Thursday, October 13

gamework

so our lovely english department hosted a speaker today, Ken McAllister. He wrote a book called Gamework. the only mention of it i could find on the internet is on an italian bookseller's site. the link is above.

his presentation was really interesting. he talked about the growing influence and importance of computer games. he talked about their rhetoric and how we ought to study these things. even though they are games and totally impractical, they are rhetoric. they make up a huge part of our economy, a huge part of our culture. I think the implication was that computer games may someday be as widely studied as historical or classic literature.

he cited a lot of cool facts. my favourite one goes like this:

in Japan it is illegal to display four-fingered gestures because they're horribly offensive.
mickey mouse has four fingers.
Disney wanted to build a Tokyo Disneyworld.
to do this legally without deforming their most famous cartoon, Disney handed a lot of money over to the Japanese government.

Disney bribed Japan so they'd overlook mickey mouse and his four fingers.

crazy.

2 comments:

Chris said...

That's like Oddworld. In the first game, Abe had four fingers, but they changed it to three for all the other games because of Japan. I'd thought it was to do with an old Japanese myth or something.

Amelia Chesley said...

heh. yeah, he mentioned that too. and he showed us the background story thing of oddworld. it was quite strange.