Bryan-Mitchell Young Presents:
jccalhoun Popular Culture Gaming

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


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Thursday, February 27, 2003
 

Some random notes.


I finished Jet Set Raido Future, and found the end (heck the whole game) to be really Japanease, in that the main bad guy changed his name and appearance for no apparent reason. (at least I assume that it was the same bad guy, if not who the heck was that final boss?) It seems that this is a common theme in japanease popular culture. In Digimon (which as a cartoon I find VASTY superior to Pokemon) the creatures are constantly getting new looks and names. anyone know why that is? or am I just taking two disparate examples and declaring them a trend?.


I got accepted to a phd program, so i will be able to do my gamer ethnography project. Yeah Me! I haven't heard back from the other schools that I applied to yet, so I'm not which school I will be going to just that I WILL. SO now of course I am trying to think of ways to milk my current employer out of as much money as possible while doing as little work as possible...


I got the Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska edited Screenplay (ISBN 1-903364-23-X)(although I think I have seen her listed as Tanya King on some online book sellers, not sure if that is a typo or what). I'm about 1/3 the way through and find it a whorthwhile read. The collection is subtitled cinema/videogames/interfaces and is mostly about where videogames intersect with films. Of course if you have read any of my stuff, you know I am pretty much anti that approach. What I've read so far isn't horrible, some of it is pretty good, but there are certainly a lit of places where I find myself saying, "Well, yeah, but that is also true of things besides film" and or "NO! That has nothing to do with film!" However, I am saying it a lot less than I thought I would, which is some sort of backhanded complement implying that I think it is worth buying.







my research

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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.