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


Archives

 
It seems some of the gaming blogs i follow are slowing down lately. It must be due in part to the school year heating up. However, never let it be said that I let reading or grading or lesson planning be a higher priority than my blog! So now I present some commentary I posted on Slashdot. (Yes, I am being ironic when I mention that others aren't posting but I am simply reposting a comment I made on another site...)

Recently a person took part in one of these "videogames are violent" studies. Read about it over at homelan fed. In it he notes that Unreal Tournament wasn't set up very well. That got me thinking.

I quote from myself:

Perhaps what is really going on here is not that the people conducting the experiment are unintentionally skewing their results by improperly setting up the games, but that the researchers are assuming that "games are easy!" The guy who wrote this article was an experienced gamer. He already knew how to play uT2k3. But as anyone who has tried to show a non-gamer how to play a FPS game knows, they can be very frustrating to learn. I think that these researchers are severely underestimating the skill that it takes to become good at a game like UT2k3. If you have never played a FPS you can't sit down at one a play it for 20 minutes with the ai on hard and NOT get frustrated.

On the other hand, in a game like Pharoh, while much deeper in terms of strategies and the like, you aren't going to die ten times in five minutes trying to learn how to play it and so you will be less frustrated in that 20 minute window of time.

So my point is that, once again, people unfamiliar with videogames underestimate them. Videogames are not as easy as people seem to think, they take a certain amount of skill to be good at them and people constantly forget that. So what this test is really studying is if learning an action game can be more frustrating than learning a sim.

Then I followed up with:

I would think that a FPS on easy would still be more intimidating in a 20 minute sitting than a game like Pharoh. Although I've never played it, it my understanding is that it is in the Civilization style of gameplay where you aren't going to totally fail and get killed as quickly as you would in UT2k3. If I am correct (and someone please let me know if I am not) then simply because UT2k3 is much more action based, you will fail more often than in a civ-like game such as Pharoh the researchers really are, whether they know it or not, are comparing apples to oranges.

I mean that there are many many more variables in comparing playing these two games than just one is violent and one isn't. Perhaps a better comparison to UT2k3 would have been a Tony Hawk game which is pretty fast paced, has a lot of failures, but it considered fairly non-violent.

I think there is a paper topic in here somewhere about the internet allowing research subjects to talk back, as well as the seemingly ignorant attitude toward games of the researchers. Maybe some day.

Henry Jenkins also posted on this topic as well.


posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 12:55 PM

home

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.