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


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As I read Screenplay, I find myself becoming more and more convinced that using film theory really does a diservice to what games are. The relationship between player and game is much different than that of viewer and film. It seems that this makes any similaritys between films and games to be very superficial at best.

While I cannot disagree with much of what the authors included in Screenplay are writing, I constantly find myself asking, "So What?" and feel that the authors are really missing the point. I am not deneying that they have a point, but it just feels like they point they are making is not very significant. To use a totally random analogy, it seems that some people (some not all certainly) are judges at a diving competition and focusing on thw swimsuits the divers are wearing rather than the dives themselves.

Call me crazy, but I feel that a lot more attention needs to be paid to ther relationship between the games and the players, than the games themselves. I don't really want to discount anyone's work here, I mean come on, I'm a videogame scholar, not the world's most important profession here, but it just seems that some are on the wrong track. This is not a retraction of my prior recommendation. I still thinkit is worth picking up, but I am still not down with their project. I will write a more full review when I finish it. I will say that as I get past the halfway point, the essays included seem less interesting to me personally. A couple of them seem sort of out of place in this collection. Oh well, isn't EVERY collection like that though?

posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 12:26 AM

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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.