By Ian Bogost
In fresh years, machine video games have moved from the margins of pop culture to its middle. reports of latest video games and profiles of online game designers now on a regular basis seem within the New York Times and the New Yorker, and revenues figures for video games are pronounced along these of books, track, and films. they're more and more used for reasons except leisure, but debates approximately videogames nonetheless fork alongside certainly one of paths: accusations of debasement via violence and isolation or protective paeans to their capability as critical cultural works. In How to Do issues with Videogames, Ian Bogost contends that such generalizations imprecise the unlimited probabilities provided by means of the medium’s skill to create advanced simulated realities.
Bogost, a number one pupil of videogames and an award-winning video game fashion designer, explores the numerous methods desktop video games are used this present day: documenting vital old and cultural occasions; instructing either young ones and adults; selling advertisement items; and serving as structures for paintings, pornography, workout, rest, pranks, and politics. interpreting those purposes in a chain of brief, inviting, and provocative essays, he argues that jointly they make the medium broader, richer, and extra proper to a much wider audience.
Bogost concludes that as videogames develop into ever extra enmeshed with modern existence, the assumption of avid gamers as social identities turns into out of date, giving upward push to gaming via the loads. yet until eventually video games are understood to have legitimate functions around the cultural spectrum, their actual power will stay unrealized. How to Do issues with Videogames deals a clean start line to extra absolutely examine video games’ development this day and promise for the future.
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Additional info for How to Do Things with Videogames
Example text
But they also emerge from overly general assumptions about a medium’s properties and the contexts in which those properties get deployed. The content and context of a media artifact is not as inessential as McLuhan would have it. The medium is the message, but the message is the message, too. Instead of ignoring it, we ought to explore the relationships between the general properties of a medium and the particular situations in which it is used. A recent trend in videogames helps drive the point home.
But Resistance does not use Manchester Cathedral in this way. The Chimera have no interest in destroying a monument, nor do they have any concern for ailing, human civilians in a makeshift church hospital. The game’s detailed, accurate re-creation of the cathedral, as well the structure’s symbolic isolation in its own special level, encourages the player to pay attention to the structure. It is not just another anonymous row house or shack or factory. Instead, it’s a structure of note, a unique place, one that demands respect.
But I’m going to insist on it as a media philosophy: we can understand the relevance of a medium by looking at the variety of things it does. It’s a fact true of all media, not just computers. Think of all the things you can do with a photograph. You can document the atrocities and celebrations of war, as did photojournalists like Eddie Adams and Alfred Eisenstaedt. You can record fleeting moments in time, as did photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. You can capture the ordinary moments of family life, as all of us do at birthday parties or holidays for an album or shoebox archive.
