Archive for February, 2008
The Cultural Myths about First Person Shooters
by Pedro Silva on February 19th, 2008
The teaser trailer of Duke Nukem Forever was released last month, and the anger that makes me rant a bit about First Person Shooters still lasts. I play FPSs on occassion, mostly because it’s homework, though I enjoy them most in a LAN party against other people in the same room. But there are a few things about FPSs that really bug me, which have less to do with the genre itself and more with a series of myths revolving around FPSs being the quintessencial videogame genre.
I have to say in advance that I have problems playing first person games in general, which is a great disadvantage when I play really interesting games that happen to use a first-person point of view, such as the Thief series and Portal. I just have a problem with being a point of view and not knowing where my character’s feet and hands are, which is a real handicap when you have to jump around on high places. FPSs are even worse, because your hands are usually stuck to a gun, and basically your representation on the screen is as expressive as a smoking weapon whose only meaningful interaction with the world is blowing things to smithereens (or punching, in case it is remotely possible to walk around without a gun). Also, whenever I play an FPS I have the nagging feeling that someone is going to come from the back and shoot me (which is what actually happens 90% of the time). On top of that, it’s annoying that, even though the screen is filled with your character’s point of view, you cannot actually see that much, because your field of vision is greatly reduced compared to the human field of vision.
…
Read all article: http://gambit.mit.edu
S de Mario - 25 anos depois
by Pedro Silva on February 19th, 2008
Mario Bros é o nome de um dos personagens mais famosos dos videojogos.
A arcada que deu origem à carismática figura foi lançado pela Nintendo em 1983. Posteriormente, o mesmo jogo foi lançado para consolas domésticas.
Veja o que já aconteceu com nosso amigo aventureiro, que agora em 2008 completa 25 anos.
Fonte: www.gamereporter.org
Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth
by Pedro Silva on February 11th, 2008
Although the vast majority of studies undertaking the examination of electronic games and the emergence of a gaming culture deny that games are addictive, a stereotype of the game player as addicted continues to circulate in various strands of ego-psychology and pedagogical study and, with greater force and political affect, in popular culture, news media and governmental rhetoric. Frequently, the addicted gamers are seen as low-class, proto-violent addicted and dangerous kids (Beavis, 1998), learning to express repressed anger and aggression (Young, 1998), sociopathically isolated (Thompson, 2002), and potentially capable of perpetrating another Columbine Highschool shoot-out (King & Borland, 2003). Unlike writers such as Young who lump games and online use together and read interactivity and immersion as addiction, there is clearly a strand in popular discourse that seeks to celebrate one over the other, and to accuse games for their addictiveness. What is at stake is how the various sets of knowledges that produce and affirm the stereotype of the addicted game player are produced and circulated. Stereotypes link an image to an idea (Rosello, 1998), fixing a long-term relation between the imaginary figure of the game player and the idea that gameplaying is addictive. The image-idea operations of the stereotype work dynamically-that is, the idea of gameplaying as addictive produces a particular form of game player, while, simultaneously, the utterance of game player invokes within some discourses the danger of addiction to gaming. But this only occurs through particular sets of ingrained attitudes that have emerged partly from a high-culture denunciation of gaming as a valid form of textual engagement, and partly through a set of moral panics around gaming as they emerge every few years in a variety of contexts.
…
by Rob Cover
Read all article: http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/cover
Interactive achievement awards
by Pedro Silva on February 8th, 2008
The 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards will be presented at this year’s D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas. The awards are given for outstanding achievement in various fields of excellence for the games of the past year, recognizing the best games in certain genres as well as various special achievements including artistic design, music, and more. Come back to this page on February 7th at 7:30 p.m. PT for live coverage of the festivities, complete with red carpet interviews with the industry’s biggest names.
Source: www.gamespot.com
