Ian Bogost opens up his presentation here with a fantastic anecdote about his son playing Animal Crossing. The part that stuck with me was when he says his son asks for more money because he has too many items to fit in his small virtual house. It can be argued that Animal Crossing does promote materialistic ideas. I thought this was a great way to open his presentation because with that I realised that video games aren’t simply novels to be read, but can shape or reflect ourselves as players. Another example he uses is a game that was designed to help teach employees at an ice cream store how to properly serve customers and what effects their work has on the business.

Both games are examples of influence on the player, the former being unintentional and the latter intentional. It’s a curious prospect that games have shaped their players, but not one I’m personally unfamiliar with.

I have a taste for old school euro trance/rave/DnB stuff but I only lived in England – where I was born in 1993 – until I was 7 years old, hardly old enough to have experienced the rave culture that was flourishing close to my birth. I looked toward some of my earliest gaming memories, two of which were Rollcage – the PC release, and my first experience with PC gaming – and Wipeout – the original one naturally.

These games were my main and only exposure to that particular culture of music yet they are an innate part of my musical tastes now. Perhaps not as topical as mortgages or career prospects, but influential nonetheless.

I think this is an emerging mode of thinking at the moment, or emerged and growing at most, which is cool. There’s plenty of academic and critical insight into more traditional popular media, namely movies and music, so seeing discussion about the wider aspects of gaming is very exciting.