Would You Believe?

April 30th, 2009

I’m sorely disappointed. I wanted to begin this post with a clip from Get Smart, with Max running through the “Would you believe?” gag. Oh well, this clip below is still pretty funny. Get Smart is an interesting case study into the way early TV portrays ethnic stereotypes. Sometimes it’s truly atrocious. >_<

As you know, I’m really interested in this games and culture topic, and although I’ve discussed the issue to good length a couple of times here already, I’ve been rather apprehensive towards tackling it head on. That’s fine though as I feel better equipped for the task now than I have in the past. So I wanted to fix this issue and began writing a series of posts on games and culture. By the time I finished my introductory piece I was pretty chuffed with the results; an extended essay that covered more or less the basic framework of my idea. Writing out my ideas in full made me realize the great injustice that is the lack of discussion on games + the culture, linguistics and anthropological realms. With a primer written up in solid english, I figured that I owed it to the disciplines to allow this topic to receive the attention it deserves and went to the only place that I figured would accept it; GameSetWatch. Turns out the Mr. Carless really liked my piece and offered me a biweekly column on the site.

I guess I have ample opportunity to discuss this issue now, right? You can read my article here:

Column: ‘Lingua Franca’ – The Place Of Games In Culture

The name lingua franca means the prime language adopted in a multilingual community. I hope to discuss not just culture, but the linguistics side of things too, in the column. Because after all language = culture. I’ll post links to any new external pieces here, as I always do. For now, I have to clear up some homework and then figure out how to overcome stage fright for the next column entry.