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 have a bit of a confession to make. I don't get The Sims. I bought the deluxe edition and played it for a couple days but quickly got bored. I guess I need more structure than that. I even let the game run overnight once and nothing exciting happened. On the other hand I am currently obsessed with completing the goals in Tony Hawk. Oh well. Different strokes.

What Got me to thinking about The Sims is some recent press that the sequel has gotten. There is a lot of buzz about how the sims grow and age and have kids and whatnot. That's all well and good, but regardless of how old or young the sim is they are still all supermodel anorexic. Why can't we have some Sims with different body sizes? How about shorter or taller sims? Would that be so hard? That this game portrays everyone as having basically the same body is not just sad, it is also limiting on gameplay. Wouldn't it be interesting to have a sim that had a weight problem? Or to take you sim to a store and find that the store doesn't stock clothes for people above six feet tall?

Gonzalo Frasca has written about the amazing possibilities of a simulation like this, surly the people at Maxis have read it, haven't they? By only including Sims whose image conform only to the western media's notion of the perfect body, the Sims is reinforcing this notion that if you don't look like this, then not only don't you matter, but you don't even exist and thus there must be something wrong with you.

Certainly the sims aren't the only game to portray only idealized body images. Heck, nearly every game in existence does. However, the Sims is the best selling computer game in history. It is played by a greater number of casual gamers than any other computer game ever to see store shelves. Shouldn't a game that is at the forefront of the public's perceptions of gaming be held to a higher standard? After all, what kind of a life simulator doesn't at least attempt to portray a more full spectrum of life?
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 6:24 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.