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


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You know people are always talking about how kids are sitting inside all day long playing games and never go outside. I'd like to invite them over to my place. The kids across the street are outside all day long riding bikes, playing hide and seek and whatever else it is that requires lots of yelling. It seems that not everyone is sitting around on their butts all day

In other news, I finished No One Lives Forever 2 and enjoyed it quite a bit. a very polished and well made game. I think designers could do worse than study NOLF2's interface. The icons in on the hud were very pleasing -- sylistic and with some character and yet very usefull as well. It seems that NOLF2 didn't have quite as good of incidental dialog as the first one but still pretty entertaining.

On the downside though, once again the game makers use a cut scene to show one of the most exciting parts of the game rather than allow us to do it ourselves. I"m going to try to be oblique about the specifics here so i can talk about it without spoiling how the game end, but still possible spoilers here. . . . . . . . . At the end, a cut scene shows us the supersoldier saving the day instead of letting us the character do it. would it have been so hard to have put some howitzers there to let us take the shot?

I'm now on to Return to Castle Wolfenstein and have to say that it is a bit of a letdown from NOLF2, I find myself playing more of the multiplayer than the single player. I still find i prefer counterstrike to it though.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 9:49 AM

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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.