I assume we have all experienced it. That feeling you get when you fail a level in a video game, when you lose a game in sports, only to continue to torture yourself and keep trying until you win. In Juul’s book The Art of Failure he scrutinizes this paradox in video games. He states, The truth is that “To play a game is to make an emotional gamble: we invest time and self-esteem in the hope that it will pay off. (P. 14)” His definition of failure is essentially that it is a manifestation of the gamers limitations being challenged. Juul argues, I think, that we let ourselves be tortured by failure in games because the positive reward we receive when we finally win is more pleasurable than the negative endured previously. I like his analogy of this paradox, completely on with how I view games as a failure-reward triggering manifestation.
I really like the Bogost reading. I thought his correlation of literary analysis and computation was really interesting and had a great time reading the excerpt. I thought this quote was funny and great, “While the epithet “hard core” is usually reserved for explicit pornography, it is also frequently used in the video game industry and press to refer to its most active and committed audience.” I find it funny that this term is used in describing video game culture, while it is also used in the porn industry. Possibly because both are dominated by a male audience? Just kidding.
I really like Bogost’s use of literary work and Cinema to compare and contrast literary criticism from game computation. I felt like he was making the statement that video game coding is often a copy and edit process, with games such as Doom being the base platform for multiple succeeding video games. I also liked his discussion of the French term bricouler. An intersection of these two domains-a
comparative videogame criticism-suggests a more intimate interrelation of two spaces of bricolage, that of criticism and that of production.”