Videogames vs. Sports

Although I agree with some parts of Dennis Hemphill's Cybersport saying sports and the internet video games have similarities, I cannot accept his overall conclusion that video games should actually be considered a sport. A sport is any recreational activity; a game, competition, etc. requiring bodily exertion. A person cannot use their body while playing a computer video game, mainly the only thing that is being used are the hands.
Sports is highly considered as a masculine activity. "English argues that the most popular and lucrative sports feature height, weight, strength, and speed, giving most men, statistically speaking, certain advantages over most women.Masculinity of this type can operate to define "real" sport as sport that involves the most face to face agression, power and body contact." Though Moody describes face to face as spoken words, facial experssions, inflections in the speaker's voice, and so on, that all contribute to the information conveyed in his Internet Use and its Relationship to Loneliness article. Also in this article he talks about people that use the internet a lot and says they either have emotional or social loneliness. Social loneliness is the feeling of boredom and marginality due to lack of meaningful friendships or a sense of belonging to a community. Emotional loneliness is a feeling of emptiness and restlessness sue to lack of intimate relationships.
"All sports appear to be games of skill rather than games of chance, and, further, the skill is physical." There is no physical movement between two human beings in video games on the computer. So how can it be considered a sport when the definition of sport says requiring bodily exertion? A lot of the arcade or "home-computer" games such as football, basketball, auto-racing programs are considered as games not sports. Sports and games all are connected with play and some of the language used in play theory, for example, by Huizinga and Schmitz "associates play with unreality, nonseriousness, or suspension of reality." "Linked to this view are sociological accounts that place play, game, and sport on a continuum, where the playful freedom of childhood gradually becomes restrained, structured, and codified as games and, when fully institutionalized, becomes sport."
New technology has tried several ways in modernizing computer games trying to get them more and more like sports. They've given the characters in these video games in-human like qualities jumping heights and distances impossible for an average human to land without any injuries. Reasons for this is because they are trying to promote a more "natural" way to play games getting them away from keyboards using more hand and feet movements. Also they have "augmented reality to superimpose graphics, audio and other sense enhancements over a real-world enviornment in real-time." They also use this in military aircraft using it for flight, navigational, or targeting data.
Video games should not be considered a sport. If video games should be considered a sport what is the point of all the athletes making a career out of it. Anyone can just play on the computer all day, but it takes skills to be able to play sports such as football, baseball, basketball, soccer, or even tennis not just luck. Now technology has made it to where you can look at your games in third person, which is impossible for a normal human. Computer programs have no physical involvement when sports are a face to face activity. "Sports is reserved for games that feature and value physical prowess."

Gunderson's Vocabulary

Secily Thomas
English 102
Billy Middleton
March 1, 2010
I believe Gunderson’s vocabulary was to large to easily read through and comprehend because he was writing the article for a more mature audience. Knowing about Danger Mouse’s Grey Album and “mash-ups”, one would be writing to teenagers. He contradicts that idea by writing the article for such readers as professors or the corporate business world appealing to the older generations. He wrote to this type of audience trying to capture heir attention so they would actually take him serious and read the review of The Grey Album listening to the points he was trying to get across.

During his article he gives several discussions on topics such as mash-ups, file sharing, bedroom producers, and distribution. He used words such as “sacrilegious”, which only means sacred, in a sentence saying “Danger Mouse’s album represents the illegal plundering of some of the most valuable property in the history of pop music, the sacrilegious re-mixing of said recordings with a capella tracks of an African American rapper, and the electronic distribution of the entire album to hundreds of thousands of listeners vexingly oblivious to current copyright law”. Even though he used this grand vocabulary this sentence is only saying the recording industry thinks Danger Mouse is stealing from someone else’s property and he’s distributing this sacred music to thousands of listeners that has no concern with copyright laws. For another example of his confusing vocabulary is “the audio cut-and-paste, pastiche technique of The Grey Album might seem an unlikely candidate for such a modernist notion as “aesthetic autonomy”, but in a culture saturated by sham originality the only viable gesture towards autonomy would have to be the representation of cultural contradiction itself ”. In transition from the other sentence I find this one very confusing and don not understand much that it is trying to say but aesthetic means existing or functioning independently.

Danger Mouse made mash-ups with artists such as Jay-Z and the Beatles or Destiny’s Child and Nirvana and said the sense of humor immanent to a good mash up, meaning operating within, relates with Freud’s theory of humor that relies on sudden lifting of the repression on psychic energy. Gunderson continues to talk about mashing Jay-Z with the Beatles saying he “highlights the fact that African American hip hop is in many ways a direct descendant of early twentieth century African American blues, which in turn owes something to Christian spirituals sung on plantation”. I feel as though he wrote that sentence to explain how music correlates with each other and how they are all related in some way appealing to corporate America’s readers. In this next example he gives his readers both a negative and positive view on mash-ups. “One could look askance at mash-ups, viewing them as puerile, disrespectful mucking about with other people’s property, but one could also celebrate that very puerility insofar as it is anti-oedipal—insofar as it short-circuits the culture industry’s normally enforced boundaries between disparate genres of music.”
Danger Mouse tries to down play his mash-up between Jay-Z and the Beatles just as Duchamp does with the Mona Lisa. He “scandalized bourgeosis fetishists of Renaissance art” by painting a mustache on the face of Mona Lisa and implying that the original model had a “hot ass.” Danger Mouse uses the musical institution that the Beatles have become and changes their sound into a new critical context. They say if art is to change, which both artists seem to be trying to say, “repressive pieties are broken down and humor injected into the mix.”

Gunderson’s review of Danger Mouse, The Grey Album, Bootleg Recording was written to higher educated adults than to his actual listeners. He wrote the article trying to persuade them that file sharing is ok, amongst other ideas, by using this type of vocabulary to appeal to their educational knowledge.

Reading Log: Response to Grey Album

I thought reading this article was difficult because I did not understand a few words and was struggling reading through it, but I did find it interesting. I think Brian Burton’s Grey Album is good and my opinion on the situation is he does not make any profits, and if so very little, from it so why do people seem to be so opinionated on it. It is the same as if he were a disc jockey, they play other artists music so what’s the difference? For example he used Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles 1969 work known as The White Album and made a “mash up” of the two. The Grey Album is an act of resistance, by mashing up Jay-Z and The Beatles he highlights that fact that African American hip hop is directly connected to the sixties era British rock and it connected to the early twentieth century African American blues which owes something to Christian spirituals sung on plantations. “The album shows despite the continued corporatization of music, the DIY ethos of 1970s punk remains alive and well, manifesting in sampling and low-budget, “bedroom studio” production values” (page 1). Though to a recording studio it represents the illegal plundering of valuable work in the history of pop music, it is the remixing of recordings with a capella tracks of black rappers and the electronic distribution of an entire album thousands of listeners that appear to be oblivious to the current copyright law. Most artists on the other hand treated The Grey Album as capturing a live performance than as a musical instrument itself. The first copyright was to encourage social advances by giving creators a financial stake in their work and by insisting that intellectual property becomes public property over a certain extinct of time. Control over the music is no longer contingent upon the exchange of cash, in digital communism a song’s exchange value evaporates as soon as that song hits the network.

Secily Thomas 2-10-10 Billy Middleton