Games / gaming

Review / 1: Cheating: gaining advantage in videogames by Mia Consalvo
Anthropology, Book Reviews, Games / gaming, Online communities

Review / 1: Cheating: gaining advantage in videogames by Mia Consalvo

·2 comments

I admit without shame that I often cheat when I play video games:  I have skipped missions on Starcraft when loosing repeatedly became too frustrating. I don’t think I have ever played Quake on anything else than Godmode. Cheating allows me to manipulate the game experience, exploit the aspects of it I enjoy the most and free myself from some of the more demanding aspects when I don’t enjoy them. 

However, because I cheat to enjoy easy and fun gaming, I would not go out of my way to cheat. Additionally, I would not cheat if the game-play is enjoyable and rewarding. And I have found that cheating can rob you of some of the best rewards games have to offer. When I got stuck on the final stage of Portal 2, I looked up a walk-through and ended up discovering the final step without wanting to: to this day, I wonder what kind of amazement I would have felt had I been able to figure it out for myself.

Are You Game? Not All Screens Lead to the Evils of Gaming Addiction
Games / gaming, Guest Bloggers

Are You Game? Not All Screens Lead to the Evils of Gaming Addiction

·4 comments

This article is a contribution by Jennifer Lewis.

We humans are a complicated lot. On one hand, we like to probe mysteries and strive to solve puzzles but on the other, we do like to be able to put things into neatly formed compartments so that we can classify them. Once we have a name and a label, we can file them away in the filing cabinet of our brain and, ostensibly, move on to the next idea. 

How fun and games can make a better world, and a better you
Anthropology, Games / gaming, Online communities

How fun and games can make a better world, and a better you

·7 comments

Among the most common comments about people who like playing video games is that they are wasting their time. In fact, after her first TED talk, in which she argued that video games can make a better world, Jane McGonigal started receiving this comment, in this form or another, repeatedly:  on your death-bed, are you really going to wish you’d spent more time playing angry birds?