Gaming
Monday, July 27, 2009 by budding_writer
Hey everyone, in lecture today when Luke was talking about Royse et al. (2007) and their three kinds of female game users, I was wondering what category other people in the class would put themselves in? I feel as though gaming is an important part of our society, be it if you play Farmville or Restaurant City on Facebook, or if you are a secret WoW addict. I did an essay on gaming last semester, and I've since become quite interested in people's habits regarding it.
Personally, I would categorise myself as a moderate user, definitely favouring RPG's and games like The Sims, or Age of Empires. I don't have time for First Person Shooter games, and often ponder why my younger brother becomes so engrossed in a game of Call of Duty, where the war scenario is so realistic, and just plain terrifying. Are other people similar to me in these ways??
I would also call myself a moderate user, or at least I used to be (not much time for computer games now).
As a teenager I loved all the Sim games, Age Of Empires etc... anything where you could build things, juggle several aspects of play at once (ie Age of Empires you had to manage attacks from competing tribes whilst trying to build up your own tribe) or where the aim was to acquire something other than points (eg Sim Tower was to build a tower 100 stories high).
There was also a stage during the first year of uni where some friends of mine got hold of an old Game Cube and we played MarioKart obsessively for about 3 months...
I'd be interested to learn about how people use the same game but in potentially different ways. For example, Grand Theft Auto provides the opportunity to race cars, buy property, slowly build up a sweet car AND pop a cap in a ho's ass! Do the different sexes play this sort of game differently?
I'm quite interested in the mobile platform that games seem to be taking today - if we look at the iPhone (which I kid you not, has similar processing power than the first sony playstation), we can see that moderate use is no longer contained to the living room. I'm also baffled by the use of augmented reality, if we look at this here. I find the iPhone quite overtly male-gendered. Anyone actually got an iPhone to confirm my suspicions?
What Hazel has said about people playing games in potentially different ways really interests me too. When I first got hooked on The Sims at the age of 13 or so, I used to talk about it quite a lot (to anyone who would listen). It seemed that female players mostly preferred the 'life' element of the game - that is, creating families with children, pets, jobs etc while the boys I knew, and indeed many girls too, played the game for its design possibilities - creating and building houses, gardens and shopping centres. Something worth noting?