Letters to the Editor
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Sounds awesome...
I've said it before -- these games are art. Rockstar has managed the Grand Theft Auto game very intelligently, constantly building on their past successes and giving players more of the experiences they wanted.
-- In GTA3 (the first 3-D version of the game), it was great fun but players longed for the game to include flying machines and building interiors.
-- So that's what Rockstar gave them in GTA: Vice City. Suddenly players could fly planes and helicopters. Some buildings (like the mall) had interior spaces. But still, the world was relatively small, and it was disappointing that the character couldn't swim in the water (but would immediately drown). The character was also not dynamic, could not change or build on experience much, and had limited relationships with other characters.
-- So Rockstar listened. In GTA: San Andreas, they gave players the ability to swim, and they expanded the world by at least 4X the size. They allowed characters to change muscle size, skill levels, clothing, relationships, modify cars, etc. GTA: San Andreas is easily one of the best video games ever produced, with ridiculous amounts of detail, deep levels of interactivity and peripheral playing options, and a remarkably bug-free interface.
So it's heartening to hear that GTA IV is a continuation of everything that Rockstar has done right. The game's trailers look amazing. I'm a PC person, and I try to avoid gaming for long stretches because I find it so addictive, but if I have one choice for where to shell out $60 for a PC game, this will be it. (Other kick-ass games are the Call of Duty series, the Half-Life 2 games, and Katamari Damacy. I refuse to even go into the rabbit hole of World of Warcraft or other blood-suckingly addictive online games. I do enjoy occasional daylight, after all.)
As for "Garden State," I hated that movie. I thought Zach Braff was cloying, and I thought -- and still think -- Natalie Portman is a lightweight actress who tends to get by on her cute, innocent, and okay, sure, beautiful looks. But she has yet to impress me with a performance.
I really find it sickening when something that I find cool, like The Shins, gets nearly ruined by being promoted in a self-congratulatory movie like "Garden State." I was a fan of the Shins way back when they were Flake Music back in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I saw them open for bands like Mercury Rev in tiny clubs. "New Slang" was an instant classic. I sure as hell didn't need ZACH MOTHERF***ING BRAFF to tell me the Shins were worth listening to. Go sing songs or get all clever about mimicking "Princess Bride" lines on your dumb TV show, Braff, and stop ruining the world of indie cinema with your posery, feel-cuddly movies.
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Grand Theft Auto (TO THE MAX)
People....praising....a.....video-game.......
I heard on NPR, "This game has everything, violence, sex, drugs and car chases." Which, by the way, is not everything.
People.....praising.....a.....video-game......
How great, push buttons, control the movements of a puppet, indiscriminately maim, kill and laugh at the carnage.
People.....loving......a.....video-game.......
Great way to waste your time and get a nice fake ego boost simultaneously. Now you too can go out in the world and drive like an idiot in pursuit of some trivial dream.
A simulation at your finger tips (fiction to escape into -make-pretend world, animations are way cooler than real people).
People.......becoming....video-games......
Next one can praise the latest navy seal video-game that depicts arabs as conniving terrorists. Review: "Takes you right into the action, makes you feel like a soldier." (No it doesn't, real war is not the simulation, real war is something all the cowards who love video-games cry in the face of).
Keep pretending.
What a marvelous thing to kill with the push of a button (o wait, that's an awful thing, but I wouldn't want to hurt the feelings of the games or the gamers).
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@Patrick Morgan
You can say the same thing about books, movies, and television, so unless you refuse to indulge those escapist pleasures, you should STFU.
Thanks so much.
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Natalie Portman changed my life
Listening to her curse in Arabic, my life has never been the same.
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@ gezelligtexas
Just as I suspected. Of course, anyone should know better than to dare do some actual critique of the simulated universe you've so ardently embraced. Wouldn't want to offend the o so sensitive gamers out there reveling in their button pushing.
Since you got nasty I'll get nasty. Try not to be idiotic, okay? Books are nothing like video games. Reading books is educational, expansive, even enlightening; tell me, what have you learned by your video-game mastery?
The point is, your level of intellectualism is probably seriously deranged by your video-game obsession. Video-games of the likes of Grand Theft auto (Whatever #) actually make people stupider and less sensitive to the world around them. Masturbating to cartoon characters you find sexy is just plain sad. Thinking murder, thievery and fast cars are cool is a serious mental sickness. Perhaps if you are some kind of adolescent cartoons are fun, but for grown men and women to actually celebrate cartoons is disgraceful.
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@Patrick, Have you played GTA?
Or are you just criticizing it on what you've heard?
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@ Manjoo
Yes.
No.
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Book Literacy, Gaming Literacy
Hi. I'm a librarian. Needless to say, I love books. Right now I'm reading Anna Karenina, and about 5 volumes of poetry I picked up this April ("National Poetry Month.")
Last year I attended the Gaming & Learning in Libraries conference for the 2nd time.
The highlight for me last year was hearing Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, outline a litany of "social skills and cultural competencies" developed by video gamers that his research identified in a recent white paper for the MacArthur Foundation.
Jenkins: "In an information society, [kids] learn by playing with information. Right now, young people are acquiring and mastering core social skills and cultural competencies through their activities as fans and gamers. A growing body of scholarship suggests these skills may have important implications for what happens for them next -- as learners, as citizens, as workers."
Skills and competencies identified:
Play -- the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem solving.
Simulation -- the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes.
Performance -- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvization and discovery.
Appropriation/Authorship -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.
Multitasking -- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus onto salient details on an ad hoc basis.
Distributed Cognition -- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools which expand our mental capacities.
Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.
Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.
Transmedia Navigation -- the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.
Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.
Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.
Jenkins made the point that while traditional print literacy is the first step towards developing all of these skills, they aren't skills that are further developed by traditional print media. In other words, you do need to be able to read to play electronic games at these levels, though simply reading books wouldn't develop these skills.
I think articulating these unique skills is a good response to non-game-players (gaming illiterates) who can't yet comprehend that games are educational or beneficial or socially relevant media. I do wish I was more familiar with the "growing body of research" Jenkins alludes to, but I also know from personal experience the extent to which a lifetime of electronic gaming has prepared me for the modern workplace and political reality.