A favorite first person shooter?

Shooter games have always annoyed me. No matter what the subject matter, they all seem like veiled references to gunplay. Disclosure: I'm a (neurotic/pacifist/treehugger) mom of three and we don't have "water guns"... we have "water squirters."

Last year I traveled to Boston to see the Institute of Contemporary Art's exhibit Design Life Now. This is the design world's Mecca... showing the best of the best from the past three years.

Among the installations I spotted what was clearly a virtual reality game. "Ug" said my inner voice. "VR is so 90s." Boy was I wrong. Snow World is a game made to help burn victims deal with the pain associated with their injuries. Men who have been injured in Iraq (due to real point and shooting) don the game's glasses, lob snowballs at snowmen and feel relief.

That's a FPS even I can support.

You cannot live on games alone...

To me, the perfect Sunday morning is spent at Barney Greengrass, on Amsterdam and 86th. An "everything" bagel is on my plate: one half lox, the other sable. Cream cheese, red onion, capers, and cucumbers accompany the fish, making an impossible-to-resist combination of flavors, textures and colors. This meal wouldn't be complete without a side of the Sunday New York Times. My husband reaches for Frank Rich, and my cousin and I share the Style and Entertainment sections.

I have now lived in West Virginia for 15 years, and visions of what they wear on 5th Avenue or in Milan become increasingly irrelevant to my life. Yet the need to touch base with some of the best writers and thinkers in the country persists. While living in a small town like Shepherdstown has wonderful advantages, I recognize that I'm certainly not living on the cutting edge of anything. Happily, I can rely on the Times to provide me with information to at least stop me from becoming dull.

Bits (Business, Innovation, Technology and Society) is a blog on nytimes.com that keeps me aware of what is going on in the tech arena. While it doesn't pertain specifically to games, it highlights things that influence the development of games from both a creative and platform standpoint. I find the smallest mention can sometimes start a hailstorm of new ideas for me.

If I want a gaming-specific perspective, I can always turn to Wired's GameLife. It keeps its finger on the pulse of new games and platform improvements. It does it so well that I can even forgive its 90s remnant title using the TwoWordsSmashedIntoOne trope. (Sorry, even great writers and thinkers sometimes succumb to marketing trends.)

If GameLife occasionally seems a bit too pragmatic, I can find solace in reading Jesper Juul's blog, The Ludologist. It covers deeper and more sophisticated theories of gaming as well as " other important things." It makes me feel like I'm engaging with an intellectual. I like reading about things like semiotics, or The Collapse and Reconstitution of the Cinematic Narrative. (Clearly this guy also reads The Economist. And isn't afraid to reference it visually with his own banner.) For me, Juul helps bridge the gap between sticky fingered teenage boys clutching controllers and crusty old academics clinging to their spectacles. And it is somewhere in that gap that I live.

photo used courtesy of a Creative Commons license.