Unlimited Potential

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Bogost’s article on what games are capable of is a very necessary read for a large swathe of people who want the medium to grow and for those who simply don’t understand the value, or at least use, of the medium. It also provides some actually useful delineations between different aspects of games’ varied aesthetics,…

Vampire: The Masquerade

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I think fun and escapism are the design of most games. Or at least allow you to feel an escape from the world. However, can that escapism from the stress and hardship of daily life lead to murder? Is it the games fault or was it the person? Is the game an excuse to allow this…

Not Guitar Hero

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The reading this week that I found most interesting was Bogost’s How to Do Things With Videogames. Early on there was a specific line that grabbed me. “In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After…

Games of Empire RR

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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…

My Name is DeNarran

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“Hey Photon, how’s it going?” This greeting was not given online. This was in person as a friend of mine, Photon, aka Michael, was letting us into his house for an evening of gaming. Most players online go by a handle or tag when online. For the group I usually hang out with, our tags…

DayZ and Juul

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What DayZ is advertized as, and what it actually is are two different things. On its Steam store page for the game it is described as “open-world survival horror hybrid-MMO game.” A mouthful, yes, but it fails to touch on the core engagement of DayZ. DayZ is, at its heart, a game about simulating human…

Edbos Week 15 writing

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My favorite reading out of this week’s lot was “Games of Empire.” Since learning about Second Life I have thought that the game was very interesting, and this reading affirmed my suspicion. I especially liked how the author called out the game for being “much like the first” life, because the in game experience is…

Kitsch

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I enjoyed this week’s readings quite a bit, but the thing that stuck the farthest out to me was Bogost’s discussion on kitschy art. Mostly because of how relevant the topic of box art is to games and their existences.

Response

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The Orientalism and Abstraction in Eurogames irritated me, Cybertext left me complex, Games of Empire freaked me out, and How to do Things with Videogames was actually wonderful. The readings for this week, as you can tell, created a cluster of emotions. I had a watch A Clockwork Orange and Rosemary’s Baby to become centered…

My Teamwork BORT

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Teamwork has always been one of the most important aspects of gameplay. The line between a group of people playing a professional sport, or trying to complete an intense raid in World of Warcraft is relatively fine. As someone who has played many sports, but has never played in a massively multiplayer game online, I…