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 going old school currently. I'm playing Grim Fandango. I've had it on she shelf for a while, but never got around to playing it. As everyone else who has played it has said, it has a great style. I really like that the main character is voiced by someone who seems to be a non-native speacker of English. How many other games released in America have characters with non-native English speaking accents? And aren't the villain? I can't think of any.

However, while it is a fun game, I think I can see why that style of game has fallen out of favor. There is a scene where the main character of Manny has to walk over a bridge. I thought I was going to gouge my eyes out holding down the forward key as he slowly walked across it. Maybe I really am part of the MTV generation (although I didn't have access to MTV untill my sophamore year in college...) but it parts of the game are just deadly monotonous. However, it is a nice diversion from my usual action games.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 4:45 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.