Gaming Academia Gets More Mainstream Press 86
jimharris writes "Eventually every area of human activity comes under the scrutiny of scholars. After thirty years, it's time for video games to go to college. The New York Times has an article (free registration required) called 'The Ivy-Covered Console', that talks about several lucky professors who play games for a living. The challenge, they say, is to develop a language of criticism to analyze video games." One particularly unfortunate quote: "Dr. [Barry] Atkins admitted that he didn't finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book, 'More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form,' (Manchester University Press), and only later realized he was two minutes from the shocking plot reversal at the end when he stopped. 'I am very nervous that I got it wrong,' he said."
Reg free link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:plot twist at the end and game as fiction.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unfinished Games (Score:2, Informative)
None?
Yeah, me too.
Quite. On the other hand, the opposite is often true - take Final Fantasy VII as the classic example of a game that starts out excellent and ceases to be worth playing a couple of hours into the second disk. Or Xenogears, come to that - the story improves rapidly towards the end, but the gameplay is long gone by then. Or Deus Ex, which many people consider falls into a rut about two thirds of the way through (personally I'm rather fond of the Ocean Lab and Missile Base missions, but I know a lot of people consider them annoying distractions).
People who fail to finish games often have quite some justification, in other words...