways they form a community, the reasons why the gaming community consists of who it does (typically middle class young white straight males) with an eye on why people who aren't like that aren't attracted to gaming, as well as why some people who don't fit that mold are part of the scene.

I always feel weird talking about issues of race, gender, class, age, and sexuality, not because they aren't important, but because I am pretty squarely in the dominant demography of white middle class straight males. So I am always afraid of "othering" when I talk about people that aren't of the same demographic.

I am very much looking forward to getting back to school though. I am sick to death of this crappy casino job. I even went so far as to download a countdown clock so i can know evacuate how many days it is until i quit.(although to be honest, working here has given me tons of appreciation for just how lucky i am to be able to leave. Among the people I know from grad school I feel every blue collar and i'm not sure that the majority of those in academia know how lucky they are not to have a job with a time clock. And I have also got a great deal of research material for what may be my next project after my dis. is done.)

The Communication and Culture program at IU has 3 different tracts. Rhetoric, Ethnography and Media. Honestly, I'm not even sure what rhetoric is, so i plan on staying as far away from that as possible... I think I will have to wait and see if I will go ethnography or media, since my project seems to fit in both. I'm sure that there will be lots of overlap in coursework anyway.

THey also have a minor requirement. not sure what I'll go for there. They have an American Studies program which might be good, but they also have an interesting T-Com program. ANd I'm also thinking about maybe a Folklore minor, which would be very ironic considering how much I struggled with it at Bowling Green. There is also a language requirement, so I guess it's time to dust of the German. Let's see what I remember? "Fich dich!" I'm sure that will go over well if I say that on the first day of German class!
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 10:38 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.