Media Analysis Video Games

Video Game Media Analysis Often video games are simply regarded as play things and because of this, are not brought under any scrutiny except for how they harm children. The video game as a medium though offers many new ways of interacting with a simulated world that the likes of movies or books could never dream of achieving. Marshall McLuhan describes games in general as, “situations contrived to permit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate live” (245). Therefore when we interact with a video game we are interacting in a way that reflects what goes on in our daily lives. Though McLuhan did not write about video games in Understanding Media he did write about games
Spacewar was produced on a PDP-1 computer that was larger than a refrigerator and had the amount of processing power as that of a 1990’s era pocket organizer. The game was a series of white lines and dots and is as cool as a medium could possibly get (Cool meaning that the medium does not overload our senses and requires participation from the user). Russle distributed his Spacewar program to other institutes such as Stanford and one of the people who got a hold of a copy was Nolan Buschnell (Rockwell). Buschnell is the creator of the first successful video game, Pong, as well as founding Atari. Once again the game is as cool as cool can be: a series of three lines, a dot, and the
Due to the technological advances video games can no longer be considered a cool medium. When playing a video game there is no longer the 8-bit graphics and a simple monophonic melody. When playing a video game today you are bombarded with visual stimulus that is worthy of art and a score that in some cases goes on to be played by renowned orchestras. All of your senses are overloaded and everything is asking you to react to something which makes this medium interesting. If Marshall McLuhan’s ideas of hot and cold mediums are taken into account video games today do not fit perfectly into these two groups but are instead a hot medium with cool tendencies. Nothing in a game can occur without the player making it