Friday, June 21, 2002

Bryan-Mitchell Young aka jccalhoun wrote in his paper First-Person Shooters Are Not Like Movies and That is a Good Thing:

"The fact that the similarities are only skin deep does not stop most critics from attempting to apply the standards of one medium to the other. Since computer games are much more recent developments it is almost always the standards of movies that are applied to games. This has been done to such a large extent that a formalized school of computer game criticism that does not apply the standards of motion pictures to games has yet to develop. It is not surprising, when seen in this light, that when computer games are evaluated using the tools of the film scholar, computer games almost always come up lacking. A Car does not do a very good job of being a tree, and if you insist on comparing it to a tree, then you will never be happy with your car."

I must agree to this statement! We are going to build a computer game criticism on its own premises. This does not mean we are not prepared to learn from other fields. However computer games are not almost literature, almost dramaturgy, almost film, or almost television. The computer game is a field of study in its own right.

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