« PREVIOUS ENTRY
The IRC Bible
NEXT ENTRY »
The neuroscience of police shootings
Now that video games are becoming part of mainstream culture, you frequently see TV shows and movies where the characters are playing games and talking. It’s a brilliant device, because so many dramatically complex things going on: The characters are interacting with the game, interacting with each other, and interacting with each other about the game. (When my friend Greg and I play Smuggler’s Run, we’ll frequently scream at each other stuff like “Hey! Those are my drugs! GIVE ME BACK MY DRUGS.”) It’s no wonder Hollywood has discovered this lovely new staging ground for human emotion.
But there’s one problem: The buttons.
If you look closely at how the characters are manipulating the joysticks, it makes no sense at all. They’re usually twitching and spasming away, randomly twiddling the joysticks in a manner that less resembles actual game playing than a crystal-meth trip gone horribly, horribly awry. Over at Game Girl Advance, Kyle Herbert became so incensed at this trend that he wrote a hilarious attack on the surrealism of Hollywood gaming:
Even shows starring actors young enough to play video games on a regular basis fail miserably at depicting game playing correctly. Nearly once an episode on Fox’s The OCtwo of the main characters, Seth and Ryan (played by Adam Brody, 23, and Benjamin McKenzie, 25, respectively) can be seen playing what appears to be a PS2. These two actors undoubtedly grew up gaming, and have been playing games long enough to know the proper way of maneuvering a character in a game environment. Even from these two though we see the same tragic button mashing that would only result in a quick loss of lives and continues.
In gamer circles, “button mashing” is actually a cultural term: It stands for the sort of random hammering of the joystick that you see when a newbie picks up a game for the first time and doesn’t know what he or she is doing. But there is, of course, a good reason why Hollywood mashes so heavily. TV always draws life in broad strokes, amplifying activities to make them seem more exciting. Remember all those 50s shows where someone’s driving a car purportedly down a straight highway, while nonetheless psychotically swerving the wheel back and forth?
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
ECHO
Erik Weissengruber
Vespaboy
Terri Senft
Tom Igoe
El Rey Del Art
Morgan Noel
Maura Johnston
Cori Eckert
Heather Gold
Andrew Hearst
Chris Allbritton
Bret Dawson
Michele Tepper
Sharyn November
Gail Jaitin
Barnaby Marshall
Frankly, I'd Rather Not
The Shifted Librarian
Ryan Bigge
Nick Denton
Howard Sherman's Nuggets
Serial Deviant
Ellen McDermott
Jeff Liu
Marc Kelsey
Chris Shieh
Iron Monkey
Diversions
Rob Toole
Donut Rock City
Ross Judson
Idle Words
J-Walk Blog
The Antic Muse
Tribblescape
Little Things
Jeff Heer
Abstract Dynamics
Snark Market
Plastic Bag
Sensory Impact
Incoming Signals
MemeFirst
MemoryCard
Majikthise
Ludonauts
Boing Boing
Slashdot
Atrios
Smart Mobs
Plastic
Ludology.org
The Feature
Gizmodo
game girl
Mindjack
Techdirt Wireless News
Corante Gaming blog
Corante Social Software blog
ECHO
SciTech Daily
Arts and Letters Daily
Textually.org
BlogPulse
Robots.net
Alan Reiter's Wireless Data Weblog
Brad DeLong
Viral Marketing Blog
Gameblogs
Slashdot Games