In Gaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo, Jack Halberstam talks about how glitches can be considered synonymous with failure. Glitching means that something is broken, it’s not right, and something that is broken or failing must be fixed. People don’t like failure. It is implied that failure is unacceptable. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all. There’s something deeply saddening about that statement. First of all, it implies that doing something differently, to the extent that it shouldn’t exist. It also means that there is always a right way to do something, with no deviations. If something is wrong, then the right must be the standard.

In my final paper for this course, I talk about Monster Factory, an online video series from Polygon where Justin and Griffin Mcelroy use the character creation engines of different games to create ‘monsters’. Although using the term monster suggests that these creations are wrong and bad, that’s not really the case. Sure, the monsters are outside the norms of what is considered attractive, and therefore ‘normal’, but they don’t exist as failures or mistakes, and they aren’t treated that way. Throughout these videos, it becomes apparent that the monsters are deviations from real life societal norms of appearance, and from the in game narrative. They aren’t extensions of Justin and Griffin, they aren’t a game piece or tool to navigate the game with, they’re their own character, with personality and a story completely separated from the rigid narrative of the game in which they are contained. When they make Final Pam in Fallout 4, her narrative isn’t that of a 1950’s housewife exploring a nuclear wasteland, she is Final Pam, a scourge upon the world, a powerful entity whose main goal is to find a multitude of sons and husbands and to escape the confines of the game. When they play Mass Effect 2 and realize that the character creator is too restrictive to make a true monster, they are upset and end up forgoing the formula of making the monster and finding their narrative to mess around with the game’s code to mess with Shepard’s polygons and find different ways to mess up his face that aren’t included in the game. It gets to the point where the appearance of the monsters is completely separate from the world of the game. They effectively exist outside of their set narrative. In the context of Monster Factory, using the character creator as a tool to create beings that are separate from the narrative created by the game, with an outlandish appearance and their own personality, shows how much gray area there is between right and wrong, success and failure.

Even though the term ‘glitch’ is mostly used in terms of technology, it still gets brought up in discussions over humanity. It’s strange, because why would there be a clear and defined wrongness in a human being? We’re all different, even if it is only in very minute ways, so claiming that there are ‘wrong’ traits to have as a human is pointless. The most obvious answer is that when there is no way to claim a person is wrong by using the language of feelings and emotions, because bigotry is too unreasonable and apparent when stated upfront with no logic behind it, the next step is to hide behind the guise of science. Science is seen as solid proof, a reasonable backing for bigotry. This leads to statements such as “There are only two genders, male and female”. To not exist in the clear definitions standardized by extremists, you are a ‘glitch’. “We’re not talking about feelings, the sex that you were born as is the one you will always be, regardless of your identity.” Being outside the standard is to be other, to be a glitch, to be a failure. If you don’t complete the narrative that everyone is expected to conform to, you are what’s wrong with society. When Justin and Griffin Mcelroy make a monster, they find a narrative not intended by the developers of that game. Being a glitch isn’t failure, nor is differing from the norm a failure. It’s just using the tools that you have been provided for a purpose that the standard didn’t intend for.

Halberstam, Jack. “Gaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo.” Queer Game Studies, by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 187–199.

Love Live: School Idol Festival is a mobile game released in 2014 that consists of three gameplay styles; a visual novel, where you get to experience the story of Love Live, a rhythm game, and a gacha game. The gameplay mechanics and the art style of Love Live mark it as a casual game directed towards women, but the community surrounding the franchise is deeper than a typical mobile game, with anime adaptations featuring multiple seasons and movie releases deepening the lore.

The story portion of Love Live is one of the features of the game that make it unique. The player can go through the story of either the original Muse idols or the more recent addition of the Aquors idols. The story is divided up into smaller narratives of the day to day lives of the girls, culminating in you receiving rewards for going through it, as well as a song for the rhythm game section you must complete in order to get the next narrative. The narrative of Love Live is very much that of a slice of life anime, of which the game was adapted into in 2015, and details the journey of nine high school girls becoming friends and popstars in order to save their school from being shut down. This narrative is very feminine in itself, with the majority of characters being young girls and women. It features no action, and barely any drama, focusing instead on cute, funny interactions between the girls.

The next gameplay mechanic is that of the rhythm game. You can use virtual cards of your idols, which usually have a special ability, to form a team, and you then use that team to tap out the rhythm to a chosen song at varying difficulties. While this part can be challenging, the player can stop playing and resume using a pause button, and one can only play so much based on the amount of in-game energy that they have, which can be replenished by in-game ‘love gems’ that can both be earned through events and consecutive use of the app, as well as buying them. You also expend different amounts of energy depending on the difficulty of the songs that you play. Just because Love Live is seen as a very casual game, being a mobile app, featuring a story that focuses on young girls, and using exclusively cutesy, anime style graphics, does not mean that there isn’t any competition for the game. In a video from Sukufesu National Convention 2018, (Sukufesu National Convention 2018 Competition), a convention dedicated solely to the Love Live franchise, a Love Live e-sports competition is taking place. Four young adult men are sitting up on stage, headphones on and smartphones in hand, playing the rhythm game while an announcer comments in the background. Even though you can’t see them, you can hear an audience cheer at appropriate moments, and sigh in disappointment when a player misses a beat. When the blue player wins, he fist pumps, and shakes hands with the player next to him. It is clear that despite the perceived casualness of the Love Live franchise, there is a vibrant community of diverse players enjoying the game.

The final gameplay mechanic is that of the gacha game. Gacha is similar to loot boxes, in that you use in game currency, that can be earned either by playing the game or with real world money, to get randomized items. In Love Live, you can get different ‘cards’, each with a different illustration of one of the characters on them. These cards can have special abilities when used in the rhythm game portion, and can vary in rarity from normal, rare, super rare, super super rare, and ultra-rare. The pull of the gacha game is the illustrations. The art style itself is very cutesy, with all of the different girls dressed in themed outfits, with some of the most intricate illustrations being featured on the ever illusive ultra-rare cards. Youtubers will make videos of themselves playing the gacha, showing favoritism, or a desire to get cards that feature a specific character.

Love Live is a casual game that makes use of multiple features seen in other casual games throughout the years. It has a simple storyline that is easy to understand and can be resumed at any point, not unlike many other visual novels in the industry. It has a rhythm game, a genre popularized by franchises like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero, a gameplay style that is easy to learn, and easy to play in one’s spare time, a defining trait of casual games. The gacha portion of the game centers on the franchise’s cute art style, and capitalizes on the collectability of the illustrations, a tactic used by many other card games that precede it. By all means, Love Live: School Idol Festival is the ultimate casual games. Despite the casualness of the game, there continues to be a strong community that loves and continuously interacts with the franchise, to the point where a second game was made, Love Live: School Idol Festival: All Stars! was made in late 2019, a mobile game app largely similar to the first game, with a few new additions. It is clear that as long as there is appeal to your game, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it is a casual game, if it has a deep and epic storyline, if it has expansive and complicated lore, because sometimes all people really want are cute anime girls and some catchy j-pop tunes, and I think that that is pretty neat.

Works Cited

スクフェス全国大会2018 決勝, Sukufesu National Convention 2018 Competition, プーさん, Aug. 4 2018

Love Live: School Idol Festival, KLabGames, 2014

This week for our readings in the book Ready Player Two by Shira Chess, I decided to read the fifth chapter, Bodies, as it pertained to the topic in my final research paper, where I am going to look into the power of choice in avatars and character creation, and how those choices may or may not reflect our real world selves. Ready Player Two is all about identifying the ‘player two’ in the social aspect of video games, which is usually a woman, but can be any sidelined identity that does not correspond with the idealized white male we often see in video game culture. One of the most notable aspects of player two is that a lot of rhetoric surrounding the ‘female identity’ in media focuses on the assigned female at birth reproductive system. As such, the fifth chapter opens up with a description of a product called Skea, an alternative to regular Kegel exercises, which are supposed to strengthen the muscles of the pelvic floor, with the draw being that it was supposed to be a gaming experience akin to the series Temple Run. The major problem with this product is the advertisement made to fund the Skea, in which the inventor, Tom Chen, demonstrates the elasticity of the pelvic floor of a woman after childbirth by shoving fruit into a net in front of a poster of a scantily clad model. This demonstration assumes that all women loose elasticity after childbirth, and chooses to represent this process not with an anatomical model of the afab reproductive system, but with a poster of a lingerie model, a representation of a woman most can’t identify with. So even though this product was made specifically with women in mind, the assumptions the product makes isn’t applicable to everyone, and its delivery comes off as insulting to those who are supposed to buy it.

And that leads to a different problem. If we assume that the player two in our community is a cis, able bodied female, we neglect so many other identities that can be harmed by this assumption. Even then, in most media, a woman is equal to someone who is cis and is not only able to, but wants to experience motherhood. This allows groups, such as transphobic feminists, known as terfs or gender critical, to exclude trans women from female oriented spaces, implying that because they do not have a afab body, they cannot have these experiences, that they “appropriate women’s bodies while still embodying patriarchal dominance” (Chess, pg 160). This view of femininity overlooks that there are women who either cannot or do not want to experience childbirth, and adversely reduces us to a mere bodily function. It’s a view that is contrary to feminism, as the thought that child bearing being the only thing women are good at, being the one thing that makes us women, is our bodies.

How does this concern player two? For one, childbirth has always been a way to confine women to the predetermined role as ‘mother’. For example, Outlast 2 embodies this throughout its narrative. Many entries in the horror genre use the trope of the ‘painful pregnancy’, an inherently sexist trope that often forces the women in the story to become pregnant, and then experience it as painful and horrific in a traumatic way. In Outlast 2, you play as a white male reporter who is trapped in a murderous hillbilly cult, who must find his wife and survive the night. The ending shows you finding your wife inexplicably pregnant, giving birth and then dying. This is her only involvement in the story besides in flashbacks and dream sequences. The reality of player two is much too often of a cis female, someone that can easily be sidelined as a damsel in distress or as a woman in the refrigerator. It excludes women to a singular bodily function, makes us exist only as the foil and the motivation to the titular male character. It ignores that women aren’t just our bodies, and it also denies trans women who may not be afab the right to exist as women.

Works Cited

Outlast 2, Red Barrels, 2017.

“Playing with Bodies.” Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity, by Shira Chess, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

In Jon Vanderhoef’s chapter on nostalgia in How to Play Videogames, there is a very pronounced difference between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. To me, restorative nostalgia feels wrong. Nothing is ever going to be the exact same as it was before, and it was probably never perfect in the first place. To recreate something flawless is inherently impossible, because life and reality has always been rife with imperfections. And I feel like that is what makes life good – nothing will ever be perfect, nothing will ever be complete. What’s the challenge and the motivation if there was never anything to improve in the first place? Reflective nostalgia, however, is more coming to terms with the past, acknowledging it for what it was, that while it might have been good, it never was truly perfect.

The indie game Gone Home is filled with reflective nostalgia. When you play Gone Home, you are walking through a house that is not your own, finding correspondence and interactions that aren’t your own. This story is not about you, the player, so why would Gone Home be demonstrative of reflective nostalgia? It is not your own personal experience, after all. It’s because you are tasked with finding things that someone else has left behind. You are finding past interactions between two people who are no longer there for you to meet, to talk to. It would be like finding someone’s diary in a yard sale or a secondhand store; an entire life that was lived that you will never get to fully know. You get to know the lives of Sam Greenbriar and her girlfriend Lonnie through notes and stories and bags of chips and Ouija boards left behind. You get to see that they spent days finding secret tunnels and making zines and being together. While Sam and Lonnie did get to enjoy their time together, you also see that there were bad times too – they got bullied at school, nasty words got written on Sam’s locker and Lonnie got detention for retaliating against the perpetrators, and when Sam’s parents finally found out that she was gay, they grounded her, and dismissed her feelings by telling her that it was only a phase. And that’s the reality of it all. That’s where reflective nostalgia separates from restorative nostalgia, in that you don’t look at the past through rose tinted glasses, you didn’t pretend that things were always good and there were no faults. Instead, you use reflective nostalgia to see both the bad and the good in the past. While Sam and Lonnie got to have great experiences and were together in the house that you are exploring, that didn’t mean that it wasn’t layered with pain, that they didn’t have to hide their feelings from their parents and everybody else for fear of retaliation. The experience of playing Gone Home is an act of reflective nostalgia. You are separated from the action of the story, you are only seeing the events second hand, and that allows you to look upon the past of these individuals while truly feeling for them and their problems. The history that the game references, such as the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” laws, are all real life events that had affected so many queer people, and the general intolerance of the LGBT community in the nineties is and was real. Maybe Gone Home is someone’s real life story, because this game is not far from the truth at all, and the act of playing it feels like reading a stranger’s diary; sad, hopeful, and just a touch nostalgic.

Works Cited

Gone Home, 2013, The Fullbright Company

Vanderhoef, John. “Shovel Knight; Nostalgia.” How to Play Video Games, by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 317–323.

Teddy Pozo’s article Queer Games After Empathy talks about how the rise of VR as an ultra-realistic medium between player and the in game world, and how it has become mistaken for an ‘empathy machine’, the mistaken idea that experiencing something in VR will lead to a genuine, real life understanding. Although VR does heighten the immersion and reality of video games, it is not a genuine stand in for any human experience. Although these VR experiences and even narrative-driven ‘walking simulators’ may have a goal of putting an individual into an immersive narrative, often with a queer theme, it is not a substitute for real human encounters, but they can be sympathetic in nature, and are representative of a want for change and representation in the titles being released.

My Roommate Sonic is part of the Sonic Dreams Collection, a series of games parodying the Sonic series made by indie developer Arcane Kids, portraying itself as long lost prototypes originally meant for the Sega Dreamcast. In this portion you interact with the world around you via VR as Sonic’s roommate. You are given a stationary first person view of the environment, as well as a genderless body. Throughout the game you receive text messages from Dr. Robotnik, encouraging you to ‘seize the day’ and confess your attraction to Sonic, performing actions such as attempting to tickle him before having your hand slapped away, and then gazing into Sonic’s eyes before you are sucked into a void, becoming Sonic yourself. Obviously it would be questionable to think that the statement of this game is to give you the experience of being attracted to video game character Sonic the hedgehog. Even in the game itself, this attraction is depicted with exceedingly surreal humor, such as your arm rag dolling when Sonic slaps it away. My Roommate Sonic is very clearly a parody, not meant to give an individual the experience of having a queer attraction to Sonic the hedgehog. It is a game that plays on the supposedly empathetic nature of VR experiences to create a surrealist comedy of a beloved fictional character. Even though the set up for My Roommate Sonic is clearly absurd, it does play off of many of the aspects of VR, indie, and walking simulator games that are geared towards making you feel empathy, using its limited interactivity to guide you through a set narrative whilst soft, ambient music plays in the background, lit dimly with the TV.

Even though the softness used in My Roommate Sonic can be off-putting due to the surrealist nature of the game, it does indicate that there is a consistent framework for indie games with queer narratives. My Roommate Sonic is significant in that an indie developer has used a big name, trademarked character in a parody that uses the framework and aesthetics of a genre that is most commonly used for queer narrative. Most big name developers don’t use the conventions of these narrative based indie games, especially not with the idea of radical softness. So while representation in the games industry as a whole leaves much to be desired, the fact that a parody indie game made use of both a franchised character along with the aesthetics of queer indie games not used in big name titles indicates a desire for more queer narratives in gaming.

Works Cited

Pozo, Teddy. “Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Soft.” Game Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, Dec. 2018.

My Roommate Sonic, Sonic Dreams Collection, Arcane Kids, 2015

Representation tends to be a touchy subject no matter what form of media you are talking about. People in online communities are especially vocal about this, especially when it comes to video games. This is probably because playing a video game requires you to have a higher immersion and level of empathy for the character you are playing as than a TV show, film, or book would require. To many, controlling a character in a game is either an extension of your own self, or it is like experiencing an adventure with a longtime friend. Whether a person is for or against inclusion in video games, that idea rests on whether or not that person wants to partake in an adventure in which they interact with someone who is part of that minority group.

In the How to Play Video Games chapter of Leisure Suit Larry; LGBTQ Representation, writer Adrienne Shaw points out the abundance of queer representation in the Leisure Suit Larry game series. Overall, the series seems to have an abundance of queer representation for a series of video games made in the eighties and nineties. Instead of not mentioning the LGBT community at all, there are many different identities represented over the series, including gay men, lesbian women, and transgender women. The problem with Leisure Suit Larry is that these depictions were all cruel, making the characters very existence a joke, or a spectacle of disgust. In one of the games, if the player decided to try the option to romance a gay man, it would result in a ‘game over’ sequence, in which the player’s own masculinity is taken into question and joked about. Larry’s wife, Kalalu, divorces him to become a ‘cannibal, bike riding lesbian’, and an encounter with a transgender woman, Shablee, in another game suggests a rape scene, with dialogue from the main character expressing disgust towards Shablee. The message this type of representation might send to a viewer is one of queer people being unlovable. A woman coming out as a lesbian labels her as a cannibal, a trait that is disgusting and inhumane for any person. Even if Larry is shown to be attracted towards Shablee, his repulsed and horrified reactions after he knows that she is transgender marks her as unlovable and unpleasant, despite Larry being the one to pursue her. When Larry decides to pursue the gay man, Gary, the game over text you receive upon flirting with him implies that being gay is bad, that you are inherently less masculine if you choose this option. And even then, the game over only comes after Larry laments “Oh no, what have I done?!” out loud, showing his remorse over the mistake of whistling at Gary. It is very clearly a mistake as well, as it is the same type of game over you get if you enter the sauna by mistake and melt to death, or if you jump into the pool and are pulled under and drowned by the weight of your clothes. And that’s really all the LGBT people mean to the creators of games, shows, and movies that make these jokes at the expense of any actual human beings that they pertain to.  It reinforces thoughts that queer people are disgusting, are unlovable, are inhumane, are mistakes. And leaving cheap jokes like these as viable forms of queer representation in media only reinforces terrible stereotypes and allows people who are uninvolved or ignorant to LGBT problems to disregard these representations as legitimate. The cheap joke and vitriol version of representation in video games borders on being needlessly cruel, as people who identify as any of the people being made fun of and who are being openly and viciously insulted are going to have to be subjected to the immersion and having empathy towards a character and a world that either hates them or wants to ignore their existence entirely.

Works Cited

Shaw, Adrienne. “Leisure Suit Larry; LGBTQ Representation.” How to Play Video Games, by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 110–117.

In Ian Bogost’s article, Video Games Are Better Without Stories, the author states “I called it [Gone Home] the video-game equivalent of young-adult fiction. Hardly anything to be ashamed of, but maybe much nothing to praise, either. If the ultimate bar for meaning in games is set at teen fare, then perhaps they will remain stuck in a perpetual adolescence even if they escape the stereotypical dude-bro’s basement”. I feel that Bogost is very wrong in this statement on many different levels, such as assuming that young adult fiction is simplistic and does not offer much in the way of artistic value. Young adult fiction may have been formed as a way to transition readers from children’s books into adult literature, many of these novels feature difficult topics that people are meant to relate to. These books are very empathetic/sympathetic in nature, as they are used as tools to give children critical thinking skills, a sort of introduction to real world life and experiences that might not be ones’ own. As a second point, narratives in games should be seen as a positive experience because of that. If young adult fiction is meant to place the consumer into a state of empathy and/or sympathy, isn’t that the main goal of playing as a character in a video game? If a game aims to place you in an alternate world, then wouldn’t the ultimate goal be the empathy displayed in young adult narrative?

One game narrative that I find most compelling is Night in the Woods (Finji,2017). In the game you play as a 20-year-old cat girl named Mae Borowski as she uncovers the dark secrets behind the small town that she lives in. I find it compelling because so much of the narrative is something that I have experienced before myself. Night in the Woods is a very melancholic, depressing, and yet hopeful vision of small town America from the viewpoint of the younger generations. It borders on the edge of a coming of age story, but isn’t quite that, and it’s drenched in the feeling that living in a rural area gives you. Mae comes back to town after dropping out of college, only to find out that some of her favorite places are closed and the town has changed in small ways. Her friends have gotten jobs and moved on in life, and she has to come back to everyone’s disappointment after they find out that she dropped out. The town in general feels very cut off from the rest of the world, being separated by a bridge in and out of town. The town council consisting of the older generation goes around town every day to brainstorm ideas to make the town bigger, and to make the younger generation want to stay. The narrative of Night in the Woods is that of a small community that is slowly falling apart, but no one really wanting to admit it. And to me, as someone who has lived in such a community, I really empathize with this narrative. The experience of playing this game felt more real to me than most games simply because I could identify with the narrative. Night in the Woods is greater than just a simple sidescroller adventure game because of the narrative, and the immersion I achieved from that and the empathy that I had received, embedded in the characters and in the town, is something that deserves praise.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better Without Stories.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Apr. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/.

Night in the Woods, Finji, 2017.

Trolling and harassment in online communities seem to have become more and more prevalent in society with the coming of the digital age. As we have developed so much technology in such a short span of time, we are now finding it difficult to regulate laws pertaining to internet and technology overall, and now we are just figuring out online etiquette. It was only 18 years ago in 2002 when 47-year-old David Fuller posed as a teenager online to kidnap and then murder the 13-year-old Kacie Woody (Perry, 2002). In that time, many more people, from young children to the elderly have been fooled by the anonymity and power that the internet gives you. In the span of two decades we, as a society, have had to endure the growing pains of figuring out the dangers put forth by the internet, and how to combat them.

The thing that I am most interested in is at what point is internet activity considered a crime? What lines do you have to cross to commit a genuine felony online? For example, in the real world it is illegal to call 911 for anything less than an emergency. So, if you call the police to SWAT a house under false pretenses, a practice that has only recently become commonly known, does that count as an actual felony? Are there laws being placed against swatting, or are there laws being introduced specifically for swatting? If, in the process of a swatting incident taking place, a person is killed by the SWAT team, is the death of the innocent person placed on the officer who actually shot the victim, or the person who made the false call? Since trolling in online communities has become more and more prevalent, at what point does that trolling become legitimate hate speech? If you engage in hate speech or sending death or rape threats online, are you breaking the law by doing so?

I did find an article online from 2018 abound federal charges being placed against three men for swatting a stranger, an incident that resulted in the death of 28-year-old Andrew Finch. According to the article, the three men were being charged for “making false or hoax report to emergency services, cyberstalking, making interstate threats, and wire fraud” (Chokshi, 2018). So far I have found nothing pertaining specifically to swatting, only that it has been grouped into making a false report to emergency services. What I find particularly interesting about that statement is that you can be charged for the crime of cyberstalking. So for example, Florida has a law called HB 479 introduced in 2003 to ban cyberstalking (Florida Computer Crime Center).

Personally, I feel that thin veneer of anonymity given by the internet allows people to feel security in harming other people. Maybe people feel like since it is the internet, the words and actions they put into it aren’t really serious. When you talk to someone online, you’re probably going to take that at face value and assume that they are telling the truth, especially when you aren’t knowledgeable about online culture. In that lane, false information is so easily spread online, and harassment can rise to obscene levels, like what we have seen with gamergate, and the only way we can really counteract this is with knowledge, educating yourself, and making sure to be at least somewhat skeptical of what you see online so you can fact check it.

Works Cited

Chokshi, Niraj. “3 Men Face Federal Charges in Fatal ‘Swatting’ Prank.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 May 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/us/gamers-swatting-charges.html.

“Florida Computer Crime Center.” Florida Computer Crime Center – Cyberstalking, web.archive.org/web/20070205233057/www.fdle.state.fl.us/Fc3/cyberstalking.html.

Perry, Tony. “Kidnap Suspect Kills Girl, 13, Self.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 7 Dec. 2002, http://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-07-na-slay7-story.html.

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.