Here are my thoughts and comments related to me and my research on videogames and culture.
Bryan-Mitchell Young aka jccalhoun


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The Dream is over...


...or has it just begun?


I have left the wonderful world of blogger and geocities behind. I have moved on to greener pastures. I bit the bullet and registered popularculturegaming.com . I'm all grown up now. snif snif...

So go over there and check out my ramblings. Do it now!
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 4:42 AM

 
Happy New Year.
I was over at Metafilter and they had a post about how Penny Arcade's Child's Play didn't get the media coverage they expected.

As these things somehow usually tend to go, a comment was made that mentioned game titles like, ""Back Alley Rapist" or "Innocent Citizen Pummel-Fest" or "Arson Party 2004" or "Digi-Chicks n' Tits" " and then a follow-up post that said, "These games that allow players to beat cops, rape prostitutes, stomp innocent people and anything else of the ilk are absolutely irresposible and disgusting."

My first response was to post a comment, but since metafilter isn't letting new people join I couldn't, so I did the next best thing and wrote about it here.

Arson???? Raping Prostitutes??? Is there ANY game EVER that features actions such as this??? If so, please tell me. Now I don't want to take this guy to task. He is not alone in holding these ideas about videogames. I have heard the thing about raping more than once. I am assuming that this guy is referring to Grand Theft Auto III. However, if there is any raping in the game, I have yet to find it yet. Again, if there is, let me know.

There is also the big bad guy of beating cops. Yes you can beat cops. But as far as I have played the game, that is not the point. Are there ANY missions in Grand Theft Auto III that directly involve violence against the police? If there is I haven't gotten to them/it yet.

The thing that frustrates me is that over at metafilter, while people are attempting to correct him, as of yet, no one has pointed out the factual errors in his assertions. Let me be clear, as someone who has been playing videogames since PONG, who subscribes to 3 different videogame magazines, watches G4TV, X-Play on TechTV and who considers myself a videogame expert, To the best of my knowledge, there are NO games that feature arson, or rape. Yes you can have consensual sex with prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto III, yes you can kill anyone, including police and prostitutes even if you have just had sex with them, but those features are NOT the point of the games. In fact I had heard so much about this getting a prostitute and then killing her to get your money back feature, I tried to do it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it! (Of course there is always the possibility that I am just a little dense)

That these rumors persist points to a serious issue with how many people perceive videogames. Here we have one game, two if yo could Vice City, that involves the ability to kill people including officers and prostitutes and yet we have people decrying ALL videogames. If you are going to be against Grand Theft Auto III, then fine, be against that game, but do not assume that all games are the same, and please, if you are going to say negative things, then at least be factually correct. More important, if you witness someone saying things about videogames that are exaggerations or are simply factually wrong, call them on it. Tell them that they are wrong, ask them for a clarification, ask them to name the games that they are talking about.

Now I am aware that to a certain extent I am preaching to the choir. Most regular readers of this blog (assuming I have regular readers, that is) know this. Regular readers, hypothetical or not, also know that I have a facination with Google, and one of my main goals in posting this is that by mentioning GTA and violence and rape that the mighty Google algorithm will pick up this post and maybe just maybe at least one person who really does think that there are videogames that include rape will see that otherwise.

Finally, it really amazes me that people are so concerned and afraid and reactionary about videogames. In an attempt to see if maybe there really was some sort of rape in GTA that I just hadn't seen yet.I did a google search for: video game rape prostitute. Go to google and search for those terms. That web sites use those terms to get hits, and that people might use those terms in looking for web sites like that is "10,000 times worse than the worst thing" that happens in ANY videogame.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 12:29 PM

 
Here once again with what is quite possibly my last post of the year. sniff. sniff. And what a year its been.

To continue my trend of reviewing a book as I go, let me offer a few quick thoughts on The Video Game Theory Reader. It is an interesting and worthy read. It is leaps and bounds better than the last book Mark J.P Wolf edited, Medium of the Video Game which I did not like at all.

The Reader is a larger book and much more of a true anthology than the other book. Overall, there is still too much reliance on film theory and psychoanalysis in some of the articles for my tastes. It also uses the Term "video game" rather than "videogame" which I understand is a personal nit pick, but it still irritates me. I'm about half way through it. I plan on sitting down most of the day tomorrow and reading a big chunk of it.

I went home for Christmas and when I came back, what should be waiting for me but more goodies! I got a copy of the DIGRA Level Up Conference Proceedings. For those of us in North America, it can be quite pricey as they want a wire transfer and the conversion rates combined with the fee for a wire transfer drives the price up. I went in with 3 other people and it ended up being $42 a person, but it is worth it. The book is over 400 pages long and in addition it comes with a CD with 49 more papers in .pdf form. If each of them is ten pages long, that's nearly 900 pages of videogame theory goodness! Go buy it now!
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 9:00 PM

 
Now that the semester is over, for better or worse, i'm still feeling that i have things i should be doing. I'm desperately trying to fill the time by playing games, but there is still a lingering guilt that i should be working. With that in mind, i've been thinking about Duke Nukem.

WIth the news that Duke Nukem Forever is still not done, I suppose its timely, but i have been thinking about how the duke is represented in videogames. It all started with a conversation that i had with a friend who is working on a paper about men playing games like tomb raider that feature women. of course that brings up laura mulvey, identification and the like. I've always argued that in most first-person shooters there is no identification because for all intents and purposes there is no real character. The main exception being duke.

That got me to thinking about characters within FPS games. Outside of Duke name the main characters of FPS games. There's (and right now as i write this i can't think of his name... says something about how memorable he is... ok i remember) Gordan Freeman from half-life, Caleb from blood, and ummmm.... doomguy from doom, space marine from quake, convict from unreal, that cop guy from sin, that miner guy in red faction, what's his name, the real mercenary from soldier of fortune. and lots of others even less memorable

Now anyone that reads this site often should know that i'm not about to whine about how we need great characters in games. Blech. I play games to shoot things. No the question is what makes duke better? Well, i think that if you look at the history of duke the difference becomes obvious. Duke originated not in the realm of FPS games, but in the side scroller -- a medium where you could see the character, and by my estimation a medium that actually HAS characters.

The most recognizable character in a FPS did not even originate in a FPS. This makes a lot of sence to me. like i said, i don't think that we need strong fully fleshed out main characters in FPS games. WE are the character after all. the nagging problem has always been duke but that duke existed before the FPS was invented explains a lot. Duke nukem really isn't a FPS character. he is a character that has had a FPS built around him. Since duke nukem 3d came out there have been duke nukem games, but they have all been genres other than FPS games. I think that is where duke might belong. after all, thats where he started.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 3:34 PM

 
Thankfully, there does indeed appear to be sanity in this world. At least some people agreed that the Spike TV Video Game Awards were the worst thing since BMXXX to happen to the videogame subculture.

So, for better or for worse the semester is over. papers are written, grades are turned in. In the two classes in which a final paper was due, I of course wrote about videogames. I'm not too happy with how they turned out. I felt like I had to rush through them (which I did). I suppose we will find out when the grades are released!


posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 2:57 PM

 
So Spike TV held their Video Game Awards. I did not have much hope for it. After all it is on "The First Channel for Men" However, it is part of the huge Viacom media conglomerate who also own MTV. For me at least, the VMA's are still at least entertaining. The VGA's? Well, lets just say that they were much much worse than the G4TV show, G-Phoria which, if you recall, I wasn't fond of...

However, certain members of another media conglomerate must have seen another show than I did. They loved it. I swear, seriously, the COULD NOT have been watching the show I watched. The VGA's were the WORST thing I have ever seen in my life.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 4:01 PM

 
So the semester has finally caught up with me. I've got two papers due, one about the body and videogames, one about the rhetoric of videogame violence, as well as grading student speeches and papers.

Like a lot of people I wasn't impressed with the Deus Ex 2 demo. Not because of the interface and performance issues so much (although they did stink) but becasue of the stupid crap that kept poping up on the screen telling me the controls. I got pissed off and didn't even get into the game very much.

Then of course there is the issue that, liek every other Unreal powered game it locked up on me all the time. Do you realize how hard it is for me not to buy a new computer? Must.... not... spend... money...

So there will probably be some changes around here during the Christmas break. Look out... ...If I survive the next week and a half that is...
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 8:01 PM

 
So I'm enjoying GTA3. I have been told that the African-American who I mentioned in a prior post is supposed to have bandaged hands so it was not an oversight -- except on my own behalf.
I enjoy the openness and freedom of the game, but I find that what I am enjoying the most is the pure variety of the missions thus far. It is really a bunch of organized crime themed minigames.
A non-gamer friend of mine came over the other night and it was very interesting to see her playing the game. Initially she would drive around and stop at all the red lights. Now when I first played the game a couple days earlier, that I should stop at the red lights never even crossed my mind. I wonder if that was just a perculiarity in my experience of the game world of of hers? I have a feeling that it was due to my experience with gaming and her lack thereof that led us to have different expectations of what was acceptable. I came to the game with a set of expectations about the conventions of other videogames. I knew what to expect from the gaming situation. I was coming to it with a conceptual framework of it being a game. She on the other hand seemed to be coming at it from the normal world, a world where running red lights is frowned upon. She came to it with the framework of the ordinary world. From my experience I knew that the rules and conventions of the game world and the normal world were different even if they look the same. She did not appear to. I intend to interview her for a paper I am writing so I will have to be sure to try to figure out the reason between our different takes on the game.

Now the larger implications of this, however, are interesting for the whole perception of videogames debate. If I am correct, then it seems that when people who are not gamers interact and view videogames, then it is little wonder that they are baffled and disgusted by them. They are bringing their real world expectations to the game. They do not have a framework for viewing games from their own perspective. Could it be? Am I implying? Yes, I am implying that the reason some people seem to so grossly misunderstand videogames is that they do not have the literacy to understand them. Yes I am implying that videogames are a complex network of signs that takes skill to be able to understand and negotiate.

Basically, I am saying that videogames are complicated.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 7:43 PM

 
You know you are doing original research when.....
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 10:21 AM

 
Adventures in Consumerism...

So (to start yet another entry with "so") I went out today with the intent of buying GTA Double pack for the X-Box. Why does buying a console game have to be so hard? First I went to the first store and of course there was no one in the electronics section to unlock the case. So I walked across the parking lot to the mall. It was like the freaking day after Thanksgiving. I went to the two game stores there and for whatever reason they both had GTA behind the counter. I go into your store to give you me my money. I don't go into your store to talk to you. Even if the store was dead I would dislike having to ask for a game like it was a dirty magazine, let alone when there is a line of people with merchandice already in their hands. So I am supposed to stand in line empty-handed to ask for the honor of being able to get a game? I don't think so. So I finally went to K-Mart. I love K-Mart, no matter how busy other stores are K-Mart isn't. I should have known that and jsut went there first. They actually had someone in their electronics department --they actually had TWO people. I still had to ask for the permission of giving them their money though. I realize kids steal games and all, but where does preventing theft end and making your customers feel welcome begin?

I finally buy the game -- and no Jack Thompson they did not card me! I might have been a 6ft 4 graying 10 year old! -- and anyway while it comes with GTA III and Vice City it comes in two seperate boxes. Why does it come in two seperate boxes? Two disk DVDs manage to come in one box. The Seaga GT/Jet Set Radio pack that came with my xbox even came on the same disk. While it is certainly posible that the GTA games are too big to put both on one disk, it still doesn't answer my question of why they need two boxes, especially when each box is marked "NOT FOR INDIVIDUAL RESALE."

So I open up the plastic on the box and guess what? Each individual box within the larger box is also shrinkwraped. What the hell is that? I get the shrinkwrap off of GTA III and then find that it also has one of those damn stickers over the edge. I have to got through 3 layers of plastic to get to the game? 3??? Is this some sort of obscure attempt at child proof packaging?

I thought capitalism was about making it easy for me to buy things?

Anyway, I finally got to play GTA and I'm enjoying it. The X-Box version is supposed to be basically the same as the other versions but with better graphics. One of the big deals is that they upgraded the hands in GTA III so that the characters actually have fingers and not just paws. However, and remember I've only played like an hour of it, I did notice that a black chaaracter that helps you in the very beginning still has paws. Hmmmm...
posted by Bryan-Mitchell Young at 9:20 PM

home

First-Person Shooters Aren't Like Movies and That is a Good Thing --A paper about why Shooters aren't like films and how comparisons to them do a disservice to what Shooters are.

That paper was presented at the 2002 PCA under the title "More Than Moving Pictures: Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games. The presentation version can be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.

Identification in First-Person Shooters

Flow in Multi-player FPS gaming (.rtf file)

my reviews

here are a couple of reviews I wrote for joystick101.org

Mark J. P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game.
Arthur Asa Bergers Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon.