Vox ex Machina » Doom

Let’s Take a Trip Down Memory Lane With Violent Video Games

Nelson Williams — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:12:48 +0000

The recent Supreme Court ruling that video games actually do enjoy free speech protections like every other form of expression (except that one, for some reason) has led to rather a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Think Of The Children crowd. This is good, because if those people are rending their garments, it means we’re advancing as a culture.

In any case, CNN decided to go whoring for gamer traffic with a top ten list of violent video games that set off the kind of moral panics that led to the Supremes dropping the hammer. Gavel, whatever.

CNN has the story.

A book you should read: Masters of Doom by David Kushner

Helvetica — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:00:00 +0000

John D. Carmack and John Romero—the two Johns who changed the landscape of videogames forever. Between id Software and Ion Storm we’ve seen much of the best early innovation of the FPS genre from the minds of great workers. And here’s the book to read about the evolution of our beloved gameplay.

We haven’t had much time to digest the pages, so we’ll defer to the Wikipedia entry to entertain and delight,

Much of the book concentrates on this dynamic. While the two men initially very much complement each other, eventually they come into conflict, leading Romero to be fired from the company. Carmack, the skilled creator of the complicated and fast game engines the company’s products use, is repeatedly referred to as the only person in the company who isn’t expendable, and this gives him a great degree of authority and influence – but that influence transforms id Software into a considerably less pleasant and fun place to work and causes the company’s games to become increasingly repetitive, despite their technological sophistication. Romero is on the opposite end of the spectrum; his Ion Storm is intended to be a very fun place to work, where "[game] design is law" and the technology must be created to realize the designer’s vision, instead of the other way around. However, his lack of management and organizational focus leads to poor and financially disastrous results.

So far it’s garnering only 4-5 stars on Amazon. And we’ll vouch that it’s an amazing look into the early rise of video games and how they changed our culture for the better. This especially from a blogger who writes almost exclusively about video games. We have a lot riding on these sorts of products.

You don’t need to know much about the industry, computers, or even video games in general—but it certainly helps a great deal—because the narrative structure of the documentary book follows the two Johns though their careers, and outlines the drama between them, and even limns both their mighty talent as well as their eventual fatal flaws.

We salute our heroes past adventures and great triumphs and we will mourn their failures.

But one thing is still certain, we need flair and passion like this to continue into the broad strange future in front of us.

Link, via Amazon.com.

Video Gamers Get Better – In Their Dreams

Nelson Williams — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:01:21 +0000

Dreaming and learning may be part of the same process, a new study from the Harvard Medical School suggests. In the study, volunteers played the rightly hallowed FPS, DOOM, and then answered questions about their dreams. Often, elements from DOOM would turn up in their dreams, like shotguns, blood, and demons.

“It really looks like if you’re not dreaming about it, you’re not getting better,” says Robert Stickgold, one of the researchers in the study.