Category Archives: First Readers

<rant type=”critique/selfrighteous”>   I must say that the Wired article, while informative, was done in really rather poor taste. Seventeen suicides… seventeen… purportedly out of 1 million employees… and that rate is a driving force for the article? National suicide … Continue reading →

These are the words crooned by doo-wop sensation Rudy West on The Five Key’s track of the same name. The phrase is an idiom about how something can be so easily dismissed if it is not in direct view. This … Continue reading →

Something that resonated with me in the reading, First Respondents, and In-Class Hosts that was only covered a little bit in class on Tuesday is the significance of competition in the development of games initially in the military sector, and … Continue reading →

One of the more interesting ideas that I pulled from Digital Play was the idea of media as “rear-view mirrors”, or “relying for content on old social contexts”. This, it is explained, is why Ping–Pong was more successful than Computer … Continue reading →

To satisfy the urge to summarize the content of the article, I will simply say this: A lesson in videogame history spanning their genesis to the Crash, ending on a note questioning the staying power of video games. Certainly, the … Continue reading →

Stephen Kline’s Digital Play talks about the progression of video games through the interaction of technology, culture and marketing. As an economics major, sometimes I find myself comparing things I read to my major. This definitely happened during the subsection … Continue reading →

After reading the Origins of an Industry article I was thinking about the first computer games developed on those large university and military computers, like Spacewar. These games were first developed by the hackers who were exploring the possibilities of … Continue reading →

When reading the Origins of an Industry chapter, I found myself returning to the concept of breaking boundaries and going to far. I do not play a lot of video games but I have participated in some discussions centered on … Continue reading →

My apologies, the blog did not post the hyperlink. Here it is: http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/10/video-games-cheating-tech-cz_mc_games06_1212consalvo.html

An important topic discussed in class today by the in-class hosts was the topic of cheating, specifically dealing with macros, glitches, and cheat codes and whether or not utilizing these detract from the original intent of the developers or enhance … Continue reading →

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4286/game_ui_discoveries_what_players_.php?page=4   This article takes an interesting look at User Interfaces in different games.  Similar to the Galloway reading, the author of this article (Marcus Andrews) uses a quartered categorization system for interfaces in games.  His two axes are that … Continue reading →

In chapter one of Gaming, Alexander Galloway divides gamic action into four distinct categories : diegetic machine act, nondiegetic machine act, diegetic operator act, and nondiegetic operator act.  In a nondiegetic act, either the machine or the operator (player) is performing an action that is … Continue reading →

One topic discussed in Gaming was cheating.  Galloway said “many games have cheats built into them for debugging purposes.  A cheat act is executed from outside the world of the game by the operator, which effects how the game is … Continue reading →

In his opening chapter, Alexander Galloway seeks to provide an “interpretive framework” with which to study various types of videogames centering around two basic classifications: diegetic versus nondiegetic and operator versus machine.  Galloway places great emphasis on the dangers of … Continue reading →