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 feel like such a moron.

So yesterday, I finished Command and Conquer: Renegade. I liked it. nothing special but fun regardless. Next on my gaming agenda is No One Lives Forever 2. I found it on sale so I finally got around to buying it. I liked the first one quite a bit so I was looking forward to playing it.

However, like a good gamer, I decided that I should apply the patches. I went to Google typed in "No One Lives Forever" found the monolith site and downloaded the patches. Trouble hit when I tried to install the patches. Repeatedly it would just lock up and quit. So I downloaded the first patch again and still it wouldn't install. So now I'm getting pissed. How in the heck am I supposed to install the patches if they won't install. What kind of slipshod operation is Monolith running here?

Well, since it was a Sierra product it installed those damn Sierra tools which I never bother using. I fire it up and it downloads the patch. I notice that the one it downloaded was like twice the size of the one I got off of the official site. It installs no problem.

But that just brings it up to 1.3 and the site had a 1.3 to 1.4 patch. So I try to install it, same thing happens. The patch locks up crashes and fails to install. So I fire up the Sierra utilities and it doesn't find a 1.4 patch. What the heck? I start up the game and sure enough it is still 1.3. What is going on here? So I go back to the official site and try to figure it out. That's when I notice it. This wasn't the official site for No One Lives Forever 2, it was the site for No One Lives Forever the first game. I've been downloading the patches for the first game, not the sequel. I, mister "videogame expert" am a moron.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 5:08 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.