CSE 40850: History of Computing

I think eSports and competitive gaming is ridiculous. I am not a competitor or an avid spectator of this "sport." I believe that it should not receive any level of recognition even remotely near that of an olympic sport or any major sport for that matter. The fact that these grown men and women are being paid millions to play a video game is ludicrous to me, especially considering the fact that most olympians that train their whole lives to make a countries team and then place top 3 can make close to nothing in comparison. For my social sensing project we are doing a project on twitch streaming which involves watching the current overwatch tournament. Yes, I understand that there is skill that goes into playing these games, but video games to me are not serious, they are a time waster and boredom killer. Though I am super against it, I can see eSports reaching levels of professional sports, but I still do not believe that it can be as massively popular as physical sports w

Sooooooo apparently I didn't save any pictures that I took at strikes and spares, but I did beat Professor Bui in a game of bowling so that should be proof enough that I was there. While at the arcade I played a mario cart simulator, which was actually quite fun! I believe that there is still some charm to arcades, especially ones that have a variety of games to play such as mega play because though you can have your friends surrounding you while you kill it at a game at home, there is sometimes a larger variety of games to play (depending on your at home collection) that you don't get to play often. In addition to the hype of having your friends surround you while you play an arcade game, there is also the challenge of beating other players previous scores, which you can obviously do with console and computer games, but the price is less (i believe) and there is lesser chance of cheating/unfairness with everyone being restricted to using what the arcade provides. 

Being that I am not someone that likes to spend hours at a time playing a game where I am interacting with NPCs or paying a monthly subscription to play a game with my friends, I view the growth of social/casual gaming as a positive phenomenon. I enjoy being able to have a game at the tips of my fingers, that doesn't require me to stay inside my house to play and can be fun even if I play it for just a couple 10minute intervals. With games like motocross back in high school, you could still be competitive with your friends and race them in real time, so the aspect of competition is still there, but with games that are not as "intense" as halo or COD. As far as the associated business models go, I have no problems with waiting for a few ads every once in a while, because, in reality, what i'm trying to do is kill time and they still accomplish that. But, the microtransactions can be a touchy topic as some games made it too easy for young children to make accidental

Since I lived a pretty active lifestyle as a kid, I really enjoyed the interactive games. One of my favorite games to play was DDR in the arcade at the movie theater and then we eventually got the plastic mat version to play in home because my parents enjoyed playing it too. It was a game that I could enjoy as a teen and my parents could find value in as 50+ year old adults. Because of this favor for active games, we got a wii as soon as it came out and I loved playing wii tennis and am still sad that I lost the original disk and could never find it. I like that I am forced to move my body, sometimes in ways that are repetitive but other time not, because I can't really completely disengage my mind when doing it so I don't get bored as easily. I lose interest in playing most games because twiddling my thumbs doesn't do anything for me. Yeah graphics on a 4k monitor are cool but so is the outdoors, so there has to be some added value other than fantasy. Virtual reality is a

Through the reading and discussions in class I have come to learn a lot more about the earlier age of video games. I never knew all too much because I didn't have my first console until I was in middle school and I was never into computer games because none of my friends played them, we all played sports and were outside more often than not. It because of that lack of early immersion into video game culture that I always thought the console wars were (yet I fanboy apple over PC) stupid because its just a way to play the same game, so why does it matter? Well going back to the early days of console games with SEGA and Nintendo you can see that the choice in co nsole wasn't about which one you wanted to play the same game, but you ended up choosing which game series you wanted to play. So the pull between SEGA and Nintendo would have been between Sonic and Mario as well as many other titles. Also since these systems were in the early stages of computer graphic and general h

My initial understanding of what made these games so great was purely because they were the first games that could be played with, at the time, incredible graphics and interface. I thought that these games were so great then for the same reason that the iPhone was so great when it came out 10 years ago and thats because it revolutionized the industry of phones just like the Atari and others revolutionized the gaming industry. So people purely being star struck by new tech is what I originally attributed the original and continuous love of these games and consoles to, but it turns out that there is more to it than that. On Tuesday we discussed and watched video of people explaining how video games back in the day had to rely more on story line and plot to keep people interested due to lack of graphics and processing power to make anything that looks crazy. The story telling of old games is what causes some of the nostalgia as those people complain that new games like first person sho