An hour watching a n00b try to jump a brick wall in Smash Brothers elicits a rumination on standards of video game literacy.
People in my department talk about “distributed cognition” — the process of using your environment and the people in it to think. Sam and I are currently going through distributed amnesia. I mean, I really feel it. Like a Borg I feel it. It doesn’t matter that he’s the dumb partner in this pairing; with the end of the semester upon us, his memory is just as important to my success as mine is.
This is the intro. Please see subsequent articles.
EverQuest, Minesweeper, and Dance Dance Revolution are all video games. To make sweeping statements like “video games encourage violence” or to ask questions like “are video games really motivational?” in light of this starts to seem clumsy.
Striated and smooth ludic spaces, and concepts still less transparent in name to the everyday player!
