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


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I finished Masters of Doom. I really recommend it for a light fun read. It's a great behind the scenes look at the people who popularized the first person shooter genre.
Books I feel I need to read before I go back to school in August: Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray, Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel, Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins and Reading the Romance by Janice Radway, as well as reread, The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel De Certeau. I probably won't get them all read, but I think they will help me in my dissertation.
Lately I've been thinking about the fact that in First-Person SHooters, there is a kind of grey area between play and game, informally (as in don't hold me to this) defining play as informal non-goal oriented activity, and gaming as more goal oriented structured type of play. Basically, when I play a game, there is what the game tells me to do, go here, shoot this person, not that, escort this moron. However, there is also an area of unstructured play/exploration where I often find myself trying to do things that the game designers obviously didn't intend, be it exploiting the AI or trying to find a shortcut. It seems that this kind of activity has an element of De Certeau's notion of making do in it, but can we be making do in an activity that is primarily designed for leisure in the first place? Of course there is the notion that even our recreation is dictated to us, in that we are all slaves of cultural oppression (Hello Adorno!) This practice of playing in the middle of a game seems also similar to textual poaching and it brings to mind notions of variable literacy as well. Its all a big jumble in my mind at the moment. However, I feel that there is something in those small moments where we aren't playing a game but are simply playing.
Speaking of playing a couple weeks ago a friend of a friend had a party and there were jarts there. Ever since I have been dying (ha! a pun!) for a set of my own illegal lawn darts. Anyone have a set gathering dust they want to part with cheaply?
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 11:42 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.