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


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Here once again with what is quite possibly my last post of the year. sniff. sniff. And what a year its been.

To continue my trend of reviewing a book as I go, let me offer a few quick thoughts on The Video Game Theory Reader. It is an interesting and worthy read. It is leaps and bounds better than the last book Mark J.P Wolf edited, Medium of the Video Game which I did not like at all.

The Reader is a larger book and much more of a true anthology than the other book. Overall, there is still too much reliance on film theory and psychoanalysis in some of the articles for my tastes. It also uses the Term "video game" rather than "videogame" which I understand is a personal nit pick, but it still irritates me. I'm about half way through it. I plan on sitting down most of the day tomorrow and reading a big chunk of it.

I went home for Christmas and when I came back, what should be waiting for me but more goodies! I got a copy of the DIGRA Level Up Conference Proceedings. For those of us in North America, it can be quite pricey as they want a wire transfer and the conversion rates combined with the fee for a wire transfer drives the price up. I went in with 3 other people and it ended up being $42 a person, but it is worth it. The book is over 400 pages long and in addition it comes with a CD with 49 more papers in .pdf form. If each of them is ten pages long, that's nearly 900 pages of videogame theory goodness! Go buy it now!
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 9:00 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.