"All Your Base are Belong to Us" post #2

This one doesn't have a fancy title. Mostly because I've read way more chapters that what I would like to talk about in this post. But, here goes!


So I'm up to the point in video game history where gamers are just starting to see the emergence of the Playstation, and the great battle between Sony and Nintendo. Not long before this console's birth though, a little company called Electronic Arts (EA) created the widely popular Madden NFL games, collaborating with actual football players and coaches. One quote stuck out from this section to me, even though sports games aren't really my cuppa: "Yet Madden was the franchise that made history, earning more than $3 billion since it was first released. Much of that success was due to a new marketing plan for games, a kind of preplanned obsolescence and keep-up-with-the-Joneses business ethic...If you didn't have the new Madden, packed with this year's players...you weren't as cool as your game-playing who procured the newest version" (Goldberg 105). This mentality, in my opinion, is still around in video games today, but it's expanded outside the realm of sports games. If you don't have the newest Call of Duty game, or the latest DLC (downloadable content) for Dark Souls 2, you just aren't hip to the jive. There are, of course, gamers who could care less about the latest updates; they play the game for the story, which bring me to the next piece that stuck out in this section I read.

PC gaming found it's niche in 1980, with a text-based adventure game called Zork. (Text based games basically go like this: Computer: "You are walking along a path and come upon a boulder in your way." You type: "North" and based on that command, the computer will either progress your character or tell you you can't do that, forcing you to figure out the proper command.) Zork had zero graphics, which left everything up to the player's imagination, much like the role-playing games it was based on (such as Dungeons and Dragons). Zork led to other iconic role-playing games, most notably The 7th Guest. This was really the first immersive role-playing game that put players in to the world, through the eyes of the character they were playing as; the developers of The 7th Guest spent a tremendous amount of time and money creating the game to almost exactly resemble the experience one gets when they are watching a movie.
Now, RPG's are a genre in their own right, with popular titles such as: the Final Fantasy series, The Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Trigger series, Elder Scrolls series, and many others. The common element that all these games share: players spend a great deal of time becoming engrossed in the story of the characters. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that my boyfriend is a super serious gamer. RPG's are some of his favorite, and he's logged over 500 hours in Final Fantasy VII (not all in one-go, don't worry!) What interests me the most about this type of immersion is that the exact same type of immersion happens when readers get lost in an excellent book. So, that begs the question then O Reader, how can we engage our students who love video game stories, but hate reading, in the same sort of immersion that happens in their video games, but in literature?

Lots of food for thought, I know. And I did get a bit rambly. But I love this book and I can't recommend it enough!
Ok, 'til next time Dear Reader.

-C