Popular Culture Gaming
Hello, my name is Bryan-Mitchell Young (alhtough as is increasingly the case with the internet, more people may recognize my handle jccalhoun than my real name) and currrently I am a graduate student in Bowling Green State University's Department of Popular Culture. I am writing my thesis on Computer Gaming Culture.  Thus far, I have written a few papers on the subject.

So I'm trying this "blog" thing out. Test it out here. I think I may change the site over to a blog later. Go there to check out my latest rant.

Recently, I have written a couple of book reviews for joystick101.org.The first one is of Mark J. P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game. You can read it here

The second review is for Arthur Asa Bergers Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon. It is available here.


At the 2002 PCA I presented a paper called "More Than Moving Pictures: Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games” aka “First-Person Shooters Are Not Like Movies and That is a Good Thing." The text of that presentation was adapted from my first essay. The presentation version can be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.

The first essay deals with flow elements of multiplayer gaming.  It can be viewed here.

The second, longer paper deals with flow in single-player games, as well as the ways in which making computergames more like motion pictures can hurt the flow of the game.  It can be viewed here.
My latest essay deals with the ways in which the identification that occurs while playing a FPS is different than the kind that occurs while whatching a movie. It can be viewed here.
If anyone wishes to contact me regarding the culture of computer games and gamers, please feel free to contact me at jccalhoun at hotmail dot com (I've written it out in an attempt to foil the spammers)