I was reading in a handy/cheap book called “50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need To Know” about theories of how we learn. What struck me was Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, particularly observational learning (aka modelling), which states that our first stage of learning new behaviour is through observation. We watch someone else perform a task, we see their success, and then we go into the next stage- we attempt to mimic, or practice. Now, a lot of people get all uppity about how video games are a bad influence. They teach us to be bad people: violent, aggressive, with no regard for other people. Well, if they didn’t already have a belief that this was a good idea, why would they even be drawn to play such games? We seem to have no problem with violent, aggressive behaviour in film (Actually, the book says this: “Hence the power of television and films to encourage behaviour change through the use of attractive, trustworthy actors doing particular things for specific rewards” p175). The argument seems to be, “Well, that’s just watching another person. In video games, you’re actually encouraged to BE that person!” Continue reading
The Magic Circle – The Imaginary Situation
The Magic Circle is a term I’ve seen and heard referenced by many a “ludologist,” game developer, games school teacher, and even games studies (ie, the discipline that looks at pre-elecrtonic games) academic. Well, the term seems to get thrown around a lot, seemingly without much first-hand knowledge or (dare I say it) understanding of the significance of the concept. As part of my research, I attempted to read Huizinga (I got lost somewhere amongst his descriptions of kites), but I was reading about the concept more than the name, and found that there’s more to the Magic Circle than I have been led to believe. Continue reading
Prelude to Imagined Situations
A friend of mine writes children’s stories, and is blogging about to process. She just wrote a blog post about sad stories: how much she loves them, and how she doesn’t feel like she can write them. A particular line caught my eye:
So in a way, I guess sad stories have been a release for me when I feel down and am unable to express myself adequately in real life. Instead, I can escape into a sad book and feel emotion through the veil of the characters.
Whether that’s healthy or not, I can’t say.
But, for all that sad stories capture me and offer a release, I cannot seem to write a story that has a sad ending.
So I wrote her a LONG reply. I’ve (barely… I removed half a line) edited it a little for here, but I’m putting it up because it’s on the same thread as a blog post I’m preparing that’s a little more “academic.”
Regarding whether it’s unhealthy to enjoy the experience of someone else’s misfortune via a sad story or whatever- well, I am writing a blog post about this, but no, it’s not.
Tragedy was considered a very important part of Ancient Greek culture- it guarded against excesses of virtue/vice. It caused the audience to first feel horror at the experience of the hero, and then feel relief that it wasn’t happening to them, followed by a fear that it COULD.
Aside from this, there is enough research into play and fantasy, especially of negative emotions. These emotions occur to us, we all know they do. We like to feel fear on rollercoasters, we like to cry over sad stories. But we don’t want to really be falling for our lives or have something sad happen to us. Hence, we enjoy experiencing them in Imagined Situations (Vygotsky’s term for it), suspending our disbelief (see Coleridge), but deep down knowing that we’re safe. Do we enjoy the actual experience, or reawakening safe? I’m not sure.
I just went largely off-topic based on one line you wrote
But I think that while sad/tragic/scary/horror stories have their place, so do happy stories. We all want to believe that we can achieve something great. We want to see someone like us achieve happiness. We want to feel happy for someone we deem worthy. I don’t actually believe they are opposites, but they complement. I love Hans Christian Andersen, but I love the Grimm brothers as well as the similar stories Dad has read me from Slovakian folklore. I also always loved Aesop’s fables. Many of these are extremely abstract and use large amounts of symbolism. They are warnings, they are moral. They had poor narrative structure sometimes. They often involved something potentially very bad happening, but then order being restored. They were warnings that at the end said, “It’s okay. Don’t live your life naively, but don’t live in constant fear.”
I also loved Little Golden Books and one called Whistle For Willie, which was about a little boy who couldn’t whiste to call his pet dog. I think in the end he learned how to whistle? But I loved just being in his world, drawing on the pavement with chalk with him. Every story has its place. Sometimes it’s nice to live in a happy place for a little while
Where I’ve been, what I’m doing.
WELL, I finally got my Dell Laptop fixed, which meant that I could finally get back to drafting some blog posts while working as reception for my Dad (there is a lot of time between phonecalls, faxes, and deliveries… so I read and/or write). I’ve got two waiting for a final edit before posting, and a couple more that need much more work.
In the meantime, I have been staying up and losing sleep over playing the original SID MEYER’S CIVILIZATION! Yes, that’s right. CIV1! One of my favourite games from childhood… but unlike Jones in the Fast Lane, I haven’t retained all my skill and tactics. How the hell do I get my cities to actually grow over population 10? I mean, I know I need the aqueduct. But people just start hating me and starving and shit. Urgh. So, after about three or four sleepless nights, I decided I wanted to play something else. I didn’t feel like playing Jones, either, so I went to Abandonia and looked for some gems, finally deciding to download and play The Legend of Kyrandia 1, which my boyfriend has played before (apparently I’m up to the part that got him stuck for a VERY long time… teehee), because my friend Joseph B Hewitt IV was one of the artists on it 😉
I’ve only played it for one night, I’m up to the Birthstones Quest thing. No spoilers, please!
Review: REDDER
REDDER. I freaking loved this game. It’s so simple, but the right balance of easy and difficult!
Making a game that doesn’t require a lot of information to play is always tricky, and Gamejam games that don’t have a tutorial or anything always win an extra award. Redder just relies purely on using ←↨→ and spacebar (although the up arrow also works as jump). Pretty easy- you don’t even need to know the convention of using WASD!
And talk about the right amount of story… that (extremely) brief intro communicates the context of the game exactly. Exciting diamonds = fuel, the spaceship runs out and you, little astronaut, need to go look for more.
It starts off relatively easy, and while “hard” and “difficult” aren’t exactly the right words to use here (for me, they imply “impossible” and “I keep dying”), it becomes increasingly tricky to get to the diamonds, often requiring more and more foresight, skill, and spatial orientation (the map helps).
I’m a sucker for pixel art, and I think it really works well for REDDER. Plus, I don’t know if my computer was somehow glitching (I don’t think so, but I’m open to it), but after you’ve been playing for a while, getting closer to your goal, some trippy stuff starts happening. It’s not enough to distract you, and it breaks up the visual monotony of walking through the same chambers again and again purely because you missed the jump and fell to the ground three chambers below.
I also really enjoyed the music. I would like to say more about this, but all you need to know is that it suits the visual style as well as the theme, and doesn’t get annoying after playing for hours (at least, I didn’t get bored of it. I wouldn’t mind playing it now…)
I played it at AdultSwim Games, but you can find it on its native home at Newgrounds.
Dressing for a Games Job Interview
Okay, so I’m writing this because it’s what I’m thinking about right now. And it’s making me super frustrated.
Why? Because everything I’m looking for assume that you’re male. So, apparently, I should be wearing dress pants, discreet belt, polished shoes and the big debate is whether I should be wearing a tie or not with my buttoned, collared shirt. I might as well just go dressed as Marlene Dietrich.
This feature article at Game Career Guide is moderately helpful, except for this amusing suggestion:
Jason Weesner, a developer at Crystal Dynamics and Game Career Guide writer, suggests dressing as if you’re going on a first date.
Riiight… so I guess that means wearing something sexy, low-cut, with high-heels? But only lip-gloss, just in case the chemistry is too much and we end up pashing furiously.
Yeah, no.
Why doesn’t someone just say something like, “think about the impression you’re trying to give- creative, professional, approachable”?
This, to me, seems like a better way to think about putting together something to wear. I think that does mean that I need to buy new shoes. Smelly $5 ballet flats or ratty, hippy-looking Cons don’t seem to make the cut.
I’m a bad blogger
Seriously, I’m terrible. I don’t know why! Maybe I just need some sort of desktop plugin or application for my phone (Android), which I think there is… Not that it’s really easy to write on my phone.
Anyway, what I seem to do is come up with all these great ideas and play all these fun games, but I never end up writing up my thoughts! So, I’m going to write a bunch TODAY. And then they will be posted in the future, and hopefully that will give me a period of grace to write some more. Shh, I’m revealing my secret. Don’t tell anyone 😉
Dreamfall: I hate April Ryan now.
You’ve got to forgive me for not writing much like I promised myself I would. My boyfriend flew over from Sydney and I’ve mostly been taking him around to catch up with people, watching X-Files, coming up with fun ideas, and playing games (NeverWinter Nights for him, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey for me).
So I just thought I’d say that while Dreamfall has been okay so far, it does have a number of totally wanky puzzles, I like the new female protagonist, Zoe, but that April Ryan, after ten years living in Arcadia, has turned into a total bitch that I hate and can’t relate to in any way. I want to get her and force her to throw herself off a cliff. That strange girl was saying “Save April, Save April Ryan!” but I think she was actually warning me to resist wilfully harming her.
Sigh. Fingers crossed, by the end of the game she’ll stop being a douchette.
Retrofuturism
I thought maybe it might be interesting to write about Retrofuturism.
About a year and a half ago, I explained it to one of the senior “New Media”/Cultural Studies staff members, the PhD supervisor of one of my supervisors, as she had never heard of it. Well, even though you can look it up on Wikipedia, I thought I’d give a quick, bite-sized version of what it is, for no real reason.
Basically, it’s a fascination with the past’s perception of what was then the future and what is now either the present or the past. True to form, I just checked it out and found out that the term comes from 1983, but I think of the phenomena as being particularly “Beyond 2000” in tone. This is because, in my opinion, we broke through all of those projected futuristic dates that sounded so cool and so unimaginable in the 1950s and 60s. And it just gets more and more exciting and then suddenly, people are so excited about the depictions of the future that they start erroneously assuming that 2010 was the year that Marty McFly went to the Future (idiots, any real fan knows that it was 2015, as he went back and forth 30 years either way from a midpoint of 1985) and therefore, why don’t we have flying cars? Oh well, at least xbox Kinect (aka Project Natal) is going to make all children react to “Crack Shot” and other arcade classics with, “You mean you have to use your hands?” “That’s like a baby’s toy!” But I say, fashion designers still have five years to move everyone from the jeggings trend to wearing real jeans inside out!
What else has Retrofuturism done? Well, maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but if you’re into gaming, you’ll probably see best evidence of it in recently made games sporting pixel-art, especially if it’s for a science fiction game. Another great game that everyone knows (or should know by now) is Robot Unicorn Attack. While not quite harking back to the 50s and 60s (which was what 80s Retrofuturism did), it does its own 30-something year retro-reference to such cliches as terrible synthpop music, rainbows, unicorns, robots and even dolphins in space. I don’t know how they couldn’t work in laser holograms or something. Everything old and cheesy is cool again. We love its quaintness, and it comes to us through a special brand of nostalgia and affection.
Oh, and then there’s stuff like Bioshock, which, fyi, very heavily references Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis.
PoMo Academic Writing = No Blogging for Me
I’ve been thinking a lot about why I find it so hard to blog. I mean, plenty of other people do it. They get out a useful, interesting article every day, every few days, every week. They are semi-regular. Why can’t I do it? Is it because I lack accountability, because I don’t have visible constant readers who are actually interested in what I’m saying?
No, I think it’s because of Postmodernism’s influence on the discipline of Academic writing. Just humour me for a second, okay? Continue reading
Ellen Jurik 