Monday, November 29, 2004

Video and computer game canon!

Well, it seems their is a race nowadays towards creating the ultimate and final canon (not as in frenzy bombardement, but in the sense of fine art) of video and computer games. Lately, Kjetil Sandvik has come up with a suggestion of a canon of twenty games.

  • Spacewar (first real computer game)
  • Pong (first commercial game)
  • Colossal Cave Adventure (first text adventure)
  • Asteroids (first commercial and succesful vectorbased game)
  • MUD1 (First multi-user dungeon/dimension)
  • Mario Bros (first character-based platform game)
  • Madden NFL (first good licensed sport game)
  • Pole Position (first good driving game)
  • Pac Man (the ultimate arcade game)
  • The Ultima-series (long, commercial and artistic succesful RPG-series)
  • Microsoft Flight Simulator (first, pure and best simulator)
  • Civilization (Ground-breaking God perspective/building game, marvelous gameplay)
  • Tetris (A class of its own)
  • Myst (first visually narrative CD-ROM)
  • Doom (historically epoch-making technology/content)
  • Tekken (most succesful martial arts games)
  • Final Fantasy-series (Ground-braking adventure/RPG)
  • The Sims (Agian a class of its own)
  • GRAnd Theft Auto (first and biggest in 3D freedom-of-movement, ironically, theme-based, show-off sound track)

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

It seems it has been a while since I last had something to say around here. In the mean time I have been busy teaching, writing essays/articles, reviewing papers and being in general a father. Still, working on a book about geek culture.

Lately, though I had some time playing NationStates. I've got three states: The Rogue Nation of Obotrites, The Holy Empire of Rugia, and The Free Land of Anarcitwo. They are all located in Westernesse.