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Do you ever skip dinner to finish that "impossible" level?

• Have you ever tossed your keyboard out the window after losing a
• game, or swung your controller around because you lost that power up?

Would you like to learn a little bit about the underground world of emulation.
 
If you answered yes to any of the above, this book was meant for you. With an insider's look at how people interact with the games and with each other, Radford Castro's tales of gaming are almost as fun as playing the games themselves.

About the Author

Radford Castro is a writer from Vallejo, California. For more than two decades, he has followed the gaming industry and participated in video game tournaments. He has also written short stories about video games for several popular gaming sites and message boards.

Excerpt 1: Violence in Video Games
 
Violence can be hard to define in certain genres and games, but how the violence is depicted is the biggest part of the game that separates the risqué from the rest. Compare Grand Theft Auto (PS2) with Postal (PC) and you can see a clear contrast between the game developer’s intentions. Grand Theft Auto introduces adult content and the freedom to inflict damage and mayhem on law enforcement however, Postal goes about giving the same type of freedom for the player:  The ability to kill non-threatening characters. The differences show up in the form of consequences. Grand Theft Auto brings out the swat team and even the military to stop the player from creating further damage to the city and its citizens. Postal barely puts up a fight on the player whenever the player goes…what else...postal. Both games exuberate an indecent amount of violence but Grand Theft Auto takes the cake in accessibility. Grand Theft Auto is also a well-formulated game. For most gamers, the violence, adult content, and unadulterated freedom initially bring the average gamer in to the controller in the first place. This is also known as providing “shock value” to the buyer. That shock value can only be temporary much in the same way the appearance of food is to a person. Think of it this way. If the hamburger looks really good, you’ll most likely take a bite out of it. Whether you take another bite out of the hamburger will be determined how well it tastes from its initial bite. The same holds true for games. The problem with this is that some people are vegetarians and despise the hamburger as something unhealthy and avoidable. In some cases, some will argue that it’s poisonous. Specifically, some will argue that violent anything provokes violent tendencies and video games using violence takes it to the next level of reinforcing this behavior among vulnerable kids. The interactive nature of video gaming makes this a very interesting topic since players by choice get to burn, maim, and kill living things in their environment by choice. Whether the player wants to use the flamethrower on the innocent bystander next to the hotel or next to a hooker (or burn them both) is up to them. In the infamous words of Neo, the problem is choice. I’ve actually went to a kid’s 12th birthday party and seen parents let several of their kids play some intense adult-themed games in front of the TV. The kids would surround the boy who held the gamepad for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and yell out the next action the boy would perform:

Kid #1: “Hit the hooker!”
Kid with gamepad (KWG): “Ok!”
Kid controls antagonist to smack hooker with a right cross
All kids:  (laughing)
KWG: “Hey she’s attacking back.”
Kid #2: “Hit her back”
KWG: “I am but she won’t die”
Kid #3: “Use your rifle and shoot her on the head”
Parent of Kid #3: “Hey don’t say that, that’s not good.”
Kid #3: “You know I’m kidding mom.”
Parent of Kid #3: “I know you’re kidding but I don’t want you learning that ok?”
Kid #3: “Ok. Shoot her dude!”
Parent of Kid #3: “Patrick!”
KWG: “Oh yeah.”
KWG pulls out sniper rifle and shoots the hooker point blank range in the head
All kids: (laughing)
Most parents: (giggling)
Parent #2: “Holy Shit!”
Parent #9: “Wow, I can’t believe that there are sickos out there that produce stuff like this.”
KWG: “Oh no. The police are coming.”
Kid #4: “It’s ok dude, I have the code to give you all the weapons.”
KWG: “What?  How?”
Kid #4: “Give me the controller and I’ll give you all the weapons.”
KWG gives controller to Kid #4 and sets up the code for all weapons
KWG: “That’s cool!”
Kid #4: “Now shoot the police quick!”

All of the kids were in awe as they saw the kid with the gamepad mow down the police with an infinite array of weapons. The parents (including myself) were laughing at first but began to notice the amount of attention to detail the game had. A lot of mixed emotions were noticed in the room as the kids were laughing in joy over some of things that were being performed in the game. Some of the parents found it disturbing. Others found it amusing. At first glance, I thought that the kids were just playing the game like any other game - trying to figure out what to do. Usually, when I see kids playing games, they try to figure out how to get from point A to point B. In Grand Theft Auto that was the normal style of play that’s expected of all games, especially when kids play them. What was disturbing in this particular session was that the kids knew what other stuff they could do prior to playing the game. If there’s one thing that violence in games does to children, it is how much it intrigues them. The fact is violence surprises parents that, in turn, leave the kids curious over their parent’s shock. I asked a few parents about Grand Theft Auto and the material it presents to children. They have actually heard some of the things you could do in the game from the older kids but haven’t really thought of the game as any kind of threat to their children – that is, until they have actually seen their kid play it.  Sometimes kids learn from other older kids or their older brethren. If the older kids give it the cool stamp of approval and the younger kids find out about it, the tip or code, spreads like wildfire around any school. That was the case of the all weapons code that was presented from one of the kids that surprised me. The fact that the kid memorized the code was even more interesting. My guess was that the kid wanted to show off to their friends that he knew something they didn’t. But again, let’s look at this from a different perspective. There’s still a theory that constant playing increases aggressive behavior in children but it is very debatable. When the game is being played with a group of children, most of them recognize the fantasy aspect of the game and usually end up in a contest of over who can get the most attention from their friends. It’s when the kid is on their own where we should start observing their traits unblemished by what the kids want. It has been speculated that video games, in general, can possibly turn social kids into solitaire ones but does so more by its violent content:
Some social psychologists argue that playing violent video games causes aggressive behavior, among other things (desensitization to violence, disinhibition of violence, belief in a ‘scary world,’ acquisition of cognitive schemas supportive of aggression). Three types of evidence are said to converge in support of this conclusion: correlational studies, field studies (which are typically correlational in nature), and laboratory experiments.
Correlational studies can tell us nothing about whether violent video games cause aggression. Even if we accept that there is a correlation between amount of time spent playing (violent) video games and aggressive behavior, there is no reason to think that games are the cause of aggression (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Colwell & Payne, 2000; Roe & Muijs, 1998). Furthermore, some correlational studies find no significant relationship with aggression (e.g., Sacher, 1993; van Schie & Wiegman, 1997).
Jeffrey Goldstein, Ph.D.
University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Some lab experiments prove that violence in interactive material increases aggression significantly but in laboratory experiments, no one plays. Being required to play a violent video game on demand is no one’s idea of an entertainment experience. It is like being forced to listen to someone else’s favorite music; it sounds like noise. Almost no studies of violent video games have considered how and why people play them, or why people play at all. Experimental research does not recognize the fact that video game players freely engage in play, and are always free to stop. They enter an imaginary world with a playful frame of mind, something entirely missing from laboratory studies of violent video games. One of the pleasures of play is this very suspension of reality. Laboratory experiments cannot tell us what the effects of playing video games are, because there is no sense in which participants in these studies "play.” Interestingly, what is called "video game violence" is actually a simulated version of aggression, different from the real thing in countless ways (Goldstein, 1999). Video games cannot "reinforce" aggressive behavior since players do not engage in any aggressive behavior in the first place. Besides, what is it that is "positively reinforced" in video games, which inevitably result in the defeat of the player’s character?
The same features that inhibit an opera audience from rushing the stage to prevent murder are present in video games. There are physical cues to the unreality of a game’s "violence," including the willing suspension of disbelief, the knowledge that you have control over events and can pause the game at will or stop playing altogether. In video games, there are sound effects, scorekeeping, a joystick or keypad in your hand, and, much like the party explained before, often playmates commenting on your performance, which simply involves streaming pixels at imaginary creatures on a two-dimensional screen.
When there are few cues to their unreality, bloody images lose their appeal (McCauley 1998). In one study, boys who played video games with violent themes showed the same positive facial expressions, quality of peer interaction, and enjoyment as those who played "neutral" games (Holmes & Pellegrini, 1999). Similarly, violence, if it is to be entertaining, must fulfill certain requirements: it must have a moral story, in which good triumphs over evil, and it must carry cues to its unreality -- music, sound effects, a fantasy story-line, cartoon-like characters. People are highly selective in the violence they seek or tolerate (McCauley, 1998; Zillmann, 1998).