History of Computing

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Reading 11: Gaming in Society

Whenever a tragedy occurs, there will be people who are quick to deflect blame away from the obvious. In the case of mass shootings, the punching bag appears to be video games. Time and again we hear how the people committing these terrible acts play Call of Duty or Counter Strike. As far back as the Columbine massacre, people have accused video games of inciting these acts. To me this just seems like blatant ignorance. Instead of pointing out how a mass shooter owned GTA V, wouldn't it be better to examine his mental state? I guess what I'm trying to say is that even the demographic that most often commits these crimes also happens to buy video games does not mean the two events are at all related. It's disappointing that the media has chosen to demonize video games over non-existent problems when more serious issues do exist. For example, addiction is a very real problem in modern gaming. In reading 8, I discussed how mobile games often included blatant slot machi

Reading 10: e(a)Sports?

I think I would say that I'm a pretty big fan of competitive games. I'm certainly someone who enjoys playing them, regardless of how good I actually am at them. I always find it interesting to talk with different people about what games they consider valid eSports. Ironically enough, the discussion tends to get tricky when it comes to whether or not sports games can be eSports. I tend to fall in with the more traditionalist camp, but I can certainly understand why some people think otherwise. That being said, I think everyone can agree that watching people play games competitively is an increasingly popular activity. Similar to watching sports, people are now more and more watching people compete in their favorite video game. It's a fascinating trend to observe. Why are people so into this? Will it stop being stigmatized? Should we consider them real athletes? Are they real sports? There are a lot of questions swirling around right now and very few answers to be had. Pe

Reading 09: Arcade Fire

Real talk, I've never been to a proper arcade. It's something I've never really had a chance to properly experience. Thankfully our generous overlord decided we would take a class field trip to one... whats in the cups? Obviously that didn't actually happen but we did go to Strikes and Spares , which had some arcade games, I guess? It's interesting how arcades have gone from such defining aspect of our culture to a thing most people have never been to in the span of a few decades. It's just seems so odd to me to think that such places could almost completely vanish from the collective consciousness of the American public so quickly. Despite this nearly total disappearance, arcades are not without merit. Although it's a fair enough criticism that arcade games are often designed with profit more in mind than fun, there is still a unique charm to them. Before we go any further I think it would be wrong of me not to point out that America is not the

Reading 08: A Casino in Your Pocket

Mobile games are weird. Think of when you got your first smartphone or tablet (or an iPod Touch if you were like me and had parents who hated fun). I remember eagerly loading up my account with iTunes gift cards and gleefully buying whatever piqued my interest. I was curious so I looked up my download history on the App Store. Back then, games were short and my attention span even shorter. I filled page after page of my iPod's home screen with flash game clones and prototypical free to play titles. It was a simpler time. Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, Jetpack Joyride, Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird...the list of 'classics' goes on and on. Absolute classics I tell you It's a little hard to trace, but I'd say around 2013-14, the App Store reached peak game saturation. As other parts of the device competed more for our storage space (read: phone cameras stopped sucking) it became much harder to get people into the App Store to download games. Obviously this di

Reading 06: But Can it Run Crysis?

The transition from 2D graphics to 3D graphics was rough, ugly, and drawn out. Early 3D games that were praised for their cutting edge visuals seem painfully ugly by today's standards. The amount of polygons required to draw a realistic looking image was a daunting task for early consoles and it wasn't until the early 2000s with the PS2 and XBOX that 3D visuals would look like anything more than a mess of pointy blocks. Original Tomb Raider was something else Today's modern graphics are the result of years of cutthroat competition between ATI (later AMD) and Nvidia. If it wasn't for the technological arms race these companies underwent, we wouldn't have computer graphics as we know them. That's not to say that just gaming that has benefitted from the explosion in power of graphics processors. With CUDA and other similar technologies the GPU is poised for rapid growth in areas it wasn't originally intended for. One of the more obvious places to lo

Reading 04 Console Wars:

So last week was about the glorious PC master race. As it turns out, most people are dirty console peasants. But why? For a long time I gamed on PC by necessity because my parents were vary of violent video games corrupting me. Naturally they saw no problem with me buying a laptop with a discrete GPU and linking their credit card to my steam wallet. Not. A. Single. Problem. One of the bigger impacts this had on me was that I missed basically every "big" game of the 2000s when they came out. I didn't experience titles like the Mass Effect and the Bioshock trilogies until years after they were released. For every game I experienced years after the fact, there were 2 more console exclusives I would never get to play. When I finally got to college and had disposable income (and reddit to inform my opinions) I decided that in addition to my PC, I wanted to experience console exclusives. It began with my 3DS, which I used to finally play a proper Zelda game for the first