Ok so gots the new Kingdom Hearts 358/2.

Ok so gots the new Kingdom Hearts 358/2 days! It is awesome. But anyways back onto the topics of video games being art. Kingdom Hearts has great graphics so far. It also has a good musical score. (come on it has Sanctuary! ^_^) The story so far is good. It is ART! Hope the game lives up to expactations!

Are video games an art form? I would ...

 

Are video games an art form? I would have to say yes. For as much work that goes into a game it is most defiantly an art. Video games, to me, are like a interactive art, where it is a continually progressing media. Graphics alone do not make a video game an art form; story lines, character development, and even music combine together to produce the “master piece” which is the game. So video games can fall into many different categories to be “art”. If we think music is an art form, that is present in a game. If we think that a book, or movie, is an art form, again that is present in a game. I do not really understand why there is a question on are video games are art or not. Not everyone likes a particular form of art, same with games, some like one over the others. I game does not have to be so complicated that only a certain group of people would be interested in it. It is like comparing Bioshock to Mario Cart, like comparing a Picasso to a Thomas Kincaid. They are completely different but each in their own right valuable to the art world. It is easy to see why Bioshock would be consider an art piece to the video game world, but why is it such a stretch for anything as sill as Mario? It might not be cutting edge like Bioshock, but games like Mario anything is what people first started playing as kids, recruiting new minds to video games, and in turn maybe even producing future game developers when they grow up.

Ok let me be the first to say that fa...

 

Ok let me be the first to say that fan boys and girls are crazy over their games and there is no way shape of form to stop them in there over obsession with anything that is link to their game. Which can lead to the over done tirades of video game reviews, or conspiracy driven gamers who like to cry about reviewers being paid off if a game that they love gets a lower score than what they think it deserves. Both tend to make it hard to take what there saying is true, and they lose credit when they get labeled a fan boy or girl.

Ok so first off the guy screaming at you in the Youtube video "KILLZONE 2 DEMO IS BETTER THAN ANYTHING THE 360 CAN AND WILL EVER OFFER”, very hard to take him seriously. He is in essence a true fan boy, obsessive with no true grounds other than a quick play of demo to a point where he is telling other people to go sell their 360 and get this game. Demos are not always a reliable source of information, they tend to be the quick version of the game, and not everything in the game is opened for you to play. So basically, you get to play, and see what the company wants you to see before they release the game. So of course it is going to be eye catching and loaded with things you want to see so you will go out and spend your money on a game. However, a demo does not show poor story lines, or other problems that you will find in a game after playing it for a few hours. So demos should be used with caution.

It does seem that fan boy or fan girl label has some negative vibe to it. I guess to me it is like the hard core gamer verses the hipsters, there is a nice gray area in there that no one wants to label and some with fandom nation. For the most part we only hear about the extremeness, the one who go crazy when any kind of negativity is linked with a game. That is a very narrow minded way to think. Don’t get me wrong, and can be called a fan girl at times, but I try and not let it crowd my judgment to much, or shove my idea’s down someone throats.

Reviews are a really a hard thing, ei...

            Reviews

    Reviews are
a really a hard thing, either they are right on or they are way off. I do have
to say that reviews do help me in choosing a game that I would like to buy and
play, but I feel it is the game reviews that are posted on line or just another
player’s review on it, are the ones that I value the most. Major newspapers
tend to be either really weak in the details, or have the stupid ten point grading
scale. I do agree that comparing new games to old games doesn’t always work. For
me, it doesn’t work because I might not have played them before that, or I didn’t
like that game.  I am not a huge gamer,
so I do not really like the comparison point of view because I do not run out
and buy all the major titles so it tends to be rather useless to tell me its
like this and that game combined.

            As for the
grading scale, who really decides what the ranking means? Is it like doctors
pain scale where a frowning face with a tear drop is a six? I don’t know. It
seems like a quick fix to someone who doesn’t have time to play the game and
tell you how they really feel about it. I can disagree with the rating scale as
well, because something that has been giving an eight I might not like playing,
but something given a five I might love to death. So yes the ten out of ten
scale is just pointless and a copout.  

            I do like reading
reviews from people who actually played the game. People who have devote a lot of
time and energy, tend to go into a lot of details, and it helps you get a better
sense of the game and describes to you about the game play and provides to you
the background story. They also tend introduce the characters and their roles
in the game. The more in depth the review is the better. A great review to me
would list the games faults as well as the games successes. You can’t have a
perfect game so having the flaws pointing out to you; you are warned before you
purchase a game.  It is when they give you
the pros and cons to a game you know that they have a good grasp of what you
are looking for.

Ok so the first article we had to rea...

 

Ok so the first article we had to read was pretty interesting. It is true that a lot of people like to put labels on video games, and that some people like to judge one game better over the over because of the content in the game. It is really interesting to learn that games are also being used to help people with rehabilitation and a training modular for work.

“The Hipsters of Gaming” article was very interesting and very true. It is funny how video games have come around full force from being bad and driving youths into violent behavior, to being ok because you can pretend to bowl in your living room. I personally like roll playing games and it seems that there are not that many out there any more, but there are tons of games if you want to play Sudoku on any kind of media. It feels like a lot of games are trying to follow a set formula that they have seen work in the past, and game makers have lost some of the “magic” that made a good game great, and after reading this article you can see that a lot of the games are being catered to the “hipsters” verses gamers.

After reading “ The Place of Games in Culture,” it is very interesting, because I do read manga and happen to like that style so it does make me sad to think that things are become “Americanize” to suite the gaming industry today. It is true that you do see a lot of different cultures represented in games, not just in appearance, but also in mannerisms and speech patterns. The only thing that can kind of go wrong there would be cultural stereotypes and then that would be opening a whole other can of worms.

So after reading all the assigned reading, my fear is that video games are going to become less of an art form and new ideas. With some many “games” coming out for education aid and fitness, will we lose the great games that have sparked so many people into picking up video games in the first place.

Ok the first real post for the class!

So the article for Videogames or Video game is kind of interesting in the since that someone had enough time to worry over this. I get trying to be correct in writing in using the correct word, however having a whole mental debate over which one to use is kind of silly. In my point of view it should be two words because video is describing what kind of game you are playing. Computer games are played on the computer, board games are played on a board, it is not to complicated but it works. Some of the things that people were coming up with were kind of dumb, like should a computer game be a video game, it already has a name computer game. It was really weird that someone asked if a table top game should be considered a video game, I don’t really see how some that has nothing to do with any kind of electronics be considered a video game.
Now on to the chapter, who would have thought something about video games could be so boring, but hey this is suppose to be a class and class equals learning which means a very dry book. Hopefully, it will get better as we go along. It is very cool that literature is starting to involve video games, branching off from the normal every day idea of literature. It is really neat how so many different fields have opened up in the study of video games that something that my mom would yell at my brothers and myself for playing to much, can actually become some kind of career.

first post

Having a blog makes me feel like i should be a antsy teenager... maybe i should get a bottle of black hair die...and some really sucky music... nah i would rather jump off a cliff.... RANDOMNESS!!! ^_^