Comments on B4GD: What Do Video Games Need to Be More Culturally Rel...

We actually talked about it at the office yesterda...

2009-05-21T09:08:21.438-07:00

We actually talked about it at the office yesterday. It ended up being a 'what should be done' to 'what has to be done to maintain regular publication'. We ended up deciding that it would be awesome if Sociology or any scholastic group would do as they should but understood the need to maintain a steady income.

Ebert mistakenly assumes that gamers and games can...

2009-05-20T15:55:17.845-07:00

Ebert mistakenly assumes that gamers and games cannot be separated. I think there's some value to him, too. But haven't quite worked out what it is yet.

I'll tell Betsy that you didn't like the lack of women in her study of males :P

I started writing this and as it entered a 3rd day...

2009-05-20T06:25:18.255-07:00

I started writing this and as it entered a 3rd day of writing i realized that I could probably just write a book about it so I tried to call it a day on the thing and make it half presentable.

Limitations of genre...my favorite genre confrontation was the introduction of I think Wizard and Glass from Stephen King where he said he enjoyed writing books that people couldn't categorize, thus forcing them to make a stephen king section of a bookstore.

Anyway, I was trying to get at video games have the potential to do their own thing but are limited by the preformed bookstore / film store genre ideals. I think Ebert is right when he says what he does of games.

And yeah, this is an exploratory exercise. I've had this idea forming itself in my head for quite some time. I need to do some learning of programming, game construction outside of design theory, and do some general research on the social construction of technology.

I am also looking forward to women in video games. I wish I didn't have to conform to the standards of the qualitative class structure but then, the class is an exercise in doing so.

ANT is some crazy stuff. David Carlton understands it from a much better perspective than me (or at least more useful to you, i think). I am looking forward to reading more on it!

Mammoth effort and good read overall, but I think ...

2009-05-19T20:52:42.455-07:00

Mammoth effort and good read overall, but I think this post has about six different threads of thought stitched together in a pretty random way. You make some claims about how engines work and how genres are limiting, and you have a bunch of quotes from sources, but you don't have quotes from anyone who makes games or understands code or the industry. This is a problem I have in some of my own writing, but I'm also not leveling claims against the entire field like you are. I'm not really prepared to take a lot of the end of this post seriously until I see that kind of research.

I also don't see genres as necessarily limiting (they exist in film after all, which Ebert knows because he's basically a champion of the genre film), but rather they become limiting when you stop thinking about how they work--as in, if you limit yourself to functional genres without seeing that there are thematic and formal ones as well.

But the ANT stuff continues to intrigue me, and I'm really excited to see what you come up with from your research of the every(wo)man and his/her views of what videogames are!