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 i'm in the middle of moving to Bloomington to start my phd. I got cable turned on in my apartment monday and to my surprise they have G4 the videogame channel. Wow. Words escape me. I have watched Techtv since nearly its beginning. (I remember the show Page View being on ZDTV for example) and it was a million times more entertaining from the first time I saw it than G4. The first episodes of gamespot tv (which became extended play and then x-play) which featured a segment on people playing games against each other while standing in a boxing ring was more entertaining. From what I have seen, G4 suffers from uniformly bad writing and horrible horrible hosting. One of the shows, Portal, must be seen to be believed how incredibly bad television it makes. From what I can gather, it features a real person interacting with characters from online games. Not people portraying the characters, but actual film clips of game footage with voice overs. It reminded me somewhat of the horrible late 70's early morning "educational" kids programming, with the same quality acting and writing.

Currently I'm watching their award show, G-Phoria. It seems mostly to consist of B-list celebrities being interviewed in some attempt to say, "Hey look celebrities play games, they are kewl really! No really!" To further my suspicions, they game an award for favorite female voice-over and every person nominated was someone you have heard of. There weren't any professional voiceover artists that were up to the caliber of Miss Cleo (nominated for her role in GTA:VC)? And to further make the awards seem shady the winner of the award was jenna jameson who was almost certainly the only one of the nominees in attendance.

However, they did have a performance from Public Enemy which is more than the MTV awards can say. I hope this network does succeed, because the quality of the programing honestly can only get better. However, if I as a gamer can't get into the network and think it is horrible, what would the average person think? And perhaps more importantly, what will they think about gamers?
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 5:39 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.