Reading Response 3 - Skip Brea

Playing video games all my life I’ve never really lost an interest in games. I played all types of games whether they were handheld, controller based, or computer games I've played them all. Growing up in a family based around a lot of males that were mostly athletes, and gamers it was easy to become good at all types of games because of the competitiveness. Especially competitiveness between boys at a young age. I would play for hours, and make sure I completed every game I played. I would just think of video games as a pass time when I’m not doing work, playing sports, or when I’m with a couple of buddies. Although, I always had a certain attraction toward games there was always something missing that never lead me to look into gaming deeper. Something that games did do was make me creative; it gave me ambition to have an imagination. That is until I read a chapter from Gaming: Essays on Algorithms by Alexander Galloway. I never looked at gaming close until I read this chapter. The chapter goes on describing what goes into the development of different games, and how it should be observed. It gave me another perspective of video gaming that I didn’t have before.

            I enjoyed reading what Galloway had to say as video games as an “action based medium”. I myself knowing a lot about photography, and taking a film studies class last semester found it interesting when Galloway mentions that an action based medium is very different from the mediums used in film and photography. I can see where some people would get an idea that a video game can be compared to a movie because of what it is based on. But something I think about is the freedom and open area of all the games that I’ve ever played. As mentioned in the chapter, video games work with this push and pull method. Video games are created with the input of the player and the output of the device. The device will only do what the player tells it to do working together as a unit in order to have everything flowing perfectly in a game. Galloway is trying to change our perspective of looking at the way we view video games.
            Galloway makes a difficult topic such as the idea of making video games that is hard to understand a little bit easier to understand. It was a friendly read in understand what he had to say about all the actions, and the two-way interaction between user and machine. Galloway rekindled that thought of knowing that video games are much more than just moving pixels on a screen. That gaming gets to a more personal level the more you play. The thought process that goes into creating characters, and the way the characters act is always thought-out by the creator. It all depends what you want to do with the information, knowledge, and skills you earn from playing video games. Galloway made me realize that I have learned so much from all the video games I’ve ever played, and made me recognize what they have offered to me ever since I was a kid.