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This article showed that Valve, a production company who developed the highly successful video game Half- Life, found marriage between public opinion and innovative game development was a better victory pathway than satisfying marketing demands. Their initial product, Half-Life was scrapped, since it did not appear to meet their internal quality standards. The game was not fun despite the artistic design, the levels tied poorly together and it was riddled with technical problems. However, often starting from the beginning allows other new ideas to generate.

It appeared the first step was to lie out the important components to developing a quality video game, and Valve defined them as:

1) Experiential destiny: player control of activity and next experience without lag time

2) Player acknowledgement:  visual reinforcement of player actions

3) The player should blame himself or herself for failure, not the game, so to continue to like the game

All designed to make the game palatable to the player. It seemed their next step was to find a perfect game-developer to put it all together. Having failed, they seemed to create their own avatar, the cabal. This cross-section of company talent combined their expertise with public play-testing to re-create Half-Life that met standard as well as financial success.

It showed that if you find talented people who can work together, there could be better success than when people work in isolation. This is however no easy accomplishment with egos, superiority complexes and self-demigods that often exist in this industry. But egos were outweighed by vision and some are energized by collaboration. This allowed widening of the opportunity to change what didn’t work for what did. In this environment leaders are needed, others with talent willing to be subordinate and skills need to be integrated.

In the end, Valve found groundbreaking success with teamwork, the cabal.

I have mixed feelings about The Play’s the Thing. I would tend to agree with the first half of the article (I am not a fan of cutscenes myself), but I am confused as to why after deriding the entirety of storytelling in games and stating, “the games that come closest to achieving artistry tend to be non-narrative”, Radosh’s consensus is that the primary artistic function of video games should be as a storytelling medium. Also, while he believes video games too often emulate film (again, I agree), his opinion that, “like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance”, seems to support imposing that paradigm further. I suspect the author’s recollection of early text adventures might be overly nostalgic as well.

Personally, I think a Marxist approach best answers the question of “games as art” without falling into the trap of defining video games based solely on their formal elements. Is the primary function of a game to generate a profit, or to be appreciated as the creative expression of it’s creator? “Capitalism represses the free development and exercise of physical and mental faculties”, said Marx, and what is the creation of art if not the free exercise of an artist’s physical and mental faculties.  For products of mass culture, decoupling creation from the limits of marketability is the most reliable means of ensuring artistic credibility.

As I understand it, the Situationists were a group of french radical thinkers in the 60’s who were highly critical of consumer culture, encouraging violent revolution to overthrow bureaucratic power structures, and Guy Debord was their foremost theorist. Debord coined the phrase “society of the spectacle” to describe the modern world of passivity and manufactured desires resulting from the accumulation of consumer images in everyday life. I believe the connection Brenda Laurel is drawing in Piercing the spectacle is that the Situationists hated boredom almost as much as they hated institutional authority, yet they felt that people waste their valuable free time consuming entertainment rather than creatively designing their own situations. She is arguing that video games do not empower us to improve our lived experience within society, they just further cocoon us within the abyss of spectacle.

Despite the common association of the word “simulation” with semiotic theory, it’s use in that context is generally sociological and has little relevance to the analysis of video games. Baudrillard used the term to describe an inferior copy that misappropriates the meaning of an authentic object, rather than in the scientific sense of a system model. Frasca’s expansion of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic model to include the “mental model” of simulation theory (which he calls the “interpretamen”) is an extremely novel approach to understanding the interpreted meaning of transformations that arise through the manipulation of simulations.

I also like his insight that the need to identify a real referent source system is an unnecessary product of the historical use of simulations in scientific testing. His Tetris example not only illustrates how an observer will project their own interpretations of meaning onto the represented system, it also exemplifies the kind of pretentious pseudo-literary analysis that can emerge when an author misidentifies their interpretation as the (actually non-existent) source system.

Conceptually, the task of designing a neo-Aristotelian drama seems so theoretically perplexing that I wonder how such a product would fit into the current framework of video games. But it’s certainly a laudable concept and could be a way to move past the mute player-character interactions typical of RPG’s and the “choose your own adventure” style of dramatic interaction games have employed so far. I imagine that if the Microsoft’s Milo demonstration turns out to be legitimate, then that technology might facilitate the creation of viable interactive dramas having the necessary sense of agency.

While reading Jenkins’ article, I was reminded of the how video games shaped my own play experiences as a child. Growing up in a relatively rural environment, the spaces of play available to my friends and I were not restricted to parks and playgrounds or as closely monitored as what the author describes as the norm. Despite our relative freedom, we were also avid game players, and our electronic play would often cross over and inspire our real life play. We imagined ourselves as the ninjas, soldiers, and space explorers that we had controlled on-screen. I think these postmodern games of cowboys and indians seem to prove the power of video games to stimulate a child’s creativity, but insufficient as a replacement for free physical play.

Although I sincerely tried to remain objective throughout my reading Julian Dibblell’s account, I can’t say he succeeded in convincing me of much other than that the internet has a much thicker skin than it did 15 years ago. Considering the ease with which vitriolic hate speech is spewed online today, Mr. Bungle’s “actions” seem more like a mischievous experiment in social engineering or a legitimate presentation of online performance art rather than a true personal violation. That being said, I understand that Dibbell’s main point is to describe the process the MUDD’s members took to establish a self-policing system of law in their quirky text-based utopia, and to that end the article has historical relevance as I can see the value of documenting the emotional experiences that emerge within online communities.

The author of the reading from the NY Time says that games lack the emotional connections and deepness of cinema which why he doesnt consider it to be art. I found this to be a both unique and agreable argument as someone who values storyline and plots in videogames. I believe that games have the potential to become what cinema came to be, but the challenge is making an engaging story while haviving solid gameplay to satified all types of gamers who either value the story or game mechanics more than the other.

From what I’ve read, “The Play of Things, I do agree that video games still have a lot of growing to do, but for the most part, it has come a long way. The graphics and technology is something to brag about after the time of Pong was around. Although, I do feel that video games are a form of art, just like theater, dancing, acting, writing a book, etc.

I find myself at odds with Daniel Radosh because I relive that there are some games that qualify as fine art. In fact I find that there are lots of games that qualify as fine art, that is if you consider fine art to be art that invokes a deep emotional response. Art that makes you think about what you are doing, why  and how you came to be doing it. The kind of art that makes you loose your sense of self and feel as if you are a part of something else, maybe something bigger. I can think of many RPGs that have asked me what my and our purpose here on this planet is, action games that have found me lost in the adventure and the world of the game, and simulation games that have made me question God and think about the level at which a God would have to think on. … Then there are those block buster games, most of them are as cheesy and corny and sit on cheap laughs, jerks of the head for that quick emotional whiplash and usually really good gameplay. Its these games that falter from a balance of the game elements that are so memorable in the eyes of the public and make it that much harder for video games to reach the level of fine art in the public eye.