The Loan Gunman

Hooo...

So my roommate has a pretty slow laptop. I, on the other hand, shelled out a fortune this summer to get my computer burning fast so I could do video manipulation, 3d graphic design, etc... One of the [fairly desirable] side effects is that my computer can run video games REALLY well. Perhaps you can see where this is going. My roomie uses my computer to play games that his can't handle. That's really no problem by me... unless I have things to do (post?).

Now, this may sound like I'm trying to come up with an excuse for why I haven't posted (the main reason was that this was week 1 of 2 from hell), but I'm actually taking this in another direction.

Watching my roommate deftly maneuver through corridors while gunning down anything in his way got me to thinking about media.

Sidebar: I know I've talked about video games quite a bit, but I think it's reasonable to do so in a class that studies new media. I've played them my entire life, but it's only now that I have started to think about them on a deeper level.

I'm starting to look at video games not as a specific medium, but rather as a category for many different media. I suppose that various video games could be classified in multiple ways depending on different criteria, but as I was watching I started thinking of the effect of perspective in relation to games. There are some games which are in first-person (Half Life, Doom). There are also quite a fair deal of 3rd person games where you watch your character interact with the environment (Tomb Raider, Max Payne). There are games in which you assume a sort of god-like roll (Sim City). How do these differences draw the player into the game? It's quite common for my roommate to say things like "how did he hit me?" He talks as if the character he commands is an extension of himself.

I'm still trying to figure out what all of this means, but this is something that I find really interesting. Anyone have thoughts on the subject?