Last week, we were talking about Massive Multiplayer Online gaming with World of Warcraft. This weeks reading mentions a little on MMO’s in the Games of Empire reading. With the material this week I’ve found that video gaming is a huge culture, and a form of media on its own. What surprised me the most was the use of MMO’s, like Second Life, by companies for employee training as well as meetings. The fact that IMB has spent real money in order to purchase Islands in the game for company use is incredible. Games are even put out by corporations, like Coldstone Creamery, for employees to play in order to teach them how to do their job. Videogaming has become something universal that isn’t just a niche product for diehard gamers to play, but something that can be used as a teaching tool, even a recruiting tool. With games like America’s Army put out by the Department of Defense and available to anyone with access to a computer to play for free, there is a large number of people able to play, the U.S. Army gains a huge amount of real life recruits from the game.

Video gaming is becoming a media source that is universal in consumption and production, and has been broken down into catagories of study. Video games are a media of music, art, and texture. There are serious games and casual games, something to pass the time like solitaire for the phone which I talk about in my BoRT post; games that require little skill and little knowledge of gaming. When reading about the texture of games in the Bogost article, I found it hard to wrap my head around the idea of a video game having texture like art or music. When reading Chantel’s short take post and seeing the video she attached, I saw the texture in the game. The way cause had effect and the noises matched the actions of the little boy running and the spider chasing.

The Bogost article had a lot of good points to make about the catagorizing and breaking down of video games, but the fact that the study is of a ‘mediaecosystem’ was very hard for me to grasp. I thought it was very interestin that videogames ,or any source of media for that matter, could be catagorized into a biological study, or an ecology. I can see how it could be synonimous with an ecosystem in many games are different worlds and take people into a whole other game world, or magic circle. While the biology of games is a little far-fetched for me, the universality of games and the break down of them into a media that isn’t specifically for that niche of gamers makes total sense to me.