Potato is yum

This year in The Game Awards had higher viewership than the super bowl. This is actually kind of crazy when you actually thinking about games as a medium. I find that there is a significant number of people that play games instead of reading.

So what makes Gaming so good? Reading is a great medium because it allows someone to very easily show the motives of characters without having to use secondary devices such as framing and body language. Because of this, there are many kinds of stories such as schemes and such that simply work better in a book form.

Movie and video is a great medium because it enables the creators to portray a lot of visual information very fast to the consumer which makes for great action scenes where the throughput of information is of highest importance.

Podcasts and audiobooks are a great medium because they allow for a creator to entirely focus on one channel of information and often has all the benefits of reading along with additional advantages for sound effects.

Gaming? It has the unique ability to put the consumer into the world. This is especially apparent in the design philosophy around halflife where something is always happening when you move forward in the game to give the player the feeling like the world is real. This shift in story telling is really interesting when you take the current market into consideration. From what I’ve been getting recommended, I’m seeing much more stories that are written in such a way that the reader can insert themselves into the main character or one of the characters. The reader self-insert has become an increasingly successful genre and this is especially apparent with the rise of gaming.

The whole point of gaming is to make the player feel like they control a piece of the world because they literally do control a piece of the world. As such, it should be possible to imitate this through other mediums such as through movies and writing. This is actually somewhat done through foreshadowing where the author hints at something happening and the reader predicts how the world will unfold. I think some more evolution can be done to this but I can’t figure it out myself.

Thanks for reading. I was a little short on time and didn’t hit on everything I wanted. Here’s my plan for next week though:

• SFM Sucks
• Media Review
• Warframe Update Opinons
• Battle Bit Opinions