Fan mail: Asking for Help with Videogame Paper

I know I didn't actually mention this guy as a target expert/enthusiast for my paper, but I decided to email Chris Franklin for feedback on my paper. I'm using his video on how violence shows up in videogames as much for technical reasons as market drive as a big basis for my argument (and it was a huge inspiration for my paper, really), so I emailed him and asked him what he thought. Below is the text of the email I sent him. So far, no response.


Hey Chris,

My name's Paul Bills and I'm a fellow videogame writer studying English at Brigham Young University. I'm working on a long paper right now tracking how videogames' connection to technology has guided and shaped their aesthetics.

Basically, my claim is that games are so often fantasy and science fiction because those genres have the conventions to best channel awe, and videogames since Spacewar! have served the ancillary purpose to mediate people's awe at technology and give them a way to feel in control of something they really don't understand or know how to control. Graetz said that his team made Spacewar! to give people something to look at and play with when they came to the computer, and my argument is that games have kind of just kept doing that.

For a big chunk of my paper I'm drawing from your Violence in Games video and relate your argument about violence as the path of least resistance to my argument, saying if games are meant to channel our awe for advanced computing technology, science fiction and fantasy are the path of least resistance to find tropes and conventions of awe so that the narrative matches and enhances the effect of the technology. I then move on to say that as games increasingly detach themselves from showing off the technology, they'll also detach themselves more often from speculative narratives and focus on more realistic and mature themes, using games like Papers, Please, and Passage as examples.

The reason I'm writing you, then, is to ask if you think this is true. Do you think games still serve the purpose to mediate our awe at technology? Has that influenced the aesthetics and pushed developers toward science fiction and fantasy? Of course there are other factors at play here and there are plenty of games that aren't science fiction and fantasy, but do you think there's something to my argument? What could I do to clarify it or back it up more?

Thanks for your time. I'm a big fan of your work and would love your input for this paper.

Thanks,

Paul

PS If you have time and are interested in looking at what I have so far, the first 9.5 pages of the paper are available here.