Talcon

I think you’re missing my point re the use of fun. If you were to ask any of these players if they were having fun, they would probably say yes. With that in mind, fun is more like the feeling envoked, the the actions done. The more generic fun, as something you do, to me is too nebulous a concept, and isn’t consistent enough across people to really narrow down an exact definition and meaning. Too much time can be spent questioning if some action really is or isn’t fun with it. (The forms of fun are also the accepted way to interpet fun in games studies for what it’s worth).

My gut instinct is that the 50’s is in a way, the last time the world was -really- scared of nuclear war. So, we transitioned away from the 50’s sensibilites and evnetually the cold war ended. I feel like Bethesda might have postulated that we would eventually hit a necular war if the 50’s sensibilites had of continued unhindered. It’s not just the visual asthetics, but also the cultural ones that get envoked, even in light of all the robots and laser guns after all.

This first bit is just something that rubs me the wrong way about some of your articulation. You count aspects of a game like exploration as something that wouldn’t be considered fun, but I think if we’re talking about games we need to use the language of game design to a certain degree. In game design, exploration is considered a form a fun, one of the fourteen to sixteen forms (some exclude two from the list in this paper) forms. You can read about that here.

http://spacepioneers.msu.edu/forms_of_fun_july_2004.pdf

I feel this is important to highlight because, the beginning of the paper comes off as a little confusing what you mean when you say fun, since otherwise, fun can mean very different things to different individuals. Regardless, I really liked a lot of the postulation you present in this piece.

You brought up the radio as a potential aspect of the game that could break immersion, but I’ll be honest, I always just assumed it used headphones or something. In general I think there would have been value in exploring how imagination can help players strengthen immersion (and the fun that can come from a player coming up for a solution for these kind of seemingly not logical aspects of a game) and how the role-play experience is strengthened in the end.

I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on the 50’s aesthetic that the game clings to. Do you think, since the average person playing fallout wasn’t born until twenty years after the fifties (minimum), that this adds to the feeling of unease and isolation that fallout 3 attempts to provide? “It’s bad enough that this is a nuclear waste land, but it’s a form of America I’ve never seen before,” do you think this kind of thinking plays a part in the impact of fallout 3’s immersion, and if so is it good or bad?

This was a very pedagogically s timulating read, so thank you for sharing it! ☺

I checked my reference list, it didn’t show up in the final product unfortunately, If I get taken on as a writer here, I might consider posting the thesis’ chapters as a think piece series. Which is in a way, scary because of the topic, but I’m considering it.

I saw a lot of very small websites when I was doing research for my honours thesis, it definitely came up then, I didn’t use it, but I remember reading it! (I might have used it in my proposal, it’s all a blur now though)

I’ve read this before actually! It was a super good read both times!

This was a pretty great read! I thought a lot of your points were quite salient. Have you looked into the work of Joshua Meyrowitz? Meyrowitz works with some ideas about technology and how society uses it presented by Marshall Mcluhan, and Erving Goffman’s ideas about social identity. Meyrowitz work was postulated before the advent of the Internet, but when coupled with Social geography, I think there’s a lot of potential to explore your ideas through these lenses.

Coming from that background, I’m left with some questions, but chief among them is this. Would you consider social media identity creation to be different than how we facilitate different facades for different people? Wouldn’t our personas online just be best seen as what we consider to be the lowest common denominator of self? The self we think is consistent across all the different personas we create for all the people in our lives?

Either way, this was a wonderful read and well written, so thank you!

I’ll definitely check it out!

MM is kind of the figurehead of my undergrad’s media arts and cultures program. I’m a now first class honours bachelor of arts in Media Arts and Cultures from the University of New Brunswick. (Going on to do a Master of Arts in Experimental Digital Media at the University of Waterloo). I wrote a thesis in my undergrad that would fall under games scholarship, a discourse analysis around Gamergate and identity.

But I mean, in general, if you’re a Canadian Media Scholar, it’s like almost a sin to not know MM. hahaha

The if there was a market, it would be catered to logic is a bit flawed in my opinion though. It discredits the power of industry cycles and how hard it can be to stop making what you’re making and actually try something new. That’s why we’re seeing this new approach to Kickstarter, where companies put a game up there, just to get a taste for if people want it or not. I’m interested to see how this will shape the production of games in the future.