Author Archives: shandler

Relaxing Video Games?

In class on Tuesday, we discussed Bogost’s chapter about “Relaxation”.  We even played that meditation game in class.  Can video games actually help someone physically relax?  I think that games can allow someone to relax who is feeling stressed out, similar to a stress ball to release frustration.  However, “Zen games” seem not to relax the body, but instead frustrate.  Holding your hands still, with your thumbs in the same place, and trying not to tilt your smartphone does not sound particularly relaxing to me.  Perhaps I’m just too active and need to keep moving and doing something while I play a game, or else I don’t feel like I actually am playing a game, but rather subjecting myself to something unpleasant.  It could just be me, but the game “Cloud” really did not seem fun at all.  It felt like I was literally outside watching clouds (in the boring sense, not the beauty sense).  When I first started up the game, I was confused as to what I should be doing, and it took me a good 10 minutes of flying around and doing nothing until I finally decided to see if I could choose a different level.

Personally, the only relaxation I feel in video games comes in the form of a game that I really cannot lose unless I do not try at all.  Unfortunately, most games made specifically to do this are incredibly boring, because there are no negative consequences for doing wrong things other than wasting time.  Games feel much less immersive if there is some sort of consequence for doing something wrong.  This is why dying in games is so effective; people who play games do not want to die.  If there is no goal to be achieved, in victory even, then there is nothing to the game at all.

Stereotypes within Genres

Bogost’s “pranks” in video games can refer to a satire about certain genres. The game Syoban Action that we played for this week for class was joke about anticipation and repetition of the original Mario game (just taking those aspects to the extreme).  Many games incorporate unbelievable physical aspects to the game that make the game more, for lack of a better term, playable (user-friendly and enjoyable).  Many Role-Playing Games (RPGs) do just this with regard to the interaction of your character and other characters.  College Humor has done many videos poking fun at some of these unbelievable, yet readily accepted, oddities in games.  In class, we discussed how types of media would resort to referencing their own media once many of the good ideas have already been taken.  However, with videos like these, someone who plays games can find humor in a reference to something they know through a different outlet (I’m not sure where “Youtube Videos” would fit as media, but it certainly isn’t under “Video Games”).  As video games have become more mainstream, references to them in other media was inevitable and “pranks” are not limited to just other video games, I feel, but could be anything from a webcomic to a video or even a blog.

Musical Recall

While reading the Whalen essay, I was intrigued when he came across the subject of “mickey mousing”.  Whalen uses the obvious example of Fantasia to describe how the term is used since the entire film is composed of animated characters moving to the rhythm and sounds of the music.  “Mickey mousing”, in this case, felt, to me, like one person’s opinion of what may be happening while this music is playing.  I, myself,did not imagine a pegasus teaching a baby pegasus how to fly when I first heard the first movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony.  And I most certainly did not imagine a scene full of centaurs dancing in and next to a lake when I first heard the second movement.  That aside, when I watched the film, the movements of the pegasi and centaurs matched so well with the choice of music that I did not think it at all out of place.  However, were I to watch the film multiple times, I might begin to start associating Tchaikovsky’s “Chinese Dance” from the Nutcracker Suite with dancing mushrooms.

With that said, repetition and distinctiveness of a melody can allow an association between the event and the music to form for the listener.  An example Whalen uses the example of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time‘s mechanic of using the melody of the music played while within an area in order to unlock something related to that area.  This type of mechanic further reinforces the tendency to associate a specific area with a unique melody.  Not only will the player be hearing the theme, but the theme will also correlate to the related area.  Thinking of either the melody of an area or the area itself will cause one to think of the other automatically.

Real Time Strategy Acts of Configuration

Galloway categorizes anything to do with acts of configuration without actually interacting with the game world as nondiegetic operator acts.  He specifically places Real Time Strategy (RTS) games in this category as the entirety of playing an RTS is interacting with the menus around the screen.  In a game like Starcraft, the mere act of placing unit production buildings in reasonable positions, or technological buildings in places that they will not be easily found or destroyed is perhaps, even, a majority of the gameplay.  This video is a beginner’s guide to Starcraft II in which the importance of building placement is emphasized and demonstrated.  Building placement is literally choosing where to build each building and is an act of configuration accomplished through the menu constantly on-screen.

SC2 Noob School