Reading Response 3 - Abby Keller

Growing up with two older brothers, I’ve been brought up in a world surrounded by video games. Constantly I would walk into my basement, and lo and behold, there would be my brothers and their friends one hundred percent invested in whatever game it may be (usually some type of shooting game). I would always ask to play, and with much hesitation and eventual reluctance my brothers would give in.  I would play for about five minutes and then get bored or frustrated by my lack of abilities. So I would take to the sidelines and just watch them work their thumbs magically. That whole time I would just think of the video game as something to do when bored, something to do with friends. And up until now, i've always thought that. That is until I read a chapter from Gaming: Essays on Algorithms by Alexander Galloway. The way the chapter goes on to describe what goes into the development of a game and how it should be perceived made me change my mind on some aspects of video games.

I thought it was interesting when Galloway described video games as an “action based medium” and talks about how it is very different from the mediums of film and photography. I always just thought of video games as somewhat like a movie. A predetermined sort of action. However, I was wrong. As mentioned in the chapter, video games are created both with the input of the player and the output of the machine. The player must do something and the machine must respond, making it a medium that must work together in order to work. He is trying to change the way we see an ordinary video game.

I like when he goes on describing the difference between game and play. The definition of game being what I was thinking like, something with preset directions and only one way to figure it out. But in reality video games are more like how he describes play; something that is free and uncertain. Video games are something that the player is creating, and the machine is just helping to enforce, not the other way around.  I’m glad I read this article to help me understand what I could not grasp as a little girl every weekend watching my brothers stare a screen with a controller in hand for countless hours.