kids and videogames
This last week in Buffalo, we've been staying with Christian's sister Carla and her husband Kevin in their attic. It means we've had a lot of time to play with Christian's two nephews (and hear the 6-month old cry his head off once or twice, like in the painful car ride home last night). Babies and little kids are great when they're good, but I'm still on the fence whether the crying and tantrums would drive me crazy if I had to deal with it more regularly.
Kevin's private space is in the attic, where he has his desk and academic books (he's a sociologist) and also his Playstation. On down time, he's come up to play a certain game called Call of Duty and I've watched him play. It's one of the few first-person games that doesn't give me motion sickness, which gives more evidence to my hunch that I only get sick with games which use a vomit-colored palette, instead of more bright and vivid colors. Not that these are especially bright, but they're not dingy, which seems to be the default with every game since Hexen and Doom. Watching Kevin play multiplayer looked pretty fun and I hadn't played one of these games since Unreal Tournament in college (the last game I've seen with a brighter palette), so I decided to give it a try on multiplayer. Ohmygosh there's so many buttons to control! We had forgotten to turn off the sounds from other players and heard one guy say "I think one of my teammates is a retard". This was, of course, after I had tilted my head down and run into a wall and then dropped a grenade at my feet.
So, the next time I got the controller, I asked Kevin to let me play some missions to get into practice with the controls. He had never played any of them, so we were all surprised with the third mission, where you go undercover with a Russian terrorist and massacre all the civilians in an airport. It's absolutely awful. That completely crosses the line, in fact, it's so far over the line you can't see it any more. Awful.
Kevin's private space is in the attic, where he has his desk and academic books (he's a sociologist) and also his Playstation. On down time, he's come up to play a certain game called Call of Duty and I've watched him play. It's one of the few first-person games that doesn't give me motion sickness, which gives more evidence to my hunch that I only get sick with games which use a vomit-colored palette, instead of more bright and vivid colors. Not that these are especially bright, but they're not dingy, which seems to be the default with every game since Hexen and Doom. Watching Kevin play multiplayer looked pretty fun and I hadn't played one of these games since Unreal Tournament in college (the last game I've seen with a brighter palette), so I decided to give it a try on multiplayer. Ohmygosh there's so many buttons to control! We had forgotten to turn off the sounds from other players and heard one guy say "I think one of my teammates is a retard". This was, of course, after I had tilted my head down and run into a wall and then dropped a grenade at my feet.
So, the next time I got the controller, I asked Kevin to let me play some missions to get into practice with the controls. He had never played any of them, so we were all surprised with the third mission, where you go undercover with a Russian terrorist and massacre all the civilians in an airport. It's absolutely awful. That completely crosses the line, in fact, it's so far over the line you can't see it any more. Awful.