“Let me take my deepest vulnerabilities and put them in a game.” The indie game creator of Braid, Jonathan Blow, stated this at the end of a documentary created by Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky. It follows the story of two independent games, Super Meat Boy and Fez. It goes through the inner workings, specifically…

Halo has a distinct rhythm, a flow that acts as a hallmark of almost any match. It is a combination of movement, positioning, the act of engaging and disengaging and shooting. This flow is the core appeal of multiplayer Halo. Most players participate in this flow, this accepted method of playing. While subverting this flow…

BoRT Questions 3: As I am sure all of you know, my experience with video games essentially just does not exist. Please bear with me as I reflect on my high school days of playing the Nintendo Wii and pretending I know about video games. I am not an avid gamer by any means, but…

Throughout Anne Allison’s book, the intertwinement of capitalism and fantasy and its impact on American soft power and Japanese globalism are discussed through various examples. I thought her writing style was a bit dense at times, but still readable nonetheless. I felt like an underlying theme throughout her book was the topic of relationships in…

Bill Brown’s article “Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism” is a pretty interesting read. He briefly traces some of the American global baseball tours of the early twentieth century, and also how the Japanese used baseball in 1914 as a tool to colonize the island of Truk, a Japanese colony in the Caroline…

Extended play-There has been one experience I’ve had with gaming where it ended up bleeding into my day to day life. About seven years ago I went to Seattle for Thanksgiving to visit family. I have a cousin who is about a year younger than me and he was currently experiencing an obsession over the…

One of the primary sources I am using outlines a study done on the effects of the sexualization of female video game characters on gender-stereo types as well as female self- image in young adults. The results of the study CATIOUTSLY suggest that the image of women was warped after playing a game with an…

Let me just start off by saying, this book was great! I really enjoyed how accesible it was for someone who has not grown up with these elements of popular culture. There were a few themes throughout the book that we had explored in earlier readings. Elements like cultral scent, and the cuteness vs. coolness…

I do believe that I am changing my topic into just the generic topic of violence in video games and how it becoming a more violent approach (not in a preaching form of video games need to change). A main source I am using is Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto. GTA has a…