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 the big buzz going is the new study that determined that gamers really aren't solitary loner psychos. You can check out the actual study here.
For me, and for all reading this certainly, this isn't news. It is blatantly obvious. That a study of this kind had to be done is evidence that the vast majority of people just don't get it. We once again come to the fear of the new, and hate what we don't understand.
As far as the study itself goes, admittedly, I haven't read the entire thing yet, but I find it incredibly superficial and so not-newsworthy, that I am amazed that it is such a topic of conversation. There are discussions about it on Slashdot and Planetcrap for example. But really, I guess what this study does do, besides stating the obvious and being as shallow as possible is offer the gaming community something that is often lacks, namely validation. IT is a way of reassuring ourselves that, no, we aren't all psychos in the making, and we aren't all that unusual. Looked at in that fashion, I suppose that study is useful after all.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 11:36 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.