"All Your Base Are Belong to Use" chapters 1-6

Being the overachiever I am, I bought two books to do for the reading assignment for my online class, LLSS 536. I chose to start reading "All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture" by Harold Goldberg. While this is a non-fiction text, it reads like a best friend telling you a really hilarious story about the history of their favorite video game. These first six chapters are jam-packed with knowledge, coupled with anecdotal stories connected to the fathers (no mothers or grandmothers of videogaming yet... still a very male-dominated field) of modern video gaming. My favorite thing to do while reading this book is to throw pop quiz questions toward my boyfriend, the biggest video gamer I know. Some of these facts he already knew, but even he is learning along with me, even after playing video games for the majority of his life.

The book starts with the creation of Tennis for Two, in the 1950's. This would eventually lead to the creation of Pong, by a tiny company named Atari. Everyone should recognize the name Atari, even if they didn't get to play on an Atari console. Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, chose the name Atari from an ancient Chinese strategy game called Go, a game he adored. "The definition is the equivalent of the word 'check' in chess but also means 'you are about to become engulfed'" (Goldberg, 25.) And engulf the world it did. Through the good times and the bad, Atari has come to be an icon of the gaming industry.

Enter a curious young artist by the name of Shigeru Miyamoto. Starting from the bottom up, his name will become synonymous with one of the biggest video game companies today: Nintendo. Everybody, young and old, knows Nintendo and their iconic characters; Mario, Princess Peach, Link, Zelda, and many more. Nintendo is responsible for some of the biggest selling video games of all time, and they continue to be at the forefront of video game creation, as well as creating and releasing state of the art gaming consoles.

For me, the theme I keep seeing pop up over and over again in the stories of these early video game CEO's is determination. From Miyamoto to Ralph Baer (creator of Pong and the Odyssey gaming system) to Dr. William Higginbotham (creator of Tennis for two, the very first video game), each of these creators has faced adversity, often very challenging and/or difficult. They were rejected, laughed at, turned aside, and ridiculed. And yet the persevered, changing the history of video gaming forever. If our students learn nothing else from video games or, if we focus on no other aspect of video games in our classroom, we should at the very least try to instill this sense of determination in our students, in every aspect of their lives.

If you hadn't noticed, I'm super digging this book. :) so I can't wait to post more about it as I continue further in to the history of video games! Talk to you later!

Student Teaching Second Semester

Hi blog! Long time no see! Hope you like the revamping I've done :)

This semester, I'm taking an online class around digital literacies in the classroom. The cool part? Instead of doing essays on the book (or books, you know me...) I get to blog about it for 8 weeks and my classmates will come and read and comment on what I post.

So that's what we'll be up to this semester, ok?

Ok :) see you in a little while!