Self-regulated or self-inflicted rules are something that everyone evaluates differently. Playing a game with someone can either be fun,challenging, or boring based on the rules they place in the game sphere. I love to play Solitaire on my phone, not just as something to pass the time but something I like to do. There are…

All the readings, while in different manners and lengths, approached the idea of realism in video games.  By realism I mean not only the visual representation of the game but also the story line, the tactile sensations it creates, and the ultimate consequences of the game must also approach reality in some light.  Bogost’s discussion…

For this weeks short take, I wanted to talk about my favorite type of video game –or actually my favorite type of game in general– puzzle games. I find puzzle games to be a really interesting type of game, one because they can be really difficult to figure out. Portal was the first puzzle video…

The reading this week that I found most interesting was Bogost’s How to Do Things With Videogames. Early on there was a specific line that grabbed me. “In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After…

Violence in video games has been an issue for a while, but what I find fascinating as the reason why it is an issue. It was brought up in Games of Empire that there was uproar when after the Columbine school shooting’s perpetrators was categorized as avid Doom players. Doom was a violent game at…

“Hey Photon, how’s it going?” This greeting was not given online. This was in person as a friend of mine, Photon, aka Michael, was letting us into his house for an evening of gaming. Most players online go by a handle or tag when online. For the group I usually hang out with, our tags…

What DayZ is advertized as, and what it actually is are two different things. On its Steam store page for the game it is described as “open-world survival horror hybrid-MMO game.” A mouthful, yes, but it fails to touch on the core engagement of DayZ. DayZ is, at its heart, a game about simulating human…

My favorite reading out of this week’s lot was “Games of Empire.” Since learning about Second Life I have thought that the game was very interesting, and this reading affirmed my suspicion. I especially liked how the author called out the game for being “much like the first” life, because the in game experience is…

I enjoyed this week’s readings quite a bit, but the thing that stuck the farthest out to me was Bogost’s discussion on kitschy art. Mostly because of how relevant the topic of box art is to games and their existences.

Teamwork has always been one of the most important aspects of gameplay. The line between a group of people playing a professional sport, or trying to complete an intense raid in World of Warcraft is relatively fine. As someone who has played many sports, but has never played in a massively multiplayer game online, I…