Video games have been a part of the technological boom beginning in the mid-20th century in a little lab of MIT. During the expansion of video games into the daily culture of the average person, groups of scholars, players, and people who never played a video game have stepped forward to describe the overall experience.…

Video Game: The Movie focused on the history of video games: past, present, and future. The director, Jeremy Snead, created a relatively easy documentary to follow with interesting transitions and plenty of people to talk about their opinions on the history of video games. This also leads to a problem, yet also a solution. The…

Violence in video games has been an issue for a while, but what I find fascinating as the reason why it is an issue. It was brought up in Games of Empire that there was uproar when after the Columbine school shooting’s perpetrators was categorized as avid Doom players. Doom was a violent game at…

Atari: Game Over is a documentary directed by Zak Penn that follows the story of “the worst video game in history”, E.T. released in 1982. It continues to follow it as a game that also brought the collapse of Atari, the first game engineers. An urban legend that also follows Atari’s collapse is that they…

First off, I don’t have a clue of what the cemented thesis is. Nardi lacks a clear argument and created more of an “I like WoW” and “Look what people can do with WoW” book. She is definitely the type of person I think of when I see anthropological writing. What I have noticed during…

“Let me take my deepest vulnerabilities and put them in a game.” The indie game creator of Braid, Jonathan Blow, stated this at the end of a documentary created by Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky. It follows the story of two independent games, Super Meat Boy and Fez. It goes through the inner workings, specifically…

I do believe that I am changing my topic into just the generic topic of violence in video games and how it becoming a more violent approach (not in a preaching form of video games need to change). A main source I am using is Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto. GTA has a…

My interest for this week was actually about Gojira, or Godzilla as we know him in America. Gojira actually had a purpose in postwar Japan other than just being entertainment. Since America was still sensitive about World War II and created an agreement for Japan to be against emperor-power (in a way), Gojira was a…

The ability to distinguish real life from a virtual life can be rather problematic for some in Second Life (SL), which leads to the documentary called “Life 2.0”. Jason Spingarn-Koff follows the real lives and alternate lives of three individuals using their avatar names: Amie Goode, Asri Falcone, and Ayya Aabye. The people who Spingarn…

In “The Art of Failure”, Juul links failure in games is a whole lot different than failure in real life. It is almost like we as humans are fine with failing in games because it adds to the feel of that game. Failure in real life is highly upsetting because it is not in a…