Blog Post 2
Video games offer us very many different ways of viewing how the different moving parts in everyday life operate. “Just as photography offers a way of seeing aspects of the world we often look past, game design becomes an exercise in operating that world, of manipulating the weird mechanisms that turn its gears when we’re not looking.”(Bogost,2015) To me this makes very much sense because you think about it in term of seeing a picture and a video while understanding how much more you can learn from a video. Then you add the element of controlling that video and you learn that much more on how things operate. You may not completely understand how to operate these different things but you do learn the basic mechanics of different aspects that the video game depicts.
Another interesting topic this article brought to light was talking about how today’s game aren’t as much based around complex systems. “But making games about complex systems instead of tanks or plumbers or hedgehogs or soldiers was always a long-shot.” (Bogost,2015) the text was referring to games like Tetris and SimsCity as being games built around complex ideas. For SimsCity for example the game is based upon infrastructure and what all a city needs to operate efficiently. The game requires some thinking before you take action. Today’s games on the other hand were referred to as being “vulgar” and “fragrantly violent.” Also stating that today’s video games have become a place for us players to escape. There are many games this article is referring to stating; “These are the most popular and often the most beloved titles of our art — Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty and Halo and Destiny and Assassin’s Creed and even FIFA and The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros.” (Bogost,2015) Bogost was explain on how nowadays people want to play the big burly male character who often has a grudge who is fighting for something but not necessarily portraying anything complex like some of the classic originals that were from his childhood. It was this recent set of games that paved the way to separate game consoles and controllers differing from the mouse on the computer.
Another extremely intriguing part the this article explains the characters as being your typical white male with no ethnicity or change amoung different game types. “ If we must have characters in games, let’s do make them represent the diversity of their players and of our society.” (Bogost,2015) Now that this has been brought to my attention its funny how I now realize in Call of Duty you may be fighting as the US Army but when you are battling against said Japanese Army the characters still have the same facial structure and all that really changes is maybe the uniform. The only example I can really think of that has some ethnic diversity to some extent would be Grand Theft Auto. In the particular one I am thinking of there for sure is African American characters and those of Latino decent as well. Off the top of my head I really am not sure of any others. This just goes to show how similar that characters are in video games and even though there are characters, do they really have much “character” at all?
