Reflecting on this first week of DMS 448, I know that I will be enjoying my experience in this class. I’ve taken theory classes in film before, but this class reminds me the most of another I took in my first year at UB. It was ENG 258, and simply labelled ‘Mysteries’. In that class I spent a lot of time reading mystery literature and even watching mystery films, reflecting upon their narratives and thinking about how the situations in those stories imitated those in real life situations, and how that made me feel. Like, how does Edgar Allan Poe’s Mystery or Marie Roget represent real life murders of young girls at that time? How does Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon reflect attitudes towards women, mental illness, and the LGBT community that were present at the time? It led me to read many new books, some of which are now some of my absolute favorites of all time, such as Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neely (100% go read this it is so good), and we even discussed one of my favorite films of all time, 1991’s Silence of the Lambs. All of this is important because culture and ideas are almost always represented through media, no matter how far back you go. Whether or not topics of feminism, racism, or LGBT were discussed at all, you can tell a lot by how people are represented, or even if they aren’t there at all. In a way, I feel like video games as a medium heightens this.

I believe that sometimes it can be hard to separate yourself from the worlds you interact with, simply because they are interactive. While you do absorb information from any medium you participate in or experience, be it a painting, a film, or a book, you will probably never interact with it on the level that you do with videogames. Experiencing other mediums do not take as much time or as much concentration that playing video games require as a bare minimum, and it can become all too easy to lose track of time while playing one. This is something that I feel separates games from other media in ‘the magic circle’, the sheer amount of time and concentration you experience is vastly larger than that of other medium. Even then there is a myriad of different ways to experience a game. Watching my older brother Steve play Earthbound is very different from just playing Earthbound myself, even though it’s the exact same narrative I am witnessing. Playing Secret of Mana together is very different than playing it alone with CPU controlling the other characters. Playing Secret of Mana together is more fun than it is playing it alone.

So at this point in time I think I want to use DMS 448 to make my experience with games more enjoyable. When I took the ENG 258 class, I certainly did not enjoy all of the materials I experienced, but they did give me more insight on why I did not like certain things, and why I enjoyed others. Even then, discussing these narratives made me enjoy them much more than I did before, and I hope I get that experience in this class.