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 again with my "not-so-frequent" "ramblings" So I went over to the dark side of the force and bought a new consol. I have an original playstation. have like 4 games for it. got bored with it, went back to computer games. Now I bought an X-Box. I bought it mainly for Halo, and Splinter Cell. I haven't bought Splinter Cell yet. A bit let down from all the hype around Halo. Found it pretty blaa. The guys from penny arcade were right about all the buildings looking the same. The vehicles handle like crud. I hated driving every one of them.

Jet Set Radio Future, which now comes with the x-box, is pretty darn good. I like it quite a bit. I find the notion that they put a "do not do graffiti" warning on the front of the game interesting. Also interesting is the fact that they talk a lot about culture and art in the game itself.

I am tempted to say that this is a japanese equivelent of Grand Theft Auto. However, I am not willing to make such cultural generalizations. Anyone know how sucessfull GTA3 is in Japan?

I did finally play a little bit of GTA, have to say, wasn't real impressed. I was more ticked off by the things you couldn't do, like go inside most buildings, than the things you could do. Also seemed like every time I tried to go one one of these famous random acts of violence, the cops were on me in seconds. I was playing a friends saved game though, so perhaps he had already irritated the cops or something. I will try to pick up the PC version and give it an honest play through though before casting me (oh so highly regarded) verdict.

I've noticed traffic on the site has gone up quite a bit lately. Thanks for stopping by!

posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 9:14 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.