E-SPEAIT Group Paper Review

I'll be reviewing Gaming industry in CIS and other world by Anton Kolisnetšenko, Kirill Kurkin, Nikita Kovaljov, Mark Shafran in this post.

The paper was well constructed and substantially informative with its descriptions of the variety periods of time gaming and the culture of e-sports had developed. The paper beginning with an immediate dive into the honest and realistic circumstances CIS people faced when attempting to play games in the earlier decades. The development of the times and spread of video games proving opportunity to more people than just the hardcore enthusiasts provide a good example to ponder how our circumstance and what we are capable of indulging in are different from the past. Throughout the paper I enjoyed reading through the timestamped years and looking at what occurred and thinking back to what I had done at that time period providing a good way to contrast and visualize the different experiences I had compared to what was going on the pro or local gaming scene. I also think the mentioning of the exact games played was quite informative, yet I'd also like to mention that it would been appreciated if more mention was given to the other types of games that also existed in a competitive manner. The paper itself mainly referenced the popular at the time and generally well-known games that were being played competitively, but there wasn't that much reference to fighting games, racing games, and even Tetris held a small niche yet existing competitive community which has grown in modern time. Another aspect of the earlier part of the paper that was pretty nice to have was the references and names of the teams that participated in the tournaments held, and how the competitive scene of players developed in the CIS. I found myself exploring the different meanings of the slang and acronyms mentioned and found it quite interesting on how a small subdivisions of language was created by the gaming community as well just like other communities. The exploration of the origin and evolution of language in this section was addressed and was interesting finding the nicknames for tanks in a certain game being a non-alcoholic bear like beverage and soup. The gaming culture section was interesting in the way that it delved into the way the industry developed and facilitated the use of games other than just the competitive e-sport variety. I found myself quite liking found the mentioning of Machinima as in my younger years I had also attempted to make a few with the Counter Strike engine and the video editing tools I had access to at the time.

I enjoyed the papers’ structure and found it informative, and a fun read overall. It's structure of having the main first chunk of content be composed of the games, players, tournaments, and circumstances of the time referenced was a good way to immediately delve into the meat of title. The second main part of the paper being composed of the language, slang, and terminology was an interesting choice and I might be compelled to argue that it shouldn't have taken a large main slot as it did in the paper, but rather be included in the third section as a subtopic and would have a preferred a different exploration of the gaming industry. The third and final part titled Gaming Culture included and covered a variety of fascinating subtopics and was well structured and thought out in the fact that it covered topics with just about the same depth and the topics themselves were one's that while one could have devoted a whole large section to delve deeper, were considered to be ones that could be addressed in meaningful manner is a shorter form.

The paper had very extensive and supportive referencing throughout. The references are quite numerous and back the claims and facts mentioned by the paper quite well. I myself often found myself checking the refereeing to the winning positions of the players and teams as well as the development of games. The language and grammar of the paper was nicely done. The sentences and vocabulary flowed quite well from line to line, and I found no difficulty in understanding what was being mentioned. It wasn't a purely academic style of writing and incorporated a few informal ways of structuring sentences. The vocabulary utilized did not incorporate slang in its main form of writing and was sufficiently varied. I did not notice any substantial distinction in the texts to be to determine if a specific author was responsible for a section as the paper was quite uniform in presentation throughout.

In conclusion, in my personal opinion, I believe the paper was quite well done and performed its task of introducing and exploring the development of the gaming culture and industry in CIS counties very well.