Lecture 6 'A Brief History of the New'

This lecture was about different approaches to 'new media', mainly talking about how techniques of film making and video games have progressed.

Bill talked a lot about video games he liked from his childhood and today a why he felt they were good, and it was all about the level of interactivity. How the leap had been made from films where the viewer is apart from the action on the screen and cannot influence it, to a completely separate interactive world which the player can enter and change, where you can meet other people in that world and exist with them in a fictional reality.

This got me thinking about the first computer games i played and why i liked them. The first game i remember is Doom95, which was a first person shooter where a gateway to hell has opened and you have to defend earth from the onslaught of demons. I remember my brother getting the game when it first came out and watching him play and being quite scared of the monsters, they seemed really real to me. Now when i look at images of game play i find it strange how i could compare it with real life that quality of the graphics are so poor you can barley see the creatures, let alone believe they could be real.

The game has been criticized for is high level of gore and satanic imagery by religious groups, and thinking about it now i was probably a bit young to be playing a game like this and to be exposed to simulated violence like this at a young age. But i don't remember it like I've just described it, it was just something i used to play, i was so young i didn't understand the gore i just new that when you shot at things they went red, it sounds really weird but i didn't think of it like 'omg i just shot that zombie and he exploded and his guts have gone everywhere' it was just 'huh he went red'. And as for the references to hell, they just went completely over my head; i am far more disturbed by this game when i play it now then i was then.

Other games i used to play were far more innocent, another favourite was 'The Great Green Mouse Disaster' where an orchestra of green mice has been booked to play at a hotel but someone dropped the basket with all the mice in and they escaped. You then had to look around all the rooms in the hotel trying to find the mice.

It is based on a children's story book, the cover is shown above. If you look closely you can see the basket of mice on the steps where it has just been dropped with all the mice running into the hotel. I really liked this game because you could interact with the other characters in it and with the objects in the rooms. This we take for granted in all games now but it was the first game i played where this was an option. I preferred it to Doom because it had a higher level of interactivity which is what Bill was talking about earlier today.