How Does it Feel to Play a Video Game?

August 6th, 2008

mega man artwork

Since I first picked up a controller and pressed the buttons, to see visual confirmation on the screen, I became fascinated by games. As a child, I played them for hours on end when I could, discussed, defended and debated them in the playground, drew pictures of them during free time and art classes, read about them and wrote stories about them. Despite my interest in the medium there was and has always been resistance. By my parents who restricted play time, from classmates who stigmatized me and my friends as social inadequates, in the media whom link video games to negative social behaviour.

Throughout all of the hard times though there was something to keep me going. Something that I have faith in. Allow me to try and explain to you what it is:

When we play games there is a psychology deeply rooted between us and the experience. With the experience being feedback generated from gameplay. The interlocking of player and experience builds up an affinity within us, creating an obvious affection towards this medium. We receive visual confirmation on screen and hence relate to that, even in the slightest form. It is this affinity that I’m attempting to describe that is the core of the playing experience.

When discussing the social difficulty of being a gaming enthusiast it is easy for me to lay the blame on those outside of our collected group. This is not the case. The reason why our parents, friends, media feel this way towards us is because we have a disconnect created through misunderstanding. They have never been hit by the same impact from games that we have and no one has ever sat them down and tried to explain to them how it feels to have that impact. In a nutshell: they fail to understand and we fail at explaining it to them.

Deep down within all of us enthusiast there is an utmost love and respect for the games we play and overall we only want the best for our industry. This is, of course, very much influenced by the ‘experience of play’ which I tried to describe.

Our problem is that we fail to correctly inform our peers of the impact that games have on us. We fail to technically justify what it it exactly, within the game and all its mechanics that send endorphins rushing through our head. Infact, worse than that we still fail to justify this to ourselves. In which case how can we possibly describe it to others.

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An Analysis of Interactive Blogging Features and Language in Fostering Characterization and Community Building

June 22nd, 2008

You may have noticed that I made some slight modifications to the regular articles, adding in a new feature called Journals. I’ll be sure to document these changes later in a follow up. If you have had any experience with tertiary education then this may already be familiar to you. Journals are academic pieces of writing which account for research articles within their field. At University, I basically write one of these per subject in my linguistics stream as a major piece. While most of these are irrelevant to the Gamer Blog, after completing one of my courses (concluding with this piece) I feel empowered to write more articles of this nature. In saying this I don’t think that the article below is greatly worthwhile. Still it is something that I would like to try my hand at in the future, covering issues of video games, technology, language and culture.
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