The Groundhog Day effect in video games

Have your ever had that feeling of being repeating the same actions over and over again in a video game? I'm not speaking about the same set of mechanics within a game (which, in fact, can also make you feel that way), but repeating the very same actions and killing/collecting/running through the same enemies/items/corridors. Dark Souls, for instance, could be seen as the paradigm of this particular Groundhog Day effect, but almost in every...

Videogames and Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (26-30)

This is the sixth round of Pic of the day RECAP (26-30). To understand what all of this is about, check out the original entry. 26 - Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse:  Can we ever truly know another human being?  Not that I'm a functionalist, but what is the social function of rhetorical questions? What is the reason we ask questions that we don't expect to be answered? Is it self-awareness of our conditions of...

An unintended breaching experiment: violating the terms of Polygon's community

Have you ever heard or read about the ethnomethodologists' breaching experiments? One of the fathers of ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel, defines a breaching experiment as follows: ...a procedure would need to modify the objective structure of the familiar, known-in-common environment by rendering the background expectancies inoperative. Specifically, this modification would consist of subjecting a person to a breach of the background expectancies...

Flash Sociological Reviews: Gone Home (part 3: video gamers)

This is the third part of my first Flash Sociological Review, focused on what video gamers said about Gone Home. I invite you to read the first (the media) and second (my own experience) parts of the review. All the quotes cited in this post come from comments written in articles on Gone Home. SPOILER alert, be careful. Is Gone Home a Video Game? If Gone Home's status as a game was a major theme for writers on online magazines,...