eternalgamer.com

Well folks, as some of you surely know, I recently made my first venture to Los Angeles, and more specifically, West Hollywood, where I attended a taping of the Price is Right. This was a fascinating experience for me for many reasons, one of which is that I've never attended a taping for any television show before. Next, and far more influential, is that the Price is Right has long been one of America's most popular game shows. The gents over at CBS are fond of reminding everyone that the show has been on for 34 years, and will indeed continue for at least one more. So what is it about the show that makes it so popular, and why should this be important to us?

I've decided to go ahead and try an experiment on this website, and we'll see how it works out. I've decided to write a paper on the politics of console wars, from fanboys to high-powered marketing execs and everything in between. I'll be combining fieldwork and interviews with a cultural studies text/context analysis, and keeping a fieldwork log here on eternalgamer.com that I hope people will comment on to give me their impressions of my impressions, and in this way create a reflexive and reciprocal dialogue that will inform my final work. I look forward to hearing from you, so stay tuned for more.

The console wars have always created an intense rivalry amongst “fanboys” (check out Robb’s blog for more info on this term) with each side qualifying why their prized system is superior. Is any one system better than the others? No, not really. All the systems have their positives and their negatives. Factors like price, graphical capability, and game selection are just a few of the things that affect what system people choose (except for those lucky enough to have them all). At no other time do I remember a console war being as interesting as it is right now. Veteran Nintendo offers its quirky Wii as the console for everyone. Former top dog Sony has, for the moment at least, become the third party in the console war as its high price crippled its first year sales. Finally, newcomer Microsoft has had an extra year to saturate the market and remains the most owned next generation system. But I am not here to argue for one system or the other. I am here to simply take a close look at one system in particular – the Nintendo Wii and its relationship to a few key concepts from Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media. Specifically, I will explore how the Wii complicates some of Manovich’s assertions regarding realism and interactivity.

So here is my ENG 486 final essay that deals with moviemaking via 3D game engines--machinima and how movies and videogames are becoming more and more intertwined as videogames become useful tools in consumer-produced media. This kind of goes along with Robb's recent post, but mine also talks about the creation of my own machinima movie (I'm sorry of you read this essay and wish you could see my movie, I'm having problems uploading it to the internet right now, so I'm unable to do so). I've split it up into two parts, the first being the more analytical section and the second being more for describing how I made my machinima movie (which was written for the fact that it'll be read by the professor) but it still has some videogame analysis in it. So I set it up that the "scholarly" section is separate from my personal account description. This essay isn't as in-depth and analytical as I would like it to be, but I think that it does a decent job of bringing up the questions raised by machinima for audience consideration. So with that, enjoy!

As one of my projects for this site, I really wanted to look at the idea of cinematic games. Next-generation consoles are finally starting to show what they are really capable of, and two recent blockbuster titles are fabulous examples of the Hollywood blockbuster aesthetic coming in full force to the world of videogames. I am, of course, referring to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Mass Effect. The former is a contemporary action/adventure title in style of Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider, while the latter is a futuristic sci-fi shooter/role-playing game. Yes, they are quite a bit different from one another, but they are also both very similar in the ways the language of cinema informs their presentation. Read on... spoilers ahead...

Selections from a work in progress

Part 3 of 3

The S3 Project

A selection from the script of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, spoken by the Colonel and Rose:

The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas. Culture. History. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature?

Selections from a work in progress

Part 2 of 3

Random Acts of Emergence

It may first be helpful to look at some examples of emergence that occur within certain players when the author is not specifically attempting to create a game environment conducive to emergence. More specifically, these are instances where the videogame experience seems to provide the illusion of gaining real experience and the player emerges with a new understanding of Self (and by extension, the Other). In this section, I will be drawing upon research I did for a paper on the role of historically-based narratives of patriotism in videogames in shaping the American understanding of historical events and their importance.

Selections from a work in progress

Part 1 of 3

These passages are part of a larger work in progress, wherein I am attempting to determine the larger implications of the immersive aesthetic in videogames, the role of the player in the immersive experience, and the act of emergence after play. Read on...

The videogame is the only medium to exist, purely, as a digital abstraction. That is to say, that there is no possible manifestation of the videogame in a definite form. It does not exist in and of itself. In fact, the closest thing we can come to a finite manifestation of any given videogame is a printout of the source code. But what does this leave us with? A stack of paper, a pile of scrap; it is definitely not a videogame.

I've been attending a seminar on gender and genre in cinema, during which I was introduced to an article called "Beauty in Motion" by Marc O'Day. The article discusses the phenomenon of Action-Babe Cinema, and the potentially empowering effect for women who are finally able to see tough, beautiful women in action roles on the silver screen. Some of the women in question involve Tomb Raider's Lara Croft and Resident Evil's Alice (who wasn't even a character in the games). I decided to dispute the article's foundation by pointing out that women in the games that these movies were (supposedly) based on are, at best, a controversial issue. Read on...

Chris posted an article about how he doesn't understand the genre of racing simulators recently, and I thought this article from my archives made a good counterpoint:

There is nothing new about the idea of a meditative quality of work. It is a popular idea in many religions, including Protestantism and Buddhism, that hard work as a state of mind carries with it redemptive and cleansing properties. Can the immersive aesthetic prompt similar types of experiences through videogames that encourage "work?"