![]() As much as I try, I always come back to them at some point or another. Knowing that Anderson’s claims are true makes me feel embarrased to admit that I can’t get myself to cease playing them. Anderson’s claims about corporations using advertisements disguised as games and adding minimal rewards after certain tasks or achievements have been completed or accomplished are very much true. I get so lost in playing that an hour or even two hours pass and it’s like time flew by so fast that it only feels like ten or twenty minutes have gone by. I would know as I am one of many people who are addicted to some of those games (my favorite being Bejewled Blitz which I play on my cell phone). All the “stupid games” are either just as (or even more) addicting than he claims. I completely concur with Anderson’s claims and arguements. I owe many thanks to my professor for assigning us (my fellow students and I) to read chapter eight out of 3E The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Handbook as I would not have come across this extremely enlightening essay. One may say that I had a light bulb turn on in my mind. I was so enlightened by Anderson’s thought-provoking, mind-boggling essay that I chose to write my first essay on this. Upon reading his essay, I now have a new perspective regarding the gaming and advertising industry. I have never gotten so excited and so interested in any sort of assigned reading in my life before… then I read Sam Anderson’s essay.īefore reading Anderson’s essay, I would have never thought about the whole big picture of the gaming and advertisement industries and how they work together in creating games adding advertisemnets in-game or advertisements as games. Anderson is right on key when he made that claim. Those paragraphs were what really caught my attention the most. I’m surprised that I never caught one to that. I found the above excerpt so very interesting. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.” Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. One critic called it ‘sex in a box.’ Tetris was invented exactly where and when you would expect- in a Soviet computer lab in 1984- and its game reflects this origin. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. Risk, releasedhave1950s950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. ![]() Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s – it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. “Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Take, for instance, on page sixty-five in the final two paragraphs: Anderson also claims that games mimic, in a way, the society in which “stupid games” are invented and played in. He claims that they are intensely addicting which corporations feed via creating even more addicting games and adding microbial rewards for spending money in-game or other in-game accomplishments. In his essay (which is printed in 3E The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Handbook), Sam Anderson claims that games such as Angry Birds, Tetris, and Bejeweled, are “stupid games”. Hyperaddictive Stupid Games” by Sam Anderson Textual Analysis: “Just One More Game…: Angry Birds, Farmville, and Other
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