National Lampoon Vacation Scene from class

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3mvQ8V6evY

Midwest Gaming Classic Pictures

This link should work.

http://s643.photobucket.com/albums/uu153/wooty1515/

Half-Real Jesper Juul

Half-Real Jesper Juul

            Juul is very concerned with rules in video games and non-electronic games.  It seems that most people bend or fit the rules of board game or non-electronic games to themselves.  Take a game of Monopoly for instance.  Parker Brothers has a rule book that comes with the game, but almost everyone I know plays the game a little different. Some people play with a pot, and some people do not.  Monopoly is a commercial game, not a folk game according to Juul, and people create and modify the rules for their own amusement.  Even in a real-life card game like solitaire, the rules get bent when the cards would make a player “lose.”  Video/computer games seem like the one true place that rules do not get altered or bent because of the programming.  This can even be debated when games contain cheat codes that bend the original rules of the game.

Juul only briefly talks about cheat codes.  The programmers insert cheat codes into a video game so the rules can be bent or broken, but does this take away from the fact that the video game is a video game.  A device like the Game Genie took any cheat codes and multiplied them greatly effectively changing the rules and fiction of a game.  I think that Juul could have included more about the bending of rules and how it affects the game and the fiction.

I found Juul’s discussion of games including many actual human activities on pg. 42 to be interesting given the popularity of Second Life.  I know Second Life is not really considered a game, but it does seem that many of the program’s features have resulted from the video game model.  Juul speaks about human interactions being symbolic, which can blur the lines between games and non-game, but does anyone question whether Second Life is real-life? I know that the Second Life was around when the book was published, but I wonder if Juul knew about it.  Juul explains that many human activities (politics, courtship, and academia) can take place in a game.  I think that this has happened, maybe before this book was published.  World of Warcraft guilds have been a meeting round for couple for a long time, and I have taken courses via Second Life.  Maybe elections should take place on-line, and perhaps it would raise voter turnout.  Juul seems to skip over some of these phenomena.

I like Juul’s point about time in games (141-156).  We saw time move unusually fast when we played Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA) earlier this week.  In the game, night and day would fly by almost without any of us noticing it in only an hour of game play.  The play time and fictional time diagrams really examine an interesting point.  I have never gotten hung up by this; I have only noticed it when looking at the game stats in GTA.  I had probably 20 hours into the game (play time) and like 50 days had gone by in the characters world.  Juul really hits on an interesting point that seems similar to time travel discussions.  If the real-time activities in the game are happening with my control, how long does it really take a character to walk or run a mile?  It is interesting that time is almost non-existent in the game, which is how I look at it as a player.

Donovan Ch 1-14 Reading Response

Donovan Chapters 1-14

The history of video games provided by Donovan is very thorough.  The information about the Atari games and the transition from the coin-op games to the home consoles was very informative because the two have always seemed to be very separate to me.  Arcade/coin-op games have a different feel and interaction than console games (including content).  Donovan brings up an example of the difference between console and coin-op content with Narc (170).  I have had plenty of console games that were also coin-op and the play is different.  Pong (Atari), Mike Tyson’s Punch Out (NES), and Mortal Kombat (SNES & Sega Genesis) are quick examples of coin-op games that differed in almost every way from the console version.

I found that moral panic surrounding video games happened almost as soon as the industry reached a level of saturation to be very interesting.  The background of pinball machines  and arcades had a negative connotation before video games were really present seems to have fed the panic.  Donovan tells us about the Surgeon General coming out against video games in 1982.  Think about the content, graphics, and narratives of games in 1982.  Pong and Space Invaders were pretty tame games compared to today’s standards of video game content.  Donovan points out that the controversial games do make for big selling games with Death Race (43).  On the opposite side of the effects coin, Donovan points out how welcomed a game like Ultima IV was by parents.  A game that promoted good values and morals did lead to positive feedback by parents.  It seems like the trend is simply for parents to complain about bad content and never say anything about good, but this example shows that this is not always the case.

One of my issues with the books is that it presents coding video game content as incredibly easy.  I know a little bit about programming language and writing code for the Internet and games, but Donovan makes it sound like anyone could write and produce these games.  Donovan presents Spacewar! as simply being figured out and simplified by the college reject that simply broke into the campus buildings or the high school student.  Also, most of the chapters about computer video games were all about bedroom programmers, which continues the same vein of thought – That creating these games are easy.  I have never used or written in BASIC, but Donovan presents writing this as overly simple.  Atari games as well.  I know the games are pretty simple, but Donovan makes it seem like everyone in the country just started writing Atari 2600 games at one point and that Atari could not control the software (98).  Is this code that easy to write?  Am I being Naïve about this?  All of this happened, but it seems, from Donovan, that everyone could write games in programming language with no background or education in the field.

I thought that the evolution of the games was one of the most interesting parts of the history.  At first, I was not very interested in the French Touch (chapter 10).  I realized that the narratives being written here had a cultural point of view and were really intriguing.  These games have a significance that early video seemed to lack.  Mewilo has a great potential as a cultural tool.  This game can do many things like teach the cultural history, allow players to identify with indigenous people, and then relive/alter the ultimate outcome of the history.  This concept is really interesting from a media studies point of view.  The interactive  nature of video games coupled with a powerful cultural narrative makes for a great work of art.  Donovan even states that Mewilo was one of the first games to receive recognition for artistic merit.