I wanted to use my last blog as a sort of reflection on this class and life in general, to be totally honest, I had a certain expectation of what the class was going to be like when I just looked at the syllabus and thought this class was going to be a pain. I was wrong and right. This class gave me a lot of different ways to look at game culture and now I can think more critically about game culture and how games can be another avenue for our society. There was a lot of work, from the readings, to the game/creative project there was a lot on my plate for the class, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the ride. The social divide in games that I had knowledge of was a lot more black and white then it actually is and I can thank this class for giving me a new perspective. 

Moving on, I wanted to talk about games within mass media. Specifically how mainstream media views video games and the culture that surrounds them. I feel as though that since this form of media is not as well known among the older generation, since they didn’t grow up with video games like we did, that games can be belittled on the basis of it being unknown. The only reason the game industry started to get more recognition is because of the financial aspect of the industry and the prospect of a new place to make money. All this attention is not always good, there were multiple points where video games, violent ones in specific, were the scapegoat to shootings across the U.S. Whenever there was any sort of incident like that one of the first blame was video games. The slander thrown towards games from any political power now has been more subtle with their jabs towards video games then in the past. Besides being an easy target for politicians to shift the blame of an event, the reason video games can be targeted is because of the fear of the unknown. You have to consider who is the audience that politicians are speaking to about how video games are supposedly ruining the younger generation. Just like the politicians themselves, it’s the older generation who has less of a grasp of the game culture since they never had it growing up. I know there were games in the past, but they were rubametry at best and not as developed as they are in the present. As time goes on I think this issue will go away, at least for the gaming industry, since people who grew up with games are going into the roles of raising the next generation they will be accepting of games for the children of the future.  

Whenever games are brought up in traditional media, specifically the sports scene, esports is usually scrutinized to be something that takes no skill and the professionals within any esports should not be counted as real athletes. This whole notion is really dumb in my opinion the even though esports don’t have as much physical strain as traditional sports would its not like being a professional in a game is easy. Most people don’t consider the amount of time the player has to commit once they are playing for a pro team in any game. A game where I have a lot of knowledge on what the pros go through is counter strike. A typical day for a cs pro would be start the day around 10 for everyone warmup, and go over any executes, or mistakes from previous scrims for around an hour, and food of course. Then we would start scrims around noon and play for four hours, then an hour break and then another four hours. Then we call it a day there, but in some situations people would be playing more after practice is over. They would play pro ten mans where there are a bunch of pros from other teams and just play for money. I know for me I like to just play deathmatch at the end of the night to help keep my aim consistent. At this point these pros are putting in 12+ hours of work each day, and compared to traditional sports it’s greater or equal to the time esports pros are putting in (Of course not every team runs how I described it, I just used my experience from running a team in the past). Even though physical activity is not the main factor that needs to be cultivated in esports pros, a healthy body has shown to be better for players in general in terms of stamina, and reaction time. Even some organizations have sports psychologists to help with the mental side of the game, specifically in counter strike, it can be a very emotional game for a lot of players and an org called Astralis has shown that a sports psychologist has proved as a good investment. In the past Astralis were known to be a great team, but whenever the big games would come around, their big hitters wouldn’t show up for the match/series. That trend changed when the players got more involved with the sports psychologist and eventually became a really dominant force in the international scene. I’m referencing all of this as proof that the work people in esports deserves to get as much credit as people within the traditional sports scene.

I wanted to use this week’s blog as a way to write out my thoughts on random topics that have been on my mind recently. First I want to start off with the launch of the new Riot title Valorant and how the beta launch has affected the landscape of other games.

To start off with Valorant, the launch was a huge hit with gamers across different game communities forming this mixed player community. To be totally honest the launch worked out way better than it should have, I love the game so far, but objectively it’s a really flawed game. I feel that the sudden surge with the launch can be traced back to the idea that the current game landscape in terms of a competitive fps was very stagnant. Games like Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and CS:GO were the options people had for competitive shooters for quite a few years at this point, and it could be argued that these brands held a little bit of a monopoly on the competitive shooters genre: CS:GO in specific was one of the most popular of these games. I’m gonna use CS:GO in specific as an example here where Valve’s track record on responding to what the community wants has been very sparse.  But suddenly a week after Valorant’s launch there were quite a few updates rolled out and some concerns that the pros brought up that day with something minor (a bug with crosshair settings) were fixed within a few hours of being stated on Twitter. Why suddenly is Valve so responsive and proactive now? Now that a game could be competing for the player base that CS:GO had for so long is now leaving for Valorant. An example of one of many cases is a semi pro CS:GO player named Tyson Ngo aka “TenZ” was pursuing his career in CS:GO and had his chance with the organization known as Cloud9. Shortly after the hype of Valorant was spreading, TenZ made the move from being a CS:GO pro and signed with Cloud9 for Valorant. With all of this in mind the point I wanted to show is that when Valve had more control and a dedicated player base they were not as urgent with keeping the players happy since no other game could give what CS:GO could provide. Overall CS:GO is still going to be very dominant at this point in time, but now Valve is being cautious of the competitor Valorant. Given enough time anyone could be dethroned. 

There has always been the divide on what’s counted as a real game, or being a real gamer. As someone who has been deep in both worlds of casual and hardcore games I feel as though this divide is slowly being torn away with games appearing in the mainstream spotlight more and more in the present day. 

Since we talked about Pokemon Go this week, I’ll use the main Pokemon series games as an example. So there are countless people who know of the basic game of Pokemon where you go get your starter, catch Pokemon and collect badges. That side of the game can be seen as the more casual side of the game, where there really isn’t that much skill needed to play the game, but knowledge of the mechanics can give someone the edge. For example the community has made up self imposed rulesets on playthroughs of the game to make it harder on themselves (nuzlocke- you can only catch one Pokemon per route and if someone faints you can’t use them anymore). That is only one aspect on how the main series can bleed more into the category of hardcore, there is a whole nother world when people enter the competeive wifi battling where people will compose team with the only intent of battling the most efficent way. 

Once we consider the competitive side of things Pokemon can be seen as a more hardcore game. The skill curve is much steeper then playing normally, making the wrong moves will have greater consequence then before and also gaining the knowledge of movesets, EV’s, IV’s types, normals sets so you can predict what people have based on experience (for anyone who doesn’t know EV’s are short for effort value and they are used to increase the Pokemon’s stats, and IV’s are short for individual values, which are predetermined stats for the Pokemon, think of it like genes).

This was only one example of how the division of hardcore and casual games are not as black and white as people assume it is. Also this shows even though a game can be labeled as hardcore or casual if people change the way of play the label can be not as defined. 

I love how, for the most part, this class hasn’t really gotten affected by all the recent events with moving everything online. We spent this week on Shira Chess’s “Ready Player Two” ;the book was outlining the so-called player two that exists in modern gaming culture and the origins of the label, and we connected those ideas to the game “Life is Strange”. 

Player two was described as anything that didn’t fit the “usual” average gamer stereotype (white, nerdy kid who doesn’t know how to socialize that well). That original identity was made back in the 1980’s where the game market started to pander towards a male demographic, this is where the divide and the idea of player two started to form. Player two generally was aimed towards women when the concept was being made, but the traits of player two were not exclusively for women. Like games that were not generally an accepted game within gaming culture being treated as fake games/gamers. We talked about the Nintendo knitting machine being a pioneer where the usual formula for games was changing but this was more for the player two demographic. Even though this was a good move to start the development of other game genres which would eventually lead to a large selection of non hardcore games in the present day. This also further reinforced the identities of people who fall into player one or two. Some of the traits of player two type games included: thematic congruence, social, time positive, low risk, creative expression, lush aesthetics, non sexualized characters, avatar choice, low violence, and low harassment potential. From this criteria you can clearly see how the idea of player two is trying to separate certain groups and create a divide with men and women. The present day version of this is the hardcore gamers vs the casual gamer. We have reached a point too where if you look at all of game culture as a whole we have a caste system dividing people and creating elitism where there shouldn’t be. For example how mobile gamers are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of ranking, then console gamers are in the middle and PC gamers are on top in this hierarchy.  

The game we played was “Life is Strange” and this sorta of fit the formula that Chess showed with the idea of player two. In terms of low risk the game gives the player the ability to fix mistakes with time travel, but only to a certain degree. This game is more focused on the main character Max’s relationship with other people, so that can fit in with the idea where it’s less about violence and more about emotions. The whole idea of the player two identity is really dumb in my opinion why do we have to generalize people based off what they like to do with their free time. 

The main topic for this week was the idea of nostalgia in games history; for me I feel nostalgic with games when I would revisit old titles that I played when I was younger. Remembering the old times when life was simpler and I didn’t have a care in the world. When we talked about the Bioshock example of how we like to put  rose tinted views of the past, I thought that was really interesting because now that I think about it a lot of games I loved back then weren’t the best objectively. I can think of so many older game series where if I go back now and play them I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I did in the past, I refrain from playing those games to maintain the good memories and not change my perspective of the series. Also there was nostalgia that when I revisited the series it revitalized my love of the franchise. For example, I played the Pokemon series for the majority of my life (since I was 5) and new game after new game came out; all of it got numbing after a while. Once I went back and played the old games, and I saw how far the series has come, my appreciation and passion for the series spiked back up. 

When we talked about the rise and fall of the arcades, it brought me back, when I was younger I would always go to the local arcade near my school and have a good time with my friends. The discussion about both arcade and nostalgia brought up this memory, the fact that arcades are a dying concept at this point in time doesn’t surprise me. I found it interesting that the potential reason for earlier opposition to video games was because when the age of arcades marketed towards a younger audience was prominent, there was a history I didn’t know about; how originally arcade machines were more of a thing used in bars and targeted towards an older audience. That idea seems like a nice way to explain the initial agenda against games in its early days, but this hasn’t changed to this day games are still being blamed for issues that the industry has nothing to do with. In the beginning it could have been that since games were a generally newer thing that it could be seen as dangerous, people are wired to fear the unknown. On the other hand the issue of the game industry being targeted for mistakes an individual makes at this point seems really ridiculous. Even when studies are showing that there is not correlation between one’s violent tendencies to them playing violent video games. The potential reason why for this could be a generational gap, the older generation is not as informed about the games we have today, and the idea of the unknown can be scary for them. But I feel that the main reason for the game industry being targeted is because it’s easy for society to blame, rather than looking at themselves to blame. 

I wanted to start off with the second portion of the week’s discussion of streaming/esports. I thought the whole idea of the spectatorship chapter was interesting, especially since it was based around one of my favorite game series, Counterstrike. I would not agree with the points made in class about the hype moments being the sole driver for the rise of esports in general. There is a lot more to this, one has to consider the fact that the community around the game are really passionate about the games, even though the hype moments are great it’s not the glue of the industry. Streaming and esports rise can go hand and hand because some of the earliest forms of streaming were related to lan events. Even though Twitch was the platform that rose when streaming became popular the only reason Twitch was able to thrive was because of the following it had before it became Twitch, it was previously known as Justin TV.

Moving on the some past/current day issues of the aforementioned “titty streamer problem”, the problem with this topic is that some people on the platform (Twitch) are actually being the so called “titty streamer”, but the issue is now that other women on the platform are being harassed solely based on the fact that they are a women on a men dominated media. We went into some detail about the gap between top male and female streamers and the video was shown about it, from my extensive experience within the Twitch community I feel that the way they are measuring the gap between the top male and female streamers are wrong. They are not taking into account sponsorships, donations, etc: they are only focusing on sub money from being partnered (the only way to get a sub button is to  have 100 followers and around 5 concurrent viewers within your streams then you can apply for partnership and then you can get sub money, which is usually at first split 50/50 between you and Twitch). The problems with that is there are some influencers on Twitch that to their metric make nothing, but are crazy successful an example of that until recently is a person named “itssliker” (or sliker) who was way past the requirements for partnership, and never got it till now. Also aside from that the way the topic streamers brand themselves is much different from the top male and female streamers. You can’t blame Twitch if someone who happened to be a guy branded themselves better than a women on the platform, it’s not a question of male or female there it’s how they make the best of their content and brand.

 I’m not going to say there are no sextist themes within the Twitch community completely. The problem with Twitch addressing this issue is that they are doing the right things for the wrong reason. They are making some changes for the sake of public relations. Twitch is focusing only on the top of the food chain to make sure there is peace with the sponsors. The change is a great move in the right direction, don’t get me wrong, but it needs to be equally distributed to all if they really cared for the people on their platform.

There has always been a stigma with one’s sexual orientation within gaming culture, from game development, within games communities, and down to the journalism connected to games. We went over the problems with games and their representation of anyone who isn’t straight. When we went over the queer archive, I looked into the Danganronpa series. Just so no one is confused about the Danganronpa series, to sum up the plot, it’s about sixteen high school kids getting stuck in a school and being put through a death game, where the only way to escape is to commit murder and get away with it. Each student has an “ultimate ” talent and its unique for everyone, from the ultimate detective to the ultimate lucky student (yes in this universe luck is a talent). I was really caught off guard by the subtle and explicit tones of queerness from looking back on my playthroughs of the games. There was one relationship that I noticed after looking in the queer archive, that were obvious by the the context clues now ,but I didn’t think of it at the time. So there was the ultimate biker gang leader, Mondo Owada, and the ultimate moral compass, Kiyotaka Ishimaru (nickname: Taka). Within the story there was this “bro” relationship forming between the two, and most people (me included) just thought they were just got really close, but after looking through the queer archive, it changed how I viewed all their interactions and my view of their relationship. A specific event that feels different now, after reading the queer archive is after Mondo was executed for committing a murder and getting caught in the class trial (place where the students debate how the murder went down and who is the blackened student), Taka was emotionally unstable at that point, since they were so close, and to the very end Taka didn’t want to believe Mondo would commit a murder. Now knowing how they could have been closer than just friends it just further explains Taka’s actions after Mondos’ death. Another instance where the character’s preference were disclosed in a very sneaky manner was in regards to Hifumi Yamada, the ultimate fanfic creator.  When he was on the brink of death the main character came up to him and some of his last words were talking about his joy for yaoi (A genre of manga/anime where the main focus is gay relationships). Other than this one moment, none of his other lines would imply that he is gay. I don’t know that much about overwatch, but I feel as though Blizzard just randomly announcing if a character is gay, lesbian, etc is more of a public relations move then their care for representation in overwatch. So there can be games that represent a certain group of people right or wrong, but you also have to consider the intention of the shining light of these characteristics. All in all games are moving in the right direction , it’s just going to take a bit. Social changes, especially in the gaming industry, need time to take its course.

I just want to start this off with my personal thoughts of going on right now. So when we were going over the semester long projects on Thursday, I felt a bit stressed. Overall looking at the work it doesn’t look too bad, but I tend to get carried away with my stress to the point where, the scenario is really close to the worst possible way the events turn out. This may seem like a bad way to view life; for me it’s been effective because it keeps me on my toes. My initial idea for the research project was to do the paper, since it might be easier to convey my thoughts through text. Once I started thinking about the second multimedia project option, it didn’t seem like the worst idea in my head, but I’m having trouble with the part where the gameplay has to go along with what I’m arguing. What I was hoping for with the multimedia option is I make my point and the gameplay has less to do with what I’m talking about, basically I wanted to do this in podcast format, rather than trying to make the gameplay go along with my argument. Now with the game project, this peaked my interests in terms of initial concept, but I’m stuck about a few things: first I don’t know what type of game I want to make (like if I wanted to make an rpg, or visual novel), second the story of said game, and third I’m worrying that since I’m new to making games that might limit me a lot. 

Moving on to what we talked about in class this week, so the whole idea behind the balance of narrative within games. The examples brought up during class were Kings Quest and BioShock Infinite. These games took two approaches to world building to develop the story and add substance to the games. Kings Quest left it up to the player to find meaning with the bare bones story. So in this instance even though the game didn’t flesh out the story there can still be complexity behind the face value of the gameplay. An example where people argue this idea is with Tetris where the game itself doesn’t tell a story, but people read in between the lines, and argue there can be a deeper interpretation of the game: the game can be seen as a microcosm of everyone’s daily day to day life and how we all get caught up trying to manage so much, and at some point people reach their limit. In comparison a game like BioShock Infinite the game takes the time to flesh out the world through direct and indirect means to help immerse the player in the universe it is set in. This game can also be seen with a deeper story than what’s being shown, but this time the initial story is more expanded upon. Now people are having the dispute of if world building makes a game better or lack of world building can make a game worse, with games that don’t spend too much time with a story or world building, it’s up to how much the player wants to put in, when talking about looking for deeper meaning in these games (the effort one puts in can equate to what they get out). On the other side of the coin games that put in time to put effort into the initial story/world, the player doesn’t have to think as deeply about it, but the option is still there too. There’s no right answer to this, it is what the player wants to put in to decide what they want out of the games they’re experiencing.  

In the article “Under the bridge: An in-depth examination of online trolling in the gaming context”, it gives an attempt to quantify trolling and trolls in an online environment. The way this study went about was through interviewing people who have trolling experience online. Even though the sample size was pretty small (around 23 people) and the results might be not representing all the potential factors. This study provided some insight into the spectrum of trolls from friendly banter to full on harassment that could even leak into one’s actual life. 

The whole idea of trolling can be vague, to a degree, but the study tries to give a sound explanation for trolling. It goes through the whether an interaction would be considered trolling, the motivation for the action, and the result of said action to help determine their definition of trolling. Through my personal experience, I like to think I’ve seen a good chunk of the spectrum of trolling: being a bystander, being the one targeted by the troll, or the one doing the trolling. The only time I can recall I was the one trolling would be friendly banter I would have with my friends, nothing ever got too serious in the scenario. I can recall numerous times where I’m the bystander in the troll where both I’ve known all parties involved and others where I know no one. An example would be when I was playing counter strike global offensive (CSGO, note: this is a very competitive game where the majority of the players like to take it very seriously) and I would join a game with a bunch of randoms, and someone was trying to be all funny, cracking a few jokes, trying to make everyone laugh, one of the guys on the team wasn’t having it. At first he was calm about it (we were losing a bit) and he just wanted everyone to focus up a little more to try to make a comeback. The guy cracking jokes didn’t take this well at all, he escalated his commentary very quickly, from making jokes to now cursing at him, calling him a wide variety of hurtful names. The guy getting berated then was fighting back and at this point the game was getting very toxic to the point where everyone wasn’t having a good time. That may seem like an isolated situation but in this game’s community behavior like this was commonplace. I’m numb to most of this but to the outside world this game can look very intimidating. 

The results of the piece categorized a few forms of trolling from the data they collected. They made a list of types of trolling actions while providing their explanation of the said action. Some examples would be verbal abuse, trash talking, flaming, etc. Those are the actions alone which can’t be the baseline for the parameters of trolling now the motivation and desired result of the troller needs to be taken into account too. For the most part people with ill intentions are trolling to single someone out, sometype of amusing reaction, or in retaliation an attack. Overall the piece is very well detailed on how they want to define trolling in the online community and even though the results didn’t cover all the bases of internet culture, it did a pretty good attempt at it.