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 enjoying GTA3. I have been told that the African-American who I mentioned in a prior post is supposed to have bandaged hands so it was not an oversight -- except on my own behalf.
I enjoy the openness and freedom of the game, but I find that what I am enjoying the most is the pure variety of the missions thus far. It is really a bunch of organized crime themed minigames.
A non-gamer friend of mine came over the other night and it was very interesting to see her playing the game. Initially she would drive around and stop at all the red lights. Now when I first played the game a couple days earlier, that I should stop at the red lights never even crossed my mind. I wonder if that was just a perculiarity in my experience of the game world of of hers? I have a feeling that it was due to my experience with gaming and her lack thereof that led us to have different expectations of what was acceptable. I came to the game with a set of expectations about the conventions of other videogames. I knew what to expect from the gaming situation. I was coming to it with a conceptual framework of it being a game. She on the other hand seemed to be coming at it from the normal world, a world where running red lights is frowned upon. She came to it with the framework of the ordinary world. From my experience I knew that the rules and conventions of the game world and the normal world were different even if they look the same. She did not appear to. I intend to interview her for a paper I am writing so I will have to be sure to try to figure out the reason between our different takes on the game.

Now the larger implications of this, however, are interesting for the whole perception of videogames debate. If I am correct, then it seems that when people who are not gamers interact and view videogames, then it is little wonder that they are baffled and disgusted by them. They are bringing their real world expectations to the game. They do not have a framework for viewing games from their own perspective. Could it be? Am I implying? Yes, I am implying that the reason some people seem to so grossly misunderstand videogames is that they do not have the literacy to understand them. Yes I am implying that videogames are a complex network of signs that takes skill to be able to understand and negotiate.

Basically, I am saying that videogames are complicated.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 7:43 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.