Video games and politics blog

Sorry to post so much, but this blog is absolute money. Here Barack Obama says that kids are spending too much time watching TV and on video games. A professor is disappointed by Obama’s stance on video games.

Also, according to Ian Bogost, social networking and youtube have taken over the role of video games in this election cycle.

Speaking of Interface…

In light of our interface discussion\testing, I thought I’d post this clip from Apple’s press conference a few weeks ago unveiling the iPhone SDK (software development kit). They demonstrate simple game (they wrote it in two weeks) that takes advantage of the iPhone’s graphics capabilities, touch screen, and Wiimote-esque accelerometer…

[youtube jn83wizEMAw]

Favre

Bret Favre recently retired from the NFL after 17 seasons as a quarterback. He holds pretty much every significant passing record. But the endless highlights and newspaper articles fail to accurately capture his greatness. Leave it to 16 years of video game appearances to fully show how great Favre was. Check out this post for screen caps and commentary on various games throughout Favre career. While it says it is a 16 page article, the article is only a few paragraphs per page—the rest is a screen cap and user comments. I recommend skipping around. While the focus of this piece is to show Favre through the ages, it also shows quite a bit about football video games. I really enjoyed this and any Madden fans need to take a look.

http://sports.ign.com/articles/858/858013p1.html

Reading response Brian

I enjoyed reading the section in Meyrowitz’s article about grammar (language) of media because it brought up some points about how the structure and syntax of the medium sometimes help our collective understanding of the medium. There are conventions that we as a society (or consumer) expect from those who create medium. For example, when watching a movie, we expect that if a character looks off to the side, the next shot should be what he is looking at so we the audience can see it too. These little “rules” have been established and reinforced over decades—we expect movie makers to follow them to avoid confusing us.
Jenkins writes about the way students learn, specifically talking about how they interact when playing certain types of games. Those who play games regularly will find loopholes that they can exploit, and once they become familiar with the structure of how the game is designed, they can take advantage of these rules. Sometimes this is called strategy, but if you are playing against the computer and you continually employ the same tricks because you know the game cannot stop you, I think you have broken the structure of the game—the programmer has followed a specific convention and you are going against it.
For example, I have been playing the football video game Madden for several years, across all types of systems, although I started on computer back in high school. I have learned that the best way to complete a pass is to put your best wide receiver in the third receiver’s spot and just wait for a linebacker to guard him. For those that are not as familiar with football, basically I am putting a fast player in position to exploit a slower defender. The game typically does not make the appropriate adjustments because it will put its best defenders where my best receiver should line up (the number one spot) but since I have my best guy in the third spot, I score lots of touchdowns. I feel like I have gone against the structure and “rules” of the game because this really would not happen in real life—and if it did, a human coach would make an adjustment.