Pageflake Tour

Hey all! Zhuge here. You can find my pageflake pagecast at http://www.pageflakes.com/ZhugeLiang/.

In my bookmarks and site listings, I tried to find not just topicality but diversity - I wanted to look at the groups that made up the video game community. Take this website that details gaming as both an art medium and an art form, for example. While probably not the first group you think of when someone says “Gaming,” their presence is indicative of the greater culture at hand. So, with no further ado:

My RSS Feeds

-Penny Arcade (Blog postings about the site proper and Tycho, one of its authors/subjects)

I saved this into my feed mainly because its one of my favorite sites; I frequent it often both as a source of entertainment and of information. More often than not Tycho and Gabe’s musings, both in comic form and in writing, relate to some major event or dialogue going on in the video game world. As such, not only is the comic a source of witty commentary regarding what is commonly regarded as the popular opinion regarding the topic at hand, but their blog postings are also eloquent and poignant as relating to said topic. Indeed, were it not for Tycho and Gabe i would not have known about the editorial scandal at Gamespot nor the implications of the Blizzard Acquisition.

-Kotaku

Kotaku is one of my major sources of information regarding events in the gaming community. Relevant, up-to-date, and varied as to the subjects of its coverage (Exclusive title releases and GDC updates have both been the subject of blog postings), Kotaku is an essential resource if one is to explore the video game world.

-Gamasutra

Gamasutra is a kind of overlay for Kotaku but delves a bit more into the personal side of gaming - that is, Gamasutra sometimes details the people behind the games. It is this aspect of the site, the touching upon the actors behind the scenes, that warrants its place on my RSS feed list.

-Gameology

Gameoloy is a much more academic site than any of the others, a vital resource in a world that is formed almost exclusively by opinion. Its breadth of subject material extends beyond video games proper to at times a more technological bent, but all of these in some fashion relate to the gaming medium as a whole. Be it research on how the brain in men differs from women in relation to rewards or how the Nintendo Wii can serve the role of Physical Therapist, Gameology is a unique resource in it scholarly approach to gaming.

-Games Are Art

Gamesareart is a very interesting site, to me, because it takes video games from an angle i never anticipated yet completely love - games as an art form. I’ve never before thought about games as a kind of cultural showcase, a kind of self expression, yet it makes complete sense from the cinematic angle. (Why didn’t I think about this before! Brilliant!) An awesome read, one i’m still very much delving into.

-IGN

IGN is one of the major players in the video game industry on the consumer side, as it is one of the largest game review sites on the net. Home to a host of forums and even more postings regarding how crappy xyz game is (but don’t forget how glorifyingly awesome Zelda OoT is!), you’ll be hard pressed to find another site as comprehensive in scale regarding the gamer community’s interaction wtih video gaming, if only due to its sheer readership (which begs the question: Is a video game site important/influential because so many people frequent it or do so many people frequent it because it is important/influential? Quite the chicken-and-egg scenario).

-1UP.com

Take the IGN description from above and multiply it x10. 1up.com is a kind of hub, a web-way leading to a plethora of other gaming resources. Serving at once as both a community resource for reviews and events and as a portal to further resources still, 1up is a unique entity in the consumer-side world of gaming (though, thinking about it for a bit, is a company dedicated to game reviews/community activities part of the consumer side or the production side of gaming? Does that depend on what we say they’re producing or consuming?)

My Zotero Bibliography

Both of the books I’m listing in my pageflake relate to the history of video games. I do this because i find the history of video games, let alone history in general, a very key resource when it comes to understanding video games in general. We have to know where we came from - what successes games and companies faced, what challenges they had to overcome(or, conversely, the challenges that overcame them) - if we’re to understand where we are going in this medium. Video gaming is very much a two-way process: The industry giants create the games for us, but we as consumers have a kind of democratic process, a voice in the system, by way of purchases and play time. As such, it is our responsibility to be aware of what’s going on in the video game world and the first step we can take in understanding that world is to take a look back at what’s been done before.

Also, it’s just a really cool read.

My Diigo Bookmarks/My Soulmate’s Bookmarks

I’m joining these two sections together because I don’t really use Diigo that much - i’m very much a habitual user of the same cadre of sites and as such, while bookmarks are important to me and useful as a mnemonic device, I already have on hand alot of what I currently use.

I chose my del.icio.us soulmate because of the variety of the resources he had described. Most important to me were the modding sites he had linked to. For those of you who don’t know, modding is the process by which someone takes a console and puts a special computer chip in the console so that i can play either foreign games, pirated games, or both. Modding is quite the controversial topic in gaming circles not just because of the piracy issue but because alot of the pirated software is foreign work that domestic consumers wouldn’t otherwise have access to. The debate over the rights of gamers to play software as opposed to the right of producers to select where they have distribution still rages, but sites like the ones Alex linked to serve as a glimpse into the one true gaming underground.

So that’s my Pageflake Tour. I’ll probably come back later and revamp it/edit it, but for now here’s my best. Now take your best shot!

-Z

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