Here's a post of week 7's lecture notes on video game studies...Kids go crazy for video games!!!

• Games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the actions and the reactions of whole populations in a single dynamic image. -Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• We should be studying: the game itself, on it's own as a self-contained system of rules; the player of the game who affects the flow of gameplay and narrative according to those rules, or some combination of the two which becomes difficult to balance.

That's all the lecture notes I took before I left early to print off an assignment before my next class - at least I'm honest! Video games aren't really my thing, but it is interesting to see how many people are into it and how much of their time they spend on such trivial games!