"My Son is Killing Me" response

I listened to “My Son is Killing Me,” and I have to say that it was interesting to listen to. As a gamer who's been playing games since the mid 90s, my perspective on gaming as a whole is vastly different than that of Nicholson Baker, who has only started playing videogames recently. I find it a little hard to relate to his experience playing games like Call of Duty, since violence has never really been an issue for me in the past with that game. In a way it becomes more like drawing something from observation, in that it requires that you break down what you're looking at to an arrangement of lines, shapes, and how they relate to each other on the page. Likewise, playing a game like Call of Duty is simply a matter of speed, timing, and location, along with precision and mastering the tools and weapons necessary to advance. The violence itself doesn't generally reflect gamers' opinions on actual violence in any way. This has been doubted and defended countless times over gaming's lifespan, but in the end, violence in videogames is used to create challenge and to adequately suit the mood and setting the developer was going for.

And when they discussed writing in video games, I was mostly thinking of how different the job of video game writing must be from anything else. Videogames are an interactive media, which means the story unfolds in a different way, one which can't simply be described to the player like a book, or have every scene planned out to play out in a specific way like a movie, since the player is actively involved in the scene in many cases. Many games try to be movies in terms of their narrative, but miss the point because the games with the best writing involve direct player involvement in the storyline, as opposed to watching cutscenes, with the gameplay only being the action that follows. There's a lot to think about in video game writing, and this has definitely gotten me to think about it a bit more.