game

Our discussion in class today and my experiences with Cathy's Book have made me think about my experience with Public Records searching and reporting.

All journalism majors, including myself, are required to take "Fact Finding" a course that essentially teaches you about individual rights to public information as well as how to go about finding this information efficiently and legally for the sake of accurate reporting.

Although the class sounds rather boring to most (oo, the joys of perusing through microfilm, old forms and computer records at your local clerk of the court and county offices) I actually found it rather fascinating. It's amazing, and a little scary, that I know exactly how easy it is to dig up any kind of information on someone, and often times, it is equally possible to find supposedly private info like social security numbers, etc., just because of some clerical worker's blind mistake.  read more »

Disclaimer: I apologize if this seems fragmented. I'm writing this on a supply of allergy meds.

So, Markku Eskelinen and the ideas surrounding Ludology seem like a dead horse by now. We've already established that most--if not all--of us either don't like his work or aren't convinced Towards Computer Game Studies is a valuable work of scholarship. While I don't exactly disagree, I'm more interested in trying to understand why his opinions are met with such open hostility, and what (if any) scholarship can be extracted from his essay.

So, if we consider Towards Computer Game Studies something of a flagship for Ludology's self-proclaimed maiden voyage into the glorious uncharted territory of the Computer Game (and while that may seem like an unfair judgement, ludology itself is a very contemporary school of thought created upon the platform of direct resistance to narratology), we run into basic problems with premises. Eskelinen's premises.  read more »

So, as some people may or may not have noticed, at the end of 'game, game, game and again game' there was a note or something about emailing the creator (Jason Nelson) if you finished the game and/or had comments. On a whim, I said "Sure, why not!" and spent a minute and a half typing my thoughts (obviously, there weren't many) and hit 'send'. Of course, being the type of person who checks their email at least once a day (and by that I mean several times a day), I was chagrined to not get any type of response back within a few days or even a week. Ah but what happens when you least expect it! This morning I found this in my inbox:  read more »

Ah, another existential art-video-game.

It seems that there are multiplicities of both story-space and discourse space within "game, game, game and again game." If story-space is the place within which the plot unfolds, then each level constitutes an individual story-space, resulting in thirteen different story-spaces. One might argue that all thirteen are one within the broad definition of "story-space," but my opinion is that each level is so separate from the previous, in both theme and objective and trajectory, that each levels shifts the plot into a new story-space.  read more »

I just finished playing Game, game, game and again game, and I have to say that it was not only confusing, but a long game with no clear ending. The first thing I noticed while playing the game was that the game was not keeping track of the points. It had a space on the top labeled "points," but I never actually accrued points. I died quite a bit in that game, and the "come on and meet your maker" line kind of through me off because you didn't "meet your maker" but rather just got moved to where you started in the level. You could die as often as you like and still end up right back where you started.

Traditional games offer points when you land on something special, may it be a mushroom, or treasure chest, however, this game offered a series of phrases that seemed disconnected and confusing, and some even had scribbled out words that made the phrase a bit more confusing to understand. Each level had a general theme with a clip of music to listen to. Some of the music really bothered me, especially level with the red line on it. Overall, as a game, it really was pointless in my terms of gaming, but it did send a message of futility and meaninglessness of life.  read more »

I just tried to play "game, game...." And I couldn't. The graphics were so spastic and annoying that I didn't even finish level two. I tried, believe me, but I couldn't stand the animation--it simply drove me away from the screen instead of drawing me in.

I just went back and tried to deal with it again--this time passing into the 3rd level before realizing that I should have had my sound on. The soundtrack drives me even further insane--I really really dislike it. But this time I put up with it through level five before being forced to quit by my overloaded senses. While I don't like the style, I do like the way that running into things doesn't necessarily "kill" you or send you back to start. It's interesting that some elements are important to encounter, because without them, you wouldn't be able to progress toward the end goal. And in all, I suppose the spasticness could be a comment on life as well, making this another version of the message in Passage.

holy heck. i have played alot of games in my day, but wow, that was just trippy. between the music and the random videos, game, game, game, and again, game is one of the strangest looking games i have seen. the random quotes are so incredibly random ( it has been agreed that the direction of heaven is up and that lions are there eating cake with bunnies?) that you just have to stop and say wow. the gameplay was simple enough, but i dont think i learned any kind of moral like we had in passage. that game was possibly the most random thing i have played, but it was ok (except that i went the wrong way at the last level and was shipped back to the past...damn)

When I found out that our first assignment would be to play a video game, I was pretty excited. About a minute or two into "Passage", however, I felt a little cheated. The graphics were blurry, there didn't seem to be any advantage to picking up the bookcase/treasure chests, and there wasn't a clearly defined objective. The symbolism and amount of ideas that could be "read out" of the game were interesting, but as a mainstream video game review might say, it has very little replay value. As an interactive narrative, I think that "Passage" works great. One of the main things I didn't like about it as a "game" was the fact that choices made by the player don't have that much effect on how the game ends, other than where on the map the character takes a dirt nap. As a medium for the discourse of a story, however, this works fine, because there is always a beginning and an ending to a story. As Chatman would say, or does say, there are infinite possibilities for what could be included in the story, but the act of selection by the author of where to begin and where to end gives each narrative text a finite quality.  read more »

Sort of. Passage is a game by the barest definition: You play it. You have one single, generic character that you navigate along a linear path with some limited room for maneuvering. There's one music track, one non-player-character, and exactly one (depressing, or cathartic, or anticlimactic, depending on how you look at it) ending.

The digital "game" is just the medium of Passage. Personally, I think of Passage as more of an artistic expression than a traditional game. Some artists use prose, and others use canvas. Passage happens to be a digital game. I don't mean to sound pretentious though. The idea of something being a 'work of art' has connotes a status of importance that transcends what many would consider the ultimate goal of any given video game: mundane entertainment. Personally I didn't think Passage was so groundbreaking and brilliant to be a "work of art" (but, some people break down into tears upon seeing a Rothko painting, so what do I know?), but it is artistic. Here's why.  read more »