Spot Check Flashback #2: Gaming the Narrative Process
In which I inadvertently reinforce Godwin’s Law, talk about the dangers of storytelling, and how HP Lovecraft dodged some of them.
Posts Tagged 'games'
Spot Check 15: Rules Complexity and Intimidation
How does bringing new players into a group of gamers influence their group identity? How does the complexity of a game shape a new player’s experience? Find out in this installment of Spot Check!
Spot Check Flashback #1: The Mythic Everyday
In this installment of Spot Check Flashbacks we’re going back to the beginning. This is the first episode of the series, recorded when my Kickstarter was in full swing. If you want to skip past the section about the Kickstarter, set a course for 1:50, where you’ll here me talk about the ways that we narrativize our everyday lives and how stories help us with that.
Spot Check 14: Gamer Evangelism
As promised, here is the most recent episode of Spot Check, the video series documenting my dissertation research into tabletop gaming. New episodes will be posted every Thursday. If you’d like to start at the beginning, you can go directly to the Youtube channel, or catch the archived episodes as they go up every Saturday. In this episode I talk about insider anthropology and gamers’ enthusiasm for bringing new people into the hobby.
Review / 1: Cheating: gaining advantage in videogames by Mia Consalvo
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.
