Gaming Virgin

As the title obviously states - before I walked into class on Thursday I had never played a game in my life nor been interested. If someone was to say the word 'videogames' to me, my mind would conjure images of individuals immersing themselves completely in a specific game, to the point of rejecting everything around them and the world of the game becoming their reality.

Thankfully, after Thursday, my viewpoint has changed. Instead of rolling my eyes at the thought of videogames, I began to become interested all the quirks gaming has to offer. What was particularly interesting was when Kevin talked of modding. The idea of taking a game, to change and rework it, to see and act on a rules variant, allows me to see that there are so many different levels to playing videogames. At one end of the spectrum is casually (or obsessively) playing facebook games, such as Farmville, and at the other end is the ability to see through the rules designed for a particular game and to change them. This vast difference in two examples in gaming begins to show an intellectual side to gaming, one that I am very interested in.

Thankfully, due to my extreme lack of experience, this paper is a theory paper. To be frank, I was scared that I would have to learn and start playing so many different games in order to pass this course, and I did not want to do that. In saying that, now that I’ve actually been to class, I like the idea of gaming, and might try it for myself.