Parent’s Just Don’t Understand

Some of you may remember when I wrote a blog post about other’s reactions to gaming. Today game designer and educator Brenda Brathwaite [bbrathwaite.wordpress.com] had an article entitled The Myth of the Media Myth [escapistmagazine.com] posted at The Escapist. As a more thorough treatment of the situation I dealt with, I found it interesting and well-written. Many of you may feel likewise.

There is Something That is In-between

Internet culture has found the middle point between the venerable Neo Geo [wikipedia.org] sprite graphics and the illustrious Daicon IV [wikipedia.org] opening animation [youtube.com] in the Paul Robertson’s latest work, Kings of Power 4 Billion % [livejournal.com] (you may know him from his previous film Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight). You really should check it out if you have any interest in groovy sprite animation, and I recommend actually doing the full download – a lot of the detail and quality are lost in the various flash streaming versions (i.e. your Youtube et al). Please be kind and download via a mirror!

Women, Games, Research, and Gender-Swapping

Richard Bartle’s blog [youhaventlived.com] has a very good write up on the recent outbreak of mass-media awareness regarding online gender-swapping [guardian.co.uk]. That’s a mouthful, and it’s definitely worth a read. An excerpt:

This Nottingham Trent paper is very reminiscent of what we saw in the mid-1990s. People came to virtual worlds with an incomplete understanding of what they are, conducted some half-assed surveys, gave unsupported and occasionally damaging explanations, and then left. Their research was regarded as a joke by specialists, and ignored. I thought we were past all that now, but apparently not. This Nottingham Trent paper means well, but it’s 15 years out of date. Nevertheless, news editors are happy to misinterpret its misunderstandings and comment on what really should have been left to its own, quiet backwater. I don’t know who courted publicity on its behalf, but academically they’ve done more harm than good.

Overwhelming

MTV.com (and a number of other mainstream press) recently had lunch with Sid Meier [wikipedia], one of the most famous designers to come out of the video game industry (he created Civilization). In the article The Three Most Important Moments In Gaming, And Other Lessons From Sid Meier [mtv.com], they get comments from Sid on a number of things including the Nintendo Wii [wikipedia], Johann Sebastian Bach, and the ‘wife-o-meter’ method of determining game quality. There was one paragraph that struck me (written from the perspective of the MTV.com writer):

I was curious how gaming journalists have changed over the years. Aside from joking that they have gotten smarter and better-looking, Meier said they have understandably gotten more engaged with the medium. He said that early in his career, he encountered people who were threatened by games, not because such people represented the mainstream or concerned parents, but because such people, gaming reporters among them, were fans of military board games. They were part of a subculture that celebrated the complexity of wars waged on game boards divided by hexagons and populated with miniatures. They thought video games were a threat, that they’d overwhelm their hobby. And they did.

Reading this, my mind immediately drew a parallel between those journalists of yesteryear and modern gamers. We gamers are fans of a number of genres that have evolved over the years, getting harder and more niche, built to please and challenge those of us who have been playing for most of our lives. The massive success of the Wii threatens the games we enjoy: take a look at the Wii section of your local game store. I’ve been quite vocal in calling this a ‘pastel-colored wasteland’. It’s shelf upon shelf of brightly-colored covers with generic cartoon characters or animals prominently featured, housing games that even a ‘casual’ gamer won’t want to play more than a couple of times, for a few minutes. It could be that in a few years the breakthrough success of the Wii will have destroyed the market for the large-budget action and adventure game experiences we have come to love. Reading Sid’s comment from that perspective has a terrifyingly prophetic ring to it.