Serious Player

Posts Tagged ‘Carmageddon’

Six years ago, I had to move from a place  to another one, and I needed a lot of space so I decided to re-organize my stuff and sort it by categories : things I wanted to keep VS things I wanted to throw away. Many old junks have been thrown in the garbage but the hard part was about all my videogames. There was no way for me to throw any of my games away but in the other way, I really needed space and all these boxes were taking so much space ! It was a heavy dilemma for me, but I had to make a choice and I finally find a solution : If I could just fling away the boxes and only keep the disk/cd I would still have the games ! After all, boxes were useless or at best decorative, and there was no other motivation for me than materialist one… Finally I was nearly convinced and proud to be separated from these materialist object which were invading my place, year after year !

Recently, I just felt stupid about this choice because I thought I was making a kind of “preservation of video game heritage”, but in fact, I wasn’t ! Nowadays it is generally easier to get a good “abandonware” copy of any of my old games than get a good scan of their covers or even their handbooks. If you consider this from a player point of view you will probably don’t really think there is much to worry about. If you consider this from a historian point of view, it is a real shame. As an art historian and a game studies researcher I now realised that I have lost precious informations. Video games covers and handbooks embody a part of video game history. I will try to summarize why: Read the rest of this entry »

Checking my RSS reader yesterday evening, I found a very brief post from Jesper Juul’s blog that drew my attention because of its title : “Gamer facing an Ethical Choice?“. He was talking in a single sentence about the fact that a game could help people consider ethical dilemmas, if it is played in a serious manner/state of mind, instead of looking for an optimizing approach, such as high scoring.

It is too bad the author didn’t develop more about this topic. Instead of that he has put a funny video on his blog I have embed here in order to start with a funny point before getting more serious (it’s about ethical choice but also a parody of a scene in the movie The Box):

Jose P. Zagal, a professor at Depaul University who mainly explores the challenges of using games as the subject of learning, add a link to one of his last paper called “Ethically Notable Videogames: Moral Dilemmas and Gameplay“. I think this paper is quite interesting on many aspects. It drew my attention particularly because of the choice of Manhunt as a case of study. Manhunt is a third-person stealth action game with a lot of violent graphics (if you don’t know it yet, it could be interesting for you to have a quick look at the wikipedia article). Read the rest of this entry »