I found that I agreed with almost everything that was talked about in the Casual Revolution article.  As the stereotypical casual game player, most of what was talked about hit home.  I thought the discussion about the Wii was really interesting. When it first came out, the people I was around at the time told me that the graphics weren’t great, but that’s because they were focused on the game play and new technology, and the graphics would come in time. Now I realize that the “ok” graphics were done purposely, and it completely makes sense. This game is meant for everyone, and I think the article get it completely right when it says that fancy graphics can be intimidating. My aunts and uncles love the Wii, and I think it is mostly because it is so casual, and not intimidating in any way or time consuming.

On the note of time consuming, I thought it was bizarre when the article talked about how much time people actually spent playing casual games. It sounds like casual game players spend as much time chunking away at their casual games as “hardcore gamers” spend playing their more involved games. So why don’t the casual gamers just play the more involved games since they are going to put that time committment into it anyways? I realized this is similar to watching tv and watching a movie. Often, I’ll get online, and want to watch something light and easy thats not going to force me to commit more than 20-4o min. So I decided to watch Frasier, and before I know it, I’ve watched two hours of tv, so in theory I could have watched a movie with the same time committment and involvement. But I feel like this sort of relationship completely captures the difference between casual gaming and hardcore gaming. TV and Casual games are like the lite version of Hardcore games and Movies.

Finally, I disagreed with one thing.

This does not seem fair at all to the casual gamer. What fun is a game if there is no challenge? But thinking about it, and then the picture of Bejewled made me realize that this statement is more or less true. There is almost no challenge in clicking boxes that are the same colors. That seems like games that are usually reserved for pre-schoolers, but here is a huge time waster for school-age kids to adults. So I guess I was left with the question, why do people play casual games, what is the purpose? Do we really have nothing better to do with our time?

In this chapter, Galloway discusses camera angles.  He spends a lot of time on the subjective angle, which would be the angle for a first person shooter game. I found that I had some different responses when I actually tried playing Quake. Galloway suggested that seeing from a characters view helps you sympathize with that character. While this may be true, I found I had a different experience.

Firstly, maybe because I am used to the subjective view used in suspenseful movies, but I was constantly worried about what was behind me. The first-person view in Quake gives close to a 180 view if that, and with people shooting at you, you constantly have to be turning completely around to see what is behind you. This is obviously unrealistic as in life, if you are concerned about something behind you, you are able to look over your shoulder, and in which case I think the overhead view of the game may in fact be more realistic. The basic idea here is that, in life we are more aware of our surroundings than in the FPS perspective, and this caused me frustration while playing.

Secondly, because I was new to this game, I spent a lot of time bumbling around trying to figure out how to turn.  The turning angle of the character is on a 360 point so besides the view not seeming as realistic, and the movement not seeming very realistic, I found myself actually more distanced from the character I was playing, and frustrated with it. In that way, the FPS perspective made it very hard to empathize with the character I was controlling.

Despite all of this, I am completely aware that I felt unnatural in the environment because I had not mastered the finesse of the movements of the game, and I definitely see where Galloway is coming from in that in some situations it might be  more stimulating to be the character rather than to see the character.

These articles discuss the role of narratives in games, and whether games can be expected to have a narrative, or whether this is just a projection of what academics want to see in games. There were several areas that I thought were particularly interesting.

The first area is Aarseth’s imagery of the colonizing literary academic in the new found computer-game land. This was really interesting that he immediately sets up this distance between academics of different areas  (“academics from neighboring fields, such as literature and film studies, are eagerly grasping “the chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure”). Clearly the articles were quite opposed to literary academics imposing their need for a narrative and a story onto the computer game. Basically, I was suprised that both articles clumped literature, and film into groups as if that was all there was to them. For example, in my literature class I read Grapes of Wrath and of course I fully expected to discuss the narrative. The book was written to be discussed for it’s literary value. In my spare time, I read Reinventing Romeo which I doubt anyone with a degree in English has ever read, much less analyzed for it’s narrative.  They are two different products being marketed to two different groups of people. Beyond this basic example, there are books about everything, to suit any academic area of interest. I would say the same is true for art, and film. It seems to make sense, that while video games are still young now, as they develop, they will branch out to provide different areas of study with more specific material.

Besides this, I thought Aarseth made a very interesting case for narratives in current video games by looking at the translation of narratives to video games and video games to narratives.

“but the cultural conventions, such as the setting and character types of, say, Star Wars, are translated. While, as Jesper Juul has pointed out (Juul 2001a), the story of Star Wars is unextractable from the game of the same name, the setting, atmosphere and characters can be deduced. So, although nonnarrative and nonludic elements can be translated, the key elements, the narration and the gameplay, like oil and water, are not easily mixed.”

I would argue that what is so brilliant about translating a book or film to a video game is that the player, in a sense, becomes the narrator, and that’s the main appeal, over the game itself. As he said before, games are as old as stories, and being able to shoot a bad guy is a familiar game, but when you become Harry Potter, and you are in a battle with Voldemort, not only are you the main character, and the constraints of the game, the rules themselves, and your actions all combine to shape the narration and results of the story and game.

I hope this all makes sense!