Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Suspension of disbelief

As I grow older, I notice that the core market of gamers grow in age with me. When I was a kid, games were for kids. When I was a teenager, games were for teenager. Now I'm 25, and gamers are, again, considered within my age group.
Is it that in order to enjoy computer and video games you need to grow up with them?

Perhaps, but I'd like to offer an additional explanation. I think that games are growing up as well, not in the sense of becoming more mature, but simply becoming, well, better, in terms of audio visual experience and the encompassing experience they provide.

(1984 - AlleyCat by IBM) AlleyCat could not catch the attention of a 20 years old like it can of a 5 years old. In order to capture the imagination of more mature people, complex games are needed. As games grow complex in graphics and content, so does the age group of the people who find them enjoyable.

In short, it's all about the effect of Suspension of Disbelief. As we grow older our Suspension of disbelief threshold grows with us. As the ability of games to draw us into their universes grew, so does the age of the people who are mesmerized by them.

This thought came up after a conversation I had with Shirley, regarding why I find theater boring in relation to Television or Movies; I had to excuse my lack of cultural sophistication to the fact that when I see theater, that's all I see: Actors, a stage, and a script, I never buy into it, because I've been exposed since the day I was born to mediums that suspend my disbelief much better.
It came to me that the same process takes place with computer games, after 3 days in a row that I spent all my free time playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, first time in years that I found myself drawn so powerfully into a game.

Monday, May 28, 2007

Pendulum - very live!

Out of curiosity I ran a search on Pendulum to see how they sound live - turns out these guys (who produce electronic DnB) do their shows with real instruments on the stage - and pull it off beautifully.
Check it out:




Another Planet (live) by Pendulum

Webcomics!

Were you aware of the abundance of free, high quality, often vulgar entertainment that exists online in the shape of a webcomic? I certainly was only vaguely aware of this phenomenon until recently. After reading my Calvin and Hobbes from cover to cover for the tenth time, I've decided I'm ready for a new relationship, so I started searching the web for interesting, free comics. To be honest, I didn't expect much, since the comics I did see up until that point weren't so hot, but boy did I find some pearls to make my day.
For those of you who've been missing the train of webcomics, like myself, I present here a list of my current favorites, just to get you started:

Cyanide and happiness
The Perry Bible Fellowship
Dueling Analogs
Ctrl+Alt+Del

All of the above have RSS updates that lets me know whenever they update, I don't know how I lived before I knew what RSS was all about! But that's a topic for another post.