Rise of the Videogame Zinesters

The games we played in class this week related quite well to Anthropy’s text “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters”. In her text, Anthropy spoke about the nature of videogames, including insight into their strengths and weaknesses. She described how videogames have strengths in story-telling abilities, especially in regards to the aspect of role-playing games. Videogames allow for player’s interactions, within the boundaries created by set rules. In describing the weaknesses associated with videogames, Anthropy points out that videogames aren’t yet very developed and progressive in their possibility spaces, plot lines, and characters because of the lack of diversity inherently brought on by many videogame creators whom often tend to be white males offering narrow perspectives. She elaborates on this topic by revealing that the ‘Big Games Industry’ adds to the problems in videogames by imposing a false sense that the knowledge needed to create games is not attainable without special institutional instruction. This makes way for ‘wannabe creators’ to be hired by big gaming corporations to be put to make games under ridiculous working conditions and long hours. Anthropy also compares and contrasts videogames to film. She describes films as media that tell static stories with no possibility for audience’s interactions, while videogames allow for audience/player interaction. A film is just a static pre-scripted story altogether, while in videogame the player can make their own story in a sense, within a given possibility space of set rules. My favorite piece from the text was when she spoke about games as culture and how games tell stories that illustrate the values of their creators in a unique way, which I believe is the most interesting and unique aspect of videogames. They let you see inside the mind of their creator, in a sense.

Rise

Today’s class was awesome! We played games that Anna Anthropy referred to as “folk games” in her book “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters”. I found the reading assigned for the book to be very interesting and the games tied in quite nicely. Anna’s argument was that videogames are still not in a mature stage yet because of the lack of diversity in its characters and plots. She says that this is due to the limited perspectives that videogames are created by because all the current videogame creators are currently white males. She gives lots of interesting facts and reasons as to why this is so, such as the loop from engineering days to modern day computer access, that make sense and gives you a whole new look at videogames. My favorite quote of the reading was how Anna describes art, she says “creation is art”. If this is so then there is no doubt that videogames are artworks and there should not be so much debate when it comes to deciding this. She also argues that with the release of new programs that make it easier for everyday people with no programming knowledge to create videogames, she hopes to see an increase in perspectives. She compares this to film and youtube, saying that not all youtube videos created by users are gems but a few will arise due to the sheer numbers of created content. I totally agree with everything Anna says in her book and find her to be very insightful. I really can’t wait to keep on reading and if the book’s class discussion involves more game playing, then it is definitely my favorite material we have covered thus far.

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