Style and Realism in combat

Of the two proposals I mentioned in class, I think I'm going to go with the one concerning the merits of style and realism in video games and the merits of both. Specifically, I'm talking about martial arts.

This topic interests me because the field of martial arts in real life is full of, for lack of a better word, bullshit in general. Many people still believe that studying Kung Fu or ninjitsu for long enough will allow them to perform acts of superhuman strength, or move absurdly fast, except many of these schools (at least in the U.S.) are more or less scams, where the real, hard sparring martial arts/sports like simple boxing and wrestling are effective.

What I want to look into is why there is merit to both realism and style. People love to see stylish moves for entertainment value, but realism has its place too (Look at the Fight Night series, or the success of the new franchise UFC Undisputed). I also want to see why there is a relative lack of more realistic martial arts depictions in video games (the two aforementioned games being the only real "fighting" sims).

Ethnography

When reading the game studies readings for the week, I kept in mind the idea that I wanted to do something involving arcades. It's almost like the assignment dropped into my lap as I read. Specifically, the book mentioned using ethnography to study a group of people who are patrons in an arcade.

Originally I wanted to do something using the audio from an arcade, but I realized that the ethnographic approach is far more relevant to my interests. I learned awhile ago that what set apart arcades from consoles, even with the advent of online gaming, is the fact that at their heart they are a social interaction space. Obviously they are mostly about the games, but the games are (or were) an implement for all sorts of people to get together, to have public relations, to enjoy a hobby with like-minded folks.

I feel an write-up of observations of people at various arcades would give me some kind of a cross-section that would be relevant to how arcade games, dying as they are, are a parallel to why online gaming is so popular now.

Bias

It seems to me that the articles we've read for this week have been utterly biased against them. One is about someone overcoming an addiction denouncing the evils of it, another is about real life people who are a little..off in the game of Eve Online, and the last is about the abuse a researcher suffered while playing City of Heroes (the scenario described in the last article doesn't make sense to me, as a former COH player).

I feel that the readings seem to be more apt to point out the extremes of the game. What about the hundreds of thousands of people that play that aren't prone to abuse, or insanity, or excess? As a former player of MMOs, I've never really had any of these problems. I played WoW for a couple hours a day for a few months in the summer, found it fun, but didn't really take it anywhere farther than that. A person can get addicted to any activity in excess, but we don't see articles about people with an absurd love of basketball, or car collecting.