ENGL 680M: New Media

i play on the weekends and in little 30-minute breaks from doing other work-type things.

if anything, i play more than i ever have before, honestly.

the joy of being a master's student, i guess.

/shrug

"i don't want gaming to start feeling like work"

ok. not to be pissy, but gaming is work for me. it something i do (have recently begun doing) because i have to. i don't enjoy sitting in heavilon in solitude playing games on the weekend. i don't really have difficulty seeing games as an academic endeavor. i /do/, however, have problems seeing them as a necessary endeavor. in light of all the other things i'm still learning how to do, gaming feels like the worst work of all because it's something everyone else seems to enjoy.

i realize, also, that i'm extremely limited by resources and knowledge. you have to know about games in order to enjoy them (or at least that's it for me). in class on friday, juliette talked about starting to love the wii--and jaci's post is about friends who are initiating her into the gaming world. if you don't have a discourse community to help you understand these things, and you're just in a computer lab trying to figure out what to do next...not that fun, really. at least for me.

and so i find it ironic that for others, gaming is something they enjoy and they don't want that time to be, as sam said, "work." for some of us, there isn't a point at which gaming was fun--and it's always already been work to be done for a class.

Sam, I have to say that this is one of the things that has really interested me this semester. When I was researching for my individual presentation, I thought a lot about binaries, and the ways they bleed into each other, forcing redefinitions of the original terms. This was precisely one of the examples I was considering as I made my notes for that talk. We, as academics, are quite familiar with the concept of work, so much so that, I think, we need very clear, very determined channels for releasing the work-related tension that builds up during the week. Games, of all sorts, provide a nice breather from the constant thinking about our work, our projects, our research, our grading, our prepping.

However, now the lines separating games from work blur, I think, because of two reasons. First, as you point out, the area of games and gaming is becoming one for scholarly research. No longer are the games just the respite from the work; they are becoming part of it. Second, the games we play have become so intertwined with our days/weeks that these breaks, at times, can seem forced: “I’ve been working for eight hours straight at [fill in task]. Now will make myself do [fill in game].” In my case, I play sudoku alongside my school/classwork. While it serves as a breather in between assignments, or when I need to think something through, it is also sinisterly distracting: “How good will it feel when I figure out that next move?”

But yet your post brings us back to an interesting dilemma of justifying that play. I think a lot of our reluctance stems from the work/play binary: “work first, play later.” Work has traditionally been the dominant element of this binary opposition; play has been positioned as inferior. I think that only when we recognize the very critical role that play has to assume in our daily schedules will we recognize its value, and perhaps (and I shudder as I say this) begin seeing it as work.