I started a discussion about this on our class forum, but I would like to meditate on it further here. Basically in all of our studies this semester and especially in watching King of Kong this past week, I am drawing a number of parallels between avid gamers and athletes or people regarded for their skill in other areas. What I can’t seem to understand is why gaming is still often seen as a waste of time. Until I took this class I had a very minimal understanding of the gaming world and while I wasn’t outward about my opinion, I too saw the act of playing video games as somewhat wasteful. It is a big part of why I didn’t spend a lot of time playing games, because I always told myself I had something better to do. And there is still a part of me that believes that, but there is also a part of me that is wondering why those who do put so much time and energy into gaming get so much less recognition than any professional athlete.

Furthermore, what is it about games that lend to the assumption of obsession when a single player chooses to devote all of their time to the game? An athlete, at least one of professional caliber in my sport, chooses to spend over 800 hours a year training to ski race. And those are just hours spent training, there are so many other hours spent preparing for training, or properly recovering from training, not to mention the amount of time an energy that goes into being mentally prepared for races. So is that an obsession? Possibly. But it is rarely looked at from that angle. On the other hand, someone like George Yao spends countless hours playing Clash of Clans and recognizes that period of his life as one characterized by addiction.

I think that humans have addictive and competitive personalities and we are easily tempted to put everything toward the possibility of being the best at something. But so what if this something happens to be a video game? Shouldn’t these players be seen as equally skilled and impressive as professional athletes? Some might say no because there is no physical skill involved, but I would argue the opposite. There is a tremendous amount of skill involved in playing a game, and especially in being the best at playing a game. And if that happens to be one’s life, so be it. I think it is only a matter of time as video games become more accessible and widespread that the recognition for the difficulty of play too will become commonplace.

As a class we have been discussing this topic all week as we look at how women are portrayed through games. It is a fairly relevant topic for me as I am a women and I am currently studying videogames. Much of what we have talked about on our forum discussion gets at the idea that women are marginalized in videogames. And not just some of the time, all the time. The trope of the helpless woman is so over used I would argue that it is no longer a trope in the industry, but a norm. What is interesting to me is that I didn’t take particular note of this until it was brought up as a topic of discussion this week. We have also been talking about identity this week, leading me to examine my own identity both as a woman and as “not a gamer”. I believe in women’s rights and gender equality but I also rarely feel the negative effects of these issues. Maybe it has to do with where I am from or how I was raised, but I have never felt limited due to my gender, or for any other reason really. I have always known that whatever I want, I just have to go out and get it. With that in mind, when I look back at my meager experience with videogames in conjunction with the representation of women in these games, I can only really speak about Super Mario. As I think I may have mentioned earlier, I loved that game and played it on my gameboy color tirelessly. Never did it occur to me that I was playing a male character and that he was forever chasing after the helpless damsel, Princess Peach. Instead I was simply a character striving to complete the levels presented before me.

As I mentioned, I have never felt my sexuality to be a hindrance. In fact, I think it lends power and perspective that I wouldn’t trade for the world. I don’t want this to be a post ranting about how great women are and how they can and should be seen as powerful, but I do want to say that I think the sexualization of women found in media is not all bad. It all depends on the context. I am thinking particularly of the music industry. There are so many female pop starts that consistently use their sexuality to their advantage, conveying power and independence along the way. It would be impossible to desexualize women. We’re built in a way that prohibits such practice. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be powerful too. As I posted on our forum, I don’t think that the trope of the helpless female has to completely disappear. In fact, I think that is an impossible request of the industry. There is no other industry that has been able to survive without sexualizing  women, and I wouldn’t expect the videogame industry to do so either. In fact, I don’t have a problem with appropriate sexualization of female characters in video games, so long as those characters are powerful.

As with just about everything, there has to be a balance. And as I mentioned in the forum, I think that balance will eventually work itself out. I think it does come down to the developers, in my own experience as a game developer this semester I am now seeing I too was facing this issue without realizing it. When Austin and I first sat down to start designing our own videogame, he said, “Lets make our character a girl. Because that would be sweet. That never happens”. At the time I didn’t see how pertinent that statement was, but after thinking about the issue this week I think it says a lot about where we are as a society and potentially as a generation of game developers. Our generation is always trying to push the boundaries in an effort to be unique. My potentially naive hope would be that in time, developers with push the boundaries and create some bad ass female characters, because you know, that would be sweet.

I became a fan of Game of Thrones when I watched the entire first season during my spring break of freshman year. Part of the draw to the show was that all my friends, specifically my guy friends were really into it and the experience of watching it as a group was unparalleled. I have continued to watch the show each spring with many of the same people that originally got me hooked on it two years ago. This week we were asked to check out a Game of Thrones Ascent social RPG  in preparation for a skype in from one of the creators of the game. I have been playing the game for about 45 minutes or so and have really enjoyed myself so far. Looking back to how we define good games, so far this game is meeting the requirements. It has a clear objective, with multiple smaller objectives needed to get there. My goal is to gain the most power in order to take charge of Westeros. From what I can tell so far, I have to go around clicking on things to gain people in support of my quest as well as command those people in the name of my quest. The challenge so far in the game is time. Everything I want to do takes time and so every decision I make to do or make something, I have to wait in order for that command to process and complete. I think this is a good format for this game in respect to the experience watching the show. In the show so often something totally epic happens, and then we cut away from those characters and are directed towards others, often put on the edge of our seats, just waiting to return to the epicness. I think this is also an effective mechanic in this kind of a game as I’m not sure I would be interested in simply clicking on things for multiple hours at hand. The time constraint adds an addictive effect to the game, effectively keeping me coming back for more every time I hear the caw of the crow noise, signifying that a task has been completed. I found it interesting that the game requires you to become an entirely new character, beyond those found in the show, but that your new character interacts with many of the characters found in the series. I don’t know if this is a unique concept or if many other social RPGs follow this same format as I have little experience with such games. Regardless,  I think it is good concept for the game because it allows me to make decisions based on the game in conjunction with the show rather than just based on what I know from the narrative of the show. If I was acting as one of the characters in the show, I would have a hard time making decisions that did not follow the plot I have seen onscreen. All in all, I think the game is fun and so far interesting and that it pairs well with one of my favorite shows.

This week I played Jason McIntosh’s “The Warbler’s Nest”. The game is considered interactive fiction, a game genre that involves the player typing in phrases in order to participate in a dialogue with the system, commanding a character with writing. When I first sat down to play this game I was confused, I had no idea what I was supposed to do, I had to look at the game’s “help and hints” in order to get started. Once I understood the game play, I still had a hard time getting a hang of the game and remained pretty confused about why I was playing for quite a while. I found the game to be frustrating, a general trend of my gaming experience. I often got stuck, without any idea as to what I was supposed to do next and with little understanding of what commands would register with the game. I felt like there was so little I could do to move forward with just my keyboard as a tool. Thinking about it now, this is a very interesting conclusion to come to. Some could argue that there are many more tools in a keyboard than in a console and that your options as a player are limitless as you are fully responsible for what you enter into the game. However, this is not the case with interactive fiction, your choices are in fact limited. When you type something that does not register with the game or does not advance you, the game responds with unhelpful lines of text hinting at the fact that you are doing something wrong in a very frustrating way. In the end, I was able to get the baby free of the chair and successfully throw it in the river, a positively satisfying close to what had been a tedious process.

When I had finished the game I felt that I had just finished reading a short story. Interactive fiction is just as its name describes, it tells a story through your conversation with the computer. However, I didn’t feel like I was driving the story much like a player often does when playing other video games due to the variety of choices and outcomes. Instead, I felt like I was trying to guess the story that had already been written, and I’m not sure I would describe this process as ‘fun’. I’m not entirely sure what the maker of “The Warbler’s Nest” wanted me as a player to get out of his game, I feel like I could have understood his story simply by reading it rather than playing through it. To then end, I’m also not sure where interactive fiction can be most effective. As I said before, I didn’t think it was particularly fun, so maybe the point is to work through the narrative in order to fully understand it’s development. So here my question is, why did McIntosh choose interactive fiction as the medium for his narrative? Why not simply write a short story? 

This week we were asked to watch the film, Indie Game, a documentary about, you guessed it, indie games and the making of FEZ and Super Meat Boy in particular. I just wrote a brief reaction on our class forum about the film, but I would like to expand on that reaction here.

My initial reactions while watching the film was that game makers and programmers are pretty weird. And that is fine, but there is just no way in which I can relate to them. But then as I watched the makers of FEZ and Super Meat Boy let the rest of their lives fall to the way side while they poured everything they have into the making of their games, I began to sympathize with them. I too understand what it means to put every ounce of energy into a project.. well not to the extent or for the time frame these guys were, but rather on a much smaller scale. I have found most creative projects while at school to become all encompassing processes time and time again and I too have let other aspects of my life (albeit momentarily) fall to the wayside. I understand what it means to pour your soul into a project and then to finish it to the horror of releasing it out into the world for all others to experience without my supervision. To that end, the most rewarding part of that process is getting to interact with others post production of whatever project I have completed and to discuss with them the process of production as well as the meaning of the work.

As I watched the film I began to think about other game makers from one man indie game operations all the way to multimillion dollar corporations cranking out war games. Regardless of the game, someone is behind the programming and even further back, the conception for the game. There are art directors and animators that have spent hours and hours working on games before they are released and I wonder if these people ever get to have conversations with gamers similar to those I get to have with viewers of my work. Do gamers appreciate the work and personality that is put into the making of games in similar ways to viewers of my films? Or do they simply want so solve the puzzles, master the levels, become the heros? I realize I am expressing a somewhat cynical view of the gamer community but I cannot help but wonder if the world outside that community had any idea how personal some of these games are and how interesting the process of making these games is, that video games would be an even more popular and widespread medium.

In conclusion, I like indie games. I liked the movie and I like the concept behind the success of these few man operations. I am fascinated by the idea of putting one’s heart and soul into a project for years on end under the pressures of anxious fans. And I especially like how personal these games are for their makers from conception to programming to release into the gaming world.

I think the only game I have ever successfully finished was Super Mario Bros. on my gameboy color. I loved this game and over the course of several spring break road trips from the mountains of Montana to the deserts of Utah, I managed to finally successfully play every level of the game. As I don’t spend much time playing games, I have never finished any other video games so when I found myself at the end of Portal it was truly a surreal experience. I loved the sense of accomplishment that came with the completion of the game, but it was also filled with some relief that the game was finally over, the nightmare had ended. Maybe this is because I was playing the game as an assignment, because I knew I had to get to the end in order to complete the work necessary for class this week, or maybe it was because I simply am just not cut out for gaming. From what I’ve heard, Portal is not a particularly difficult game. Those who play games regularly say its pretty easy, quick to learn and even faster to finish. For me the game was a full adventure into another world that became far more complex than I had  anticipated.

It would be wrong to discuss Portal without talking about the development of the narrative throughout the game. When I wrote about Portal last week I was still seeing the game as a series of sterile rooms with somewhat simple challenges to overcome. There are only two characters in the game, Chell the player-character and GLaDOS, the enemy represented throughout most of the game as a computer animated voice. In the beginning of the game, GLaDOS offers words of encouragement as Chell beings to explore the world of the game and to better understand her capabilities in this world. As the game progresses, GLaDOS becomes more and more cynical and you begin to realize that you are not in a test chamber to prove yourself, but that your goal is to escape the chamber in order to get away from GLaDOS who is clearly trying to kill you.

I was especially interested with the change in the graphics of the game as you leave the pristine world of the test chambers and enter the slightly broken down world of what I can only assume were the first chambers built as part of the entire operation. I enjoyed the way the two worlds flowed and were clearly connected to one another while still being separate. I was most struck by how creepy the game became in a fairly short period of time. Between the combination of GLaDOS’ sweet computerized voice and the change in the scenery from clean world to that of dirtied walls and broken stairways, I was quickly convinced that this was a world I did not belong and should work towards escaping. To this end, I think the game is successful in establishing a clear and somewhat compelling narrative. When I had finished, I felt similar to the way I do when I finish a movie that contains a significant plot twist. I sat back from my computer reeling and trying to understand what just happened and exactly why. I think the game is clever, unique and appropriately challenging for a beginner.

I’d like to write now about my most recent exploration into the game of Portal. For the most part I’ve enjoyed my time playing Portal, except when I get frustrated and can’t seem to figure out the given puzzle. My first impressions of Portal were that it was a silly game, frustrating because of it’s first person platform  of which I am unfamiliar. I found myself turning my head from side to side as I learned to direct my view within the game, obviously a beginner. I also didn’t really ‘get’ the game. I didn’t understand the patterns of the game play nor did I understand exactly how my actions affected the world of the game. To me it seemed like I was just bumbling around in this very stark and strange world without much in the way of direction or motive. But then things started to change! I started to understand the patterns of the game and began to realize what I could and couldn’t do and how those decisions could more quickly propel me through the levels. And this is where the fun began, the more I knew about the game world, the more I enjoyed it. I felt like I was getting good at this game and that little bit of confidence and success ultimately made the game fun.

We have been reading about the development of graphics in video games this week and I would like to discuss the graphics of Portal. The game was released in 2007 so naturally it’s graphics are some what advanced in accordance with the technology present at the time. Hutchinson writes that the technical limitations at the time of a game’s creation have an enormous impact on the overall aesthetic of the game. In other readings it is established that game designers continue to push the envelope of production in game development due to a ongoing demand from consumers. While I agree with both of these points, I think the Portal is potentially a deviation from the standard. To me it appears that other games produced the same year have significantly more advanced graphics than that of Portal. Halo 3, also released that year appears to me to have significantly more advanced graphics than Portal. Also released that year, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, seems to be more graphically complex than Portal. From what I can tell from how far I am in the game currently, Portal is somewhat “bare bones” in comparison to other games of its time. It’s strength is in it’s puzzle nature rather than it’s graphics.

I would also argue that these games that are structurally strong  are able to stand the test of time rather than games that are more focused on advanced graphics. As we were told as a class that we would be playing Portal several of my classmates told me, “Oh you’ll like Portal. It’s a great game!”. It seemed although this game was several years old, they were excited to play it again, excited to revisit those same puzzles. I look forward to finishing Portal in the coming week!

I was especially excited about this week’s focus on sound and music in relation to video games because I think both have become increasingly important in creating the experience for players. As I worked with Joseph to come up with discussion questions for this week we talked in length about the ways in which music has changed the video game industry and why these games that employ music as a mechanic of the game have become so popular. I tested out a few games that use music in multiple ways and had different experiences with each.

When Nick and Austin asked me to play Rockband earlier tonight I realized with some embarrassment that I had never played the game. I found myself sitting in front of the game drum set awkwardly holding the drumsticks, nervous for the music to start. I have some musical background, I played piano (as most young children do) throughout elementary school and picked up the cello for 7 years of school orchestra spanning middle and high school. I consider myself to be a somewhat rhythmic person, someone who has a good ear and a deep appreciation for music. However, as the “notes” came hurdling at me on screen, I found myself unbelievably unrhythmic barely squeezing in a correct note. Playing guitar was a slightly better experience, I strummed along nicely but had increasing difficulty getting both hands to operate in their individual tasks. All in all, I enjoyed myself, I liked the satisfaction of getting the right notes and I was enjoying playing with my friends.. until they made me sing. There are few things that make me extremely uncomfortable, but singing is one of them. Especially into a microphone in front of people, all games aside. And I think my fear of my own voice was my greatest inhibitor to success as the singer for Rock Band. I was so afraid of messing up or generally sounding terrible that I sang timidly and reserved and didn’t have much fun at all because of it.

I’m not sure if I’m an introvert or an extrovert, but I have come to realize that I don’t like doing things that I’m not good at in public. This may seem rather intuitive, but I have a real problem with putting myself out there. Its not that I’m uncomfortable with being terrible at a game, but that I’m uncomfortable with people watching me be terrible at a game. I would so much rather sit alone in my room dying 18 times in a game of League of Legends than I would play in a room full of friends privy to my failures. I think part of the reason Rock Band and other multiplayer performance based games have become so popular might be because they give people the opportunity to show off, to be something they’re not. In doing so they allow us to adopt a potential alter ego and to enter into a world outside of our own similar to most games, the difference being that this world and the real world seem to have more of an overlap than many other games. I think this is because of the way in which music is employed as a mechanic of the game. The songs these games use are familiar to us, we already know the words even before they pop up on screen and that familiarity reminds us of the real world. These games offer a unique gameplay that carefully balances and blends  game like structure with real world influences.

I’d like to think of the title of this post being read by Luigi as the phrase kicks off another race in Super Mario Kart. It is light hearted and seems to air on the side of low expectations and high fun factor. I have made it through my first week of exploration into the world of video games!

This week I have been thinking about what constitutes a game and relating that to why games are so enjoyable and addicting. I have really enjoyed Caillois’ definition of a play in that it is free, separate, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules and make believe. In my experience with the games we were to play this week I most enjoyed Candy Crush.. so much that I had to delete the app after just one day of playing. I found myself reaching for my phone and playing the game with every free moment, whether it be a lull in lunch conversation or a few quiet minutes before bed. I loved the game. I loved the way it continued to tempt me with goals that were just out of reach, leading me to believe that I could in fact reach them if I just tried one more time. Candy Crush meets all the requirements of play and I had a great time playing it.

I was not so convinced by The Room or by SolForge. I found the room to be somewhat entertaining in its endless puzzles, but I had little incentive to solve the puzzles. It was unclear to me why I wanted to get into the chest, a flaw that in my mind made the playing experience much less enjoyable. I found myself frustrated and unenthused when I had finished playing. SolForge proved a similar experience in that I was frustrated and confused. I found it to be entirely too complex for my enjoyment as I was hopeless in the effort to keep track of my cards. Maybe the conclusion here is that I like simple games, games that are fairly intuitive but that benefit from greater skill and understanding of the game.