I was born in 1975 so, I think my experience of video games might be a little different than the rest of the class. We had Atari - played Missile Command, Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, Q-bert, Frogger... We got the Atari 400 with the little flat keyboard and I learned BASIC :) - I made some of my own games. Then my step-father started building PCs and we got online with Prodigy. We played (as a family) Space Quest and King's Quest. I didn't really get into any video games much after that. My husband plays Civilization occasionally on his laptop and he has PS2. Don't ask me what games he has because I don't know! He got me a Wii for Mother's Day this year and we play when company comes over mostly. People really like that thing and I guess I think it's better than sitting still. :) No, I really do enjoy it and I helped my husband with some things in Zelda (?) I think. I think I would really like a lot of the games that are available but, they seem so time consuming and I guess I'm afraid of getting sucked in to something less than valuable to my personal growth and well-being of my family. In a nutshell, I'm too old for that! I do think it's a relevant industry and an interesting topic of discussion. The whole notion of how it relates to and reflects our culture is well worth my time. I'm starting the class with a notion that the driving force in technological innovations is the economy. In other words, what gets developed is not necessarily what is for the betterment of humanity (or most needed) but, what is most profitable. Will we spend a given resource to develop hurricane proof houses for the poorly insured working class in New Orleans or will it more likely be spent to develop a more highly produced video game for the upper middle class teenager? I don't mean this to sound cynical, it's really just an observation and thought process. That being said, I think a relevant web site for this class might be Economist.com. Here is an example of a relevant article I found on their site:
Online gaming's Netscape moment?
