Andy’s New Media Blog

The whole time I was reading Turkel’s article on video games, all I could think was how many more things she would have had to talk about if she had only waited a few years for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to come out in America and confirm nearly everything she was thinking about video games.  More so than most arcade games of the time, games for the NES like Zelda and Mario were big breakthroughs as far as immersing players in unique and interesting environments that weren’t derivative’s  of other cultural objects like the knights in Joust.  The NES also solidified the “closed cartridge” system which started with the Atari 2600 and essentially kept everyone but Nintendo itself from making cartridges for their console which is something that Jarish was rightly concerned about.

Nintendo really took some of Turkel’s ideas to the next level by creating game worlds that were highly structured and rule based but also incredibly artistically inventive and make the player feel like they are in a truly unique space.  Of course this makes it very easy to get lost in the simulated world as Turkel puts it.  For instance, I can’t remember how to do long division by hand, but somehow I still know how to find the secret whistles in Mario 3 that let you skip straight to world 8.

One of the main aspects of the chapter that I will definitely need to spend more time looking at for my project is the idea of games as a sort of zen experience because they allow the player to be in an extremely focused state on something that is completely under their control.  Obviously this idea gets very complicated with the increasing popularity of online games where large groups of people of varying skills and attitudes are all expected to interact and play with each other in the same space.  Interestingly, instead of causing a chaotic experience that disrupts the zen, the opposite occurs and people seem to be even more entranced by massively multiplayer online games than with traditional single player games.  This is most likely because the introduction of other personalities makes the illusion of the simulated world even more convincing because of the inherent unpredictability that comes with actual human interaction but I need to think more about it.