Chapter Four

Chapter Four is a biography of sorts of a game developer named Cliff Bleszinski. I appreciated the author’s attempt to make someone who seems so distant more realistic. As Bleszinski notes himself in this chapter, game developers are highly intelligent folks who prefer not to be recognized. While playing a video game, it has never occurred to me to ask who might have developed such a game and what genius went into creating the game. This chapter offered me a bit of reflection into the creativity that goes into creating a good game. It was also refreshing to hear Bleszinski’s account of his earliest favorite – Mario Bros. That is a bond that I will forever share with this man. Heck, next time I’m in Cary, I might visit his headquarters and try to speak with him.

Playing Games in Class

My experience playing games in class today was negative. I felt like I was wasting time when I should have been studying for Capitalism. I was forgetting that this was what we were supposed to be doing during class. My guilt hindered my enjoyment of the games that I played. When I was playing the games, I was unable to focus and figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Eventually, I gave up and moved on to studying.

Chapter 3

There definitely exists an “us” and “them” when it comes to video gaming. I would classify the “us” as those of us who see video games as a waste of time and do not engage in gaming. The “them” that I am referring to would be the “Others” (yes, proper noun here) who do not see gaming as a waste of time and do engage in gaming. But what about the outliers? What of those who see gaming as a waste of time and yet still choose to play? What do we do with this group? The “unbearable lightness of games” calls us to allow for those who defy boundaries, and the author is one of those people.

Sexuality in Video Games

The above video is an excerpt of a gay sex scene between a man and an elf in the video game Dragon Age Origins. Is sex present in video games? Yes. Is it a bad thing? That is to be determined by the person playing the game. I do not find anything wrong with the presence of sex/sexuality in video games as long as it is responsible and is not being seen by young viewers. Sex is a natural part of our world, and it is not something to be scared by. I think exposure to sex is a good thing because it plays down the shock value of sexuality. The video above is like masturbation – it might be a positive outlet for someone to explore their sexuality without putting themselves in danger of disease or ridicule by their peers.

Extra Lives, ch. 1 & 2

I have to admit that the first thing I thought after reading the first chapter was why is someone who is so obviously brilliant wasting so much time playing video games? The author missed the inauguration of the first African-American US President so that he could play the new Fallout 3 video game? Maybe there is something I am missing. Maybe I don’t understand what it is like to enter into the world of gaming and get lost there. This is my problem, though. I don’t want to get lost in the world of gaming, especially when that world might expose me to “watching a character close to you suffocate and die”  as Bissell puts it (p. 13). I am willing to try a video game, I am willing to expose myself to something that I don’t understand and do not even enjoy. Yes, I will try to understand the world of gaming, but I will not applaud something that studies have shown increases social phobia, depression (something Bissell himself admits might have been exacerbated by his video gaming), anxiety and a host of other issues.

As the author puts it in Chapter One, “the game enables the experience, but it is not the experience” (p. 12). What is the experience? I am intrigued to find out. I want to play Fallout 3 just as much as I want to watch a horror film. That is to say, I do not want to play the game. What I do want to do is to get a glimpse of the experience. What do gamers experience when they play these video games? My limited experience is from childhood playing simplistic games in worlds that were not as graphic or as violent as the ones depicted nowadays. I still remember, though, experiencing a wide range of emotions in these pseudo-worlds. Anger when I would die, frustration at not being able to beat the level, ecstasy when I would beat a game. In fact, my first attempt at stringing together a jumble of curse words in a way that would sound appropriately violent was after losing a game of Zelda. I even threw my controller at the TV. I will never, ever forget that feeling and the guilt I felt for days after that. So I agree that the experience is larger than the game itself. What I want to know is what IS the experience and how is it affecting our generation?

Bissell touched on it in chapter two when he compared video games to horror films in that they are the “ultimate compulsion” (p. 30). People that are drawn to video gaming have been shown to have more compulsive behaviors to begin with. I never understood how my brother could lock himself into his room for days, literally days, on end to play a new video game. It truly was compulsive. Does compulsion breed compulsion? I certainly hope Bissell addresses this issue in the book.

Obviously, I am taking a different view than the author of the book. The author is largely interested in describing his gaming experience which I find fascinating. I have wanted to know what it is about the gaming world that some people find so fascinating. I am interested, however, in how the world of gaming affects the sociological world – the external structures of our society and of those who play video games. I am also interested in how this subculture of gamers affects our society and how it is affected by the society it is in. I really hope Bissell gets to this in the coming chapters.

Assigning Meaning

When I see the picture, I think of two things – my brother and a recent experience I had. My brother was an avid video gamer when we were growing up. Many times, if I wanted to find my brother, I would just look in his bedroom where he would be trying to beat the highest level of his latest video game. He was a master gamer. I owe any gaming prowess I might have to the many hours I spent watching him play and learning the secrets of gaming from him. I am also reminded of a recent experience I had in Asheville over New Years weekend. I was staying in Asheville with my boyfriend, and a friend of his was celebrating a grand opening weekend at his new “gaming bar” in the downtown area. The bar was set up like any normal bar, except that there were gaming stations all around the bar – wii, playstation, old arcade games, even two vintage Nintendos with giant screens behind the bar where you could play and be watched by everyone sitting at the bar. My boyfriend and I sat ourselves down at the Nintendo station and were given a menu with different games that we could order. We started with Mario Bros. As soon as I started to play, I was blown away at how something I had not done in almost twenty years came back to me immediately. I was taken back to another world that I had not visited since my childhood. Suddenly, every nook and cranny of this virtual world was recognizable. I was remembering where the warp zones were, I was recalling where to find secret coins and invincible stars. It was one of the highlights of my entire weekend. My point is that the picture we were asked to discuss reminds me of how certain things that we do during childhood can have a lasting impact on us and can represent something that we will carry with us for our entire lives.

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