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.