Blog 6

Hello!

OK ill get straight into it, Tutorial Task this week was to play around with Microsoft Word and Excel.

The exercises for word were pretty basic; I have done Computers all through high school so am pretty well versed in the ways of Word. The exercises for Excel has me a little confused, i have always struggled with Excel as I’ve never needed to use it regularly so it was a great refresher and was fun to play around with. I think that these kinds of exercises are great because it is always helpful to know the programs well.

Onto the lecture.....

This week Adam ran the lecture and it was all about Video Games.
Video Studies:
-Arcade games
-Consoles
-Computer Games
-MUDs
-MMOGs
My knowledge of video games is pretty basic because I have never been majorly into them but the lecture opened up a lot about them, especially in terms of different academic and theoretical considerations.

Some of the Theoretical ideas we covered included:

-Media Effects
-The Persistence of Effect
-Games and Utopia
-Thinking of video games as a new form of cultural practice, in the same way we know think about old media such as newspapers, radio, TV and films.
-Are there questions surrounding video game culture that don’t apply to any other form?

We also covered the perspectives of Ludology and Narratology, two terms that I had never heard until this class.

Narratology> ‘story’ based.
Is the study of video games from the perspectives of them being stories or literary works. Think that games can be studied in the same way as ‘texts’ >> similar to the study of books, films, art and music.

Ludology> ‘Fun and play’.
Not concerned with the story elements but rather with Game Play elements. People who have written work that is considered as Ludology tend to follow the idea that the story element of video games is only for decoration.

Basically what I took away from the lecture was the Video Games have evolved as more than just entertainment in the same way that films and other media did and now has developed a set of cultural discourses unique to it that will continue to expand and be studied.

That’s it! I’m done!