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


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Hmmmmmm Never would have guessed that search result. Google is weird.

Any way, so a couple of books worth taking a look at if you are intrested in the role of the body in videogames Performance as Political Act by Randy Martin argues that the body has become less and less visible since the industrial revolution. He doesn't talk about videogames at all, but it is interesting to try and take his work and project onto it what he might think of virtual bodies.

The second is The Absent Body by Drew Leder who talks about the ways in which we don't really think about teh body untill something goes wrong with it and trying to explain where this whole mind/body split came from. Again, nothing about gaming in particular, but where he talks about tools as extentions of the body and how we project ourselves out into the world, I can't help but think of FPS games. He even mentions living with a First-Person Perspective.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 6:50 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.