MASTERS OF DOOM (David Kushner)
This reading was surprisingly interesting. Before reading them, I expected to not be interested nor find anything relevant in these two readings, but I was pleasantly proven wrong about that.
The readings from Masters of Doom were very interesting in the way they were written. Throughout the readings for this class, many of the authors have stressed how important it is to remember that historical writing is telling a story. These readings by Kushner tell a story, an interesting story.
I think he does a great job of marrying historical information with storytelling. At times, I wonder where he gets his data from, for example when he’s telling stories from the viewpoint of Romero. He doesn’t mention that he interviewed Romero and he doesn’t state the information as being universal, as things every player sees or hears or experiences. He very much tells the exact response of Romero in these moments (mainly game-play); which leads me to wonder how much liberty he took in those moments.
The most important discovery in this reading is finding a writing style I really enjoy reading. I plan to buy Masters of Doom (and any other books written by David Kushner) to get more acquainted with his writing style.
THE VIDEO GAME EXPLOSION (Mark J.P. Wolf, ed)
First, as a non-gamer, I found the video game timeline before the readings useful. Most of the video games I am aware of were referenced in the timeline. I’m familiar with a few arcade games, like Street Fighter, and the major releases from my childhood, like Super Mario Bros.; so the timeline provided gave me a good contextualization of the field.
I am more and more leaning towards exploring the field of film music, so this article on “Sound in Video Games” by Eric Pidkameny was insightful because a lot of the considerations in video games are also important in film music — diegetic versus diegetic music, the affective nature of music, the narrative qualities of music to tell things that the storyline doesn’t or can’t.
Additionally, as someone interested in various textualities (intertextuality, paratextuality), Martin Picard’s chapter “Video Games ant Their Relationship with Other Media,” was interesting when thinking about adapting video games for other media and the para/intertextuality of video games and film or television.