I’ve spent a lot of time in the car this summer. And for much of that time, my six-year-old son has been my constant companion. When I was a kid, getting ready to travel involved books, crayons, paper, and a snack in a Ziploc bag. Today, we travel with a mobile electronics store. By the end of a trip, the backseat is littered with my iPod and headphones, a mobile video player with an assortment of SpongeBob and Scooby Doo […]
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How Long Is a Good Video Game?
With so many video games to choose from, I often have trouble deciding how to get the most bang for my buck.
Sometimes I compare how much I spend on a game to the amount of time I expect to play it. I wonder if other gamers do the same? Games like Kingdom Hearts, Okami, and Dragon Age: Origins may easily take 50 to 60 hours just to beat the initial storyline, to say nothing of any side-quests on which a […]
U.S. Women’s Soccer and Abby Mania: One Fan’s Perspective
I recently joined countless others around the country and jumped on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (U.S. WNT) bandwagon. In fact, almost everyone I encountered during the team’s amazing FIFA World Cup run seemed to be aware of the its international success. Even before the Semifinals, the U.S. WNT had already gone head-to-head against the highly rated Brazilian team in the Quarterfinals. A game-tying “header” in the 11th hour by none other than Rochester, New York’s own Abby Wambach […]
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Bill Kunkel, 1950-2011: Video Game Journalism Pioneer
On September 4th, the video game industry lost a true pioneer. Bill Kunkel, founder of Electronic Games magazine and longtime video game journalist, passed away at the age of 61.
Kunkel began his career writing comic books and covering the wrestling industry, but he made his greatest impact as a journalist chronicling, celebrating, and critiquing video games. Over the years he worked on numerous publications, designed games and taught about them, and in 1981 cofounded, with Arnie Katz and Joyce Wetzel, […]
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The Pirate and the Dollhouse
While cleaning out my parents’ basement before moving into my first-ever apartment, I came across two treasured “artifacts” of my past: a poster of Johnny Depp in his Pirates of the Caribbean get-up and my childhood dollhouse. As it turns out, the two items are not as unrelated as you might think.
As I prepared (five years ago now—yikes) for my freshman year of college, I faced a quandary: how to decorate my first-ever dorm room, a space I would share […]
Been Here Before: Same Landscapes, Different Stories in Video Games
In college, I spent much of Critical Reading loathing the professor’s love of American Romanticism and wallowing in my disdain for his assigned texts. Many of my classmates held similar sentiments, but we kept quiet during discussions of titles such as “Bodily Harm: Keats’ Figures in the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’” However, I will never forget the rapid-fire conversation about how individual experience shapes varying degrees of reality. We all had encountered many of the same things—holidays, historical events, […]
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Ten Good Books on Video Game History
This summer three students provided important assistance to ICHEG. Two Rochester Institute of Technology game design majors, Ned Blakely and Matt Fico, upgraded equipment in our research lab, captured game footage for archival purposes, and created multimedia experiences to include in our eGameRevolution exhibit opening this November. Josh Keaton, a student from the State University of New York at Brockport, assisted with background research for the exhibit. Here, in no particular order, are ten books Josh found helpful:
#1. Replay: The […]
Happiness Is a Good Vacation
Vacationing has a long tradition for working folks the world over. Most of us look forward each year to taking any break(s) we may have earned from the routines of everyday living. We all anticipate and welcome regular periods of relaxation during which we say to ourselves, “I’m on vacation now, and I will do only things that make me happy. Besides, I need a break.”
As I started looking into this topic, I learned that a formal concept called the […]
Happy Birthday Home Video Games!
Home video games turn 45 this week. That’s right, on August 31, 1966, Ralph Baer originated the idea of playing a video game on a television. An electrical engineer and employee of defense contractor Sanders Associates, Inc., Ralph had toyed with the idea of using a television to play some sort of game before, but, now, the thoughts crystallized into a definite concept.
As Ralph records in his memoir, Videogames in the Beginning:
During a business trip for Sanders to New York […]