3/17 first person response

In Juul’s article she talks about several different aspects of time when concerning video games. First she talks about play time and event time. Play time is the time that takes place in the game to start and finish it. For example, in adventure games play time starts once the player begins the game and ends when he or she beats the final boss. Event time is where the game takes place. This could be the future, past or present. She also mentions that play time is often repeated for certain tasks. An example I can think of this is when one must beat a boss in a certain pattern to continue. This could be compared to coming of age rituals in which one must do it a certain way to gain new recognition of their status before he or she can move on to the next stage of life. Juul also discusses the idea of real-time and turn-based abstract games. Real-time games are ones such as World of Warcraft that take place in a constant movement of time. Turn-based games could be ones such as chess and checkers in which the players make a move and the opponent then gets his or her move and the original player has to wait until he or she can go again.

All of Juul’s terms made sense to me and didn’t seem like anything new to me. I played video games a lot growing up and I understood all of this without classifying games into specific types of games based on time. It makes sense to classify games in these ways, it is just weird for me to think about games being classified as a medium of study.

~ by bmill1 on March 17, 2008.