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 there are some interesting issues going on with gaming. A judge in St. Louis decided that videogames don't contain ideas and so aren't provided free speech protection. According to one article Judge Limbaugh (yes he is related to Rush Limbaugh although I don't think we should be punished for who we are related to) didn't even play the games he just watched films of them. In his ruling he said that videogames showed, "no conveyance of ideas, expression or anything else that could possibly amount to free speech. ... Video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures."

Now anyone who knows my research should know that I totally agree with his observation that they don't have much in common with films. However, the notion that videogames don't contain ideas is silly. Similarly that board games don't contain ideas and expressions is probably news to the makers of the Life As a Black Man Game. There are some interesting takes on this available at joystick101.org and penny arcade.

The second issue is the guy who killed 18 people in a school shooting. Notice I said guy, not kid. People are blaming counterstrike and saying that he was a kid. He wasn't he was 19. He was a member of 2 gun clubs and his parents didn't even know that he was kicked out of school. But its those damn videogames fault. WHo's fault is it that people are calling him a kid? It looks like German media is palying the moral panic card and is placing the blame for the violence squarely on the shoulders of those awful videogames, allegedly calling counterstrike, "Software for a massacre." So once again its those damn videogames to blame. They make people so violent. That's why LAN parties always break out into violence and sporting events don't, right? Oh wait... I don't remember any fights at LAN parties. But I seem to remember Lots of fights at sporting evens. Can it be that the media is scaring us about the wrong thing????

posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 6:05 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.