I recently watched independent animation film director and designer Léo Verrier’s short film, Dripped. The 8-minute film presented a fictional story of a burglar who stole famous paintings from museums and proceeded to eat the artwork. Shortly after the thief consumed an artwork, his body morphed into a figure or design from the specific painting. I like to imagine that Verrier came up with this idea for his film after viewing a Picasso. Many artists find inspiration in existing art. […]
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From Battlezone to World of Tanks
In 1970, the movie Patton became a top-grossing film of the year, earned eight Academy Awards, and starred George C. Scott as the brilliant, eccentric World War II tank commander General George S. Patton. At a time when the country was mired in jungle warfare in Vietnam, in which tanks played relatively little role, audiences warmed to the epic story of America’s fast-moving tactical victories in the “good war” a quarter-century earlier. Tanks fired the imagination of not only movie-goers, but […]
Warrior and the Video Arcade Fighting Game
On a recent stroll through the arcade in The Strong’s eGameRevolution exhibit, I recalled a favorite childhood memory of my hometown arcade. During the early to middle 1990s, even as arcades declined, young gamers like me hurried to our local arcades after school to pick fights. No, these weren’t real fights, but some players left with sore fingers from mashing buttons and injured egos from too many lost battles. During these years, video arcade fighting games such as Capcom’s Street […]
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Video Games in a Museum?
Most everyone is some sort of a gamer, whether that means you play Call of Duty to strategically advance and complete missions or you simply log onto your iPhone for a quick game of Words with Friends. Electronic games are everywhere. The Strong has the advantage of interpreting electronic game history in the context of play history.
When a guest at The Strong views electronic games and related artifacts displayed in various exhibits, she might see how preserving the history of […]
Video Games in the Humanities Classroom
Before I came to The Strong, I taught writing and literature courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology and elsewhere, which fits right in with writing electronic games blogs. As video games occupy more and more of our playtime, it is not surprising that some educators are finding opportunities to use gaming to teach writing and critical reading skills. Here are three examples I find particularly interesting:
1. BiblioBouts
With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, researchers at the […]
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Video Game Museum Tour
On a recent trip to France, I saw the beautiful Romanesque basilica of St. Sernin in Toulouse, a stop on the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Martin Sheen and Emilio Estavez celebrated and updated this journey in their movie The Way, and the thought struck me: if a modern video game pilgrim traveled to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) at The Strong, what museums might he visit along the way?
Selling Electronic Play in Video Game Television Commercials
A few years ago, I asked my students in an American cultural history course to identify logos and slogans from their lifetime. Not surprisingly, since advertising bombards us through print, radio, television, and the Internet, the students did this easily (try this Logo Quiz game for yourself). After this exercise, the class discussed how advertising illustrates changes in social and cultural history. Take for example, the changes in television commercials from three different generations of video game consoles—the Magnavox Odyssey, […]
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Four Horsemen: 3DO’s Apocalypse That Never Was
“And so, the Four Horsemen were unleashed as foretold, and their names are Famine, Pestilence, War and Death. I am the line that separates life from death, war from peace and good from evil. I am known as Abaddon. And though I walk through the shadow of death I shall fear no evil…because evil fears me.”
~ Original game tagline from 3DO
The 3DO Company began developing their first M-rated video game title, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in 2002. The game’s […]
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Satisfy Your Wanderlust with These Video Games
I have wanderlust. In college, I found like-minded companions in Dean and Sal from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In one passage, Sal recognized why he felt compelled to travel and explained that he had “no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, rolling under the stars.” I still relate to his sentiments; however, my lifestyle does not always permit sporadic adventures. Now when I feel the need […]
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