For my Game Culture class this week we had to play four five minute games; Dys4ia, Art Game, Passage, and We Were You and write small responses for them each. All four had very different styles but I think had very unique stories to tell.

Dys4ia is a simple little game similar to Wario Ware, but really signifies the confusion and torture of someone who is transexual. The message of this game is that the people going through these changes are having a rough time, mentally and physically, and wants the players to experience some of that confusion and hardships that come with not being born the correct gender, not because they want to torture the players in some way but to let the players experience what it is like to be in these situations.

Art Game is a game that uses games as art. I think this perfectly exemplifies what a lot of gamers already see. Video games are art. And to use a game to create art to show in a gallery is an ingenious way of showing it.

Passage is the passage of time in a little pixel side scroller. I played it through twice (due to some technical difficulty of my computer). The first time I just went straight ahead not knowing you could do anything more than move forward, the second time I moved up and down and found obstacles. I think the message of the game is to constantly move forward though as time never stops. Sure there maybe obstacles in the way but you can work your way around them, or you could just live a simple life and stay on the narrow path, either way life continues to move forward. The passage of time never ends.

Lastly We Were You is a song games that basically tells the player everyone has a story and the player should listen to their story. The butterflies have a story, the mammoth has a story, and the Tiger has a story. Listening to their stories lets the player experience some part of the creatures life, and to hear a story is to learn a lesson.

One of my teachers asked us last class if we have an absolute right to privacy, and I instantly thought of course we do, but in really thinking about it some more I don’t think that is the case. If you think about it we have always already given away some of our privacy at birth. Doctors know your birthday, your blood type, have copies of hand and foot prints. Then the government has to get in on it by giving you a social security card and have you registered as a US citizen. From there they follow you along and make sure you go to school and… etc etc etc.

There is such a thing as a right to privacy, but I don’t think that continues into an absolute right to privacy. You can still keep who you’re dating, your sexual orientation, what classes you are taking, what you like on your latte, or even if you like latte, all of these you can keep secret. But when it comes to some detailed personal information the government knows. Now does the government really have the right to this information? Do you truly have the absolute right to privacy?

According to this USNews Article the government doesn’t even feel you have the absolute right to privacy with your own data. This is an age old question though. If the government has rights to some data why can’t they have rights to all of it? Well for one they shouldn’t. Telephone calls and other things they should never have had access to anyway. They say it protects people but rarely has this data trolling actually helped anyone. So we should be allowed to have absolute right to privacy, but we give up a few of those rights in order to protect people. But it’s always a constant struggle of how many of those rights we still have.

Take the article mentioned above, the government is upset that Apple and Google are setting up protections on peoples smart phones so they can keep their data private, as it should be. They are upset though because they feel they should have rights to it. Like a search warrant can give you the right to search someones place, they feel they should have a right to data as well. But in reality if these were smart terrorists there wouldn’t be anything on any electronic device that they own that would link back to themselves, not that I would think most criminals are smart, but I have heard drug dealers get cheap pay by the minute phones and throw them away when they think they are being pursued. So why wouldn’t terrorists or others do the same? Why would criminals be stupid enough to be walking around with something that would instantly incriminate them anyway.

Point is, which seemed to go off on a tangent for a bit, that no in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones we don’t have an absolute right to privacy, but that doesn’t not mean we have no rights to privacy. Don’t get me started on people willingly giving up those rights with Facebook and Twitter and such XD

Reference: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2014/10/20/you-have-no-absolute-right-to-privacy-including-in-your-data-encryption

The Spectacle, the all encompassing world of media and advertisements that surround us, is rather hard to get away from according to “Piercing the Spectacle”. I actually agree with most of what the writer says, but disagree with some of the writers views on using games to replace real world action. “Through fantasies of agency we are entrained to satiate our needs for personal power in a realm where we can create no real disturbance to the web of control that enfolds us.” This is true only because we feel we have no power in the real world. In games we have all the power. No “games are not a rehearsal for life”, as the writer says, but can help train us in difficult situations when to assert ourselves. The real world has consequences that cannot viably be tested without generally dire consequences, for example loss of job, housing, imprisonment, and these are for basic things, for instance standing up for what you believe in. Games allow us to explore these things and vent frustrations without any repercussions.

As for gaming being addicted, I think most people can say that yes it is, but no more addictive than most other forms of media and entertainment. The spectacle is all about getting people hooked on their products be it a game, a TV show, a movie, a retail store, or a brand of clothing. The writer says that mobile gaming is a distraction for you brain and on that I agree but it’s a distraction from the spectacle that surrounds us everyday. Playing games is along the same lines as reading books are the train. The mind does need distraction sometime especially when it receives tons of information of a daily basis, why wouldn’t you want to distract it for a little mindless fun, when you are otherwise doing another mindless activity anyway. While it is true that the spectacle does exist to distract us or get us hooked, it does not necessarily follow that we will be hooked or distracted by the spectacle. To put it bluntly, I do feel that because of the spectacle that we are less likely to do anything against the people running the spectacle because they hold the power, usually in the form of money, and for the most part we do not.

Videogames of the Oppressed by Gonzalo Frasca is an interesting thesis on taking video games and making them much like Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. The Theater of the Oppressed is a model of theater in which a situation is presented to the audience and they have to come up with a real world solution in order to solve it. Of course, many will probably disagree with this assertion that Frasca is suggesting but I think games could benefit from this type of interaction rather than the typical binary interaction video games typically have. Take, for example, The Black Glove which failed it’s Kickstarter goal, but has been talked about a lot frequently. In the game the player must make changes in time in order to help various characters improve themselves, so a failing singer could be changed to a star just by changing the genre they sing. It’s a bit more complicated than that of course cause there are many things you could change to change the outcome of the character.

I always believed that games should be treated in more of a way that Frasca suggests, Where you’re interaction actually has consequences rather than just a yes or no. As a result most games today have various different stories but they don’t really seem overly interactive. The players are introduced to loads of story chucks and then kill all the bad guys. There are a few games that do continue the story while there is some action, for example Skyrim, but it’s still stop, kill, return to story. Even games with side choosing, meaning being good or being evil, is only doing it two sided. For instance inFamous: Second Son you can choose to be good or infamous but there are some instances that I would do good by not having a gun waving lunatic on the streets and it’s considered evil. Secondly, why can’t Deslin just use his powers to persuade the enemies not to do these things. I mean threatening after many uses of the power is about as good as using the powers.

Games like The Black Glove need to happen just to extend and change the way stories are told in gaming, otherwise what we are left with is stories that are compelling but only really two sided.