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In The Game But Rarely No.1

Opossums are often accused, but rarely responsible for getting into garbage cans or gardens. They are certainly game to stop by and clean up the mess left by other wayward critters, though! They are often accused of killing chickens, something that happens very rarely. Most people complain about opossums just being there, rather than for any problems they cause.

He seemed poised for a breakthrough sophomore pro season. But early in the final preseason game, Wells went down with a knee injury that turned out to be a lot more serious than the Cardinals would let on in the coming weeks.

He played in 13 games but rarely displayed the dynamic power that he has shown at his best, finishing with 116 carries, averaging 3.4 yards an attempt as the Arizona offense struggled in a 5-11 season.

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Adding to the card's rarity is the fact that each No. 1 Trainer card was customised with the name of the tournament winner printed onto the card, making each card one-of-a-kind. According to auction house Heritage Auctions, the personalised aspect of the cards also mean that they rarely appear at auction, making them an even rarer sight in the world of Pokémon cards.

To promote the release of Pokémon Snap on the Nintendo 64, two contests were run which saw players submitting their favourite snaps from the game, with hopes of their photos made into official Pokémon cards.

The Tropical Mega Battle saw 50 players from around the globe take part in a tournament for the trading card game in Honolulu, Hawaii. The only way to participate was to win a battle in your local region and earn an invite, making it an exclusive event for the best Pokémon trainers in the world - and the cards offered as prizes some of the rarest Pokémon cards in existence.

A mint-condition first-edition shadowless holographic PSA 10 Charizard sold at auction in October 2020 for a whopping $220,574 to retired rapper - and Pokémon fan - Logic, setting a new record for the already valuable card, according to card game outlet Cardhops.That record was broken in November 2020 after a copy of the Shadowless Charizard sold at auction for $350,100, before reportedly being broken once only a month later with the sale of a copy for $369,000 - auction house Goldin Auctions claimed the figure to be the highest amount of money paid for any Pokémon card to date.

Humphrey sneaks into the final spot here over New Orleans' Marshon Lattimore, who had a down year in 2021 and allowed seven touchdowns in coverage. Humphrey missed the final five games of 2021 with a torn pectoral muscle and the Ravens' defensive production took a big hit. Baltimore allowed nearly five more points per game in Weeks 14-18 without Humphrey than it did in Weeks 1-13 with him. He's one of the best slot cornerbacks in the league but also thrives on the outside, ranking second only to Atlanta's A.J. Terrell in completion percentage allowed on the outside last season, per PFF.

White tore his ACL in Week 12 last season and missed the Bills' postseason run. Prior to his injury, he had only one pick and six passes defensed in 11 games played. Though he doesn't always make the splashy plays, White has been a consistent defender in coverage throughout his career, as he has allowed the second-lowest passer rating in coverage (64.2) since 2019, per PFF (min. 100 targets). He is a sticky defender and QBs tend to stay away from him due to his physical play. Look for a bounce-back season from White, who's aiming for a Week 1 return from injury.

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A thrower-in shall not (1) carry the ball onto the court; (2) fail to release the ball within 5 seconds; (3) touch it on the court before it has touched another player; (4) leave the designated throw-in spot which is one step to his left or right; (5) throw the ball so that it enters the basket before touching anyone on the court; (6) step on the court over the boundary line before the ball is released; (7) throw the ball out-of-bounds without it being touched by a player in the game; (8) exit the playing surface to gain an advantage on a throw-in; (9) hand the ball to a player on the court.

As questions go, this is not a bad one: Do games tell stories? Answering this should tell us both how to study games and who should study them. The affirmative answer suggests that games are easily studied from within existing paradigms. The negative implies that we must start afresh.

The operation of framing something as something else works by taking some notions of the source domain (narratives) and applying them to the target domain (games). This is not neutral; it emphasises some traits and suppresses others. Unlike this, the act of comparing furthers the understanding of differences and similarities, and may bare hidden assumptions.

The article begins by examining some standard arguments for games being narrative. There are at least three common arguments: 1) We use narratives for everything. 2) Most games feature narrative introductions and back-stories. 3) Games share some traits with narratives.

The article then explores three important reasons for describing games as being non-narrative: 1) Games are not part of the narrative media ecology formed by movies, novels, and theatre. 2) Time in games works differently than in narratives. 3) The relation between the reader/viewer and the story world is different than the relation between the player and the game world.

The article works with fairly traditional definitions of stories and narratives, so as a final point I will consider whether various experimental narratives of the 20th century can in some reconcile games and narratives.

The first argument is a compelling one, as it promises a kind of holistic view of the world: Since we use narratives to make sense of our lives, to process information, and since we can tell stories about a game we have played, no genre or form can be outside the narrative.

A more interesting argument centres on the fact that most games have a story written on the package, in the manual, or in intro-sequences, placing the player's playing in the context of a larger story (back-story), and/or creating an ideal story that the player has to realise:

Most modern, single player non-arcade games such as Half-Life (Valve software 1998) actually let you complete the game: through countless saves and reloads it is possible to realise the ideal sequence that Half-life defines. Obviously, only a microscopic fraction of the play sessions actually follow the ideal path, but Half-Life does succeed in presenting a fixed sequence of events that the player can then afterwards retell.[2] This means that some games use narratives for some purposes.

The above Space Invaders example also means that games share some traits with narratives: Many games feature reversals such as movements from a lack to the lack being resolved. Jens F. Jensen has used this trait of Space Invaders to argue that computer games, while being deviant, are narratives (1988).

Additionally, many games have quest structures, and most computer games have protagonists (though this is less common in non-electronic games). As Janet Murray suggests in Hamlet on the Holodeck, such similarities would indicate that there is a promising future for digital storytelling and interactive narratives, that games and narratives are not very far apart.

It is also an oft-repeated but problematic point that game sessions are experienced linearly, just like narratives. (See Aarseth 1997 p.2.) I will return to this but briefly note that this idea ignores the player's experience of being an active participant - this experience is so strong that most people will involuntarily change bodily position when encountering interactivity, from the lean backward position of narratives to the lean forward position of games. And playing a game includes the awareness that the game session is just one out of many possible to be had from this game.

It is thus possible, in different ways, to view games as being in some way connected to narratives, but does this really answer the opening question? The above points would indicate that games and narratives do not live in different worlds, but can in some ways work together: A narrative may be used for telling the player what to do or as rewards for playing. Games may spawn narratives that a player can use to tell others of what went on in a game session. Games and narratives can on some points be said to have similar traits. This does mean that the strong position of claiming games and narratives to be completely unrelated (my own text, Juul 1999 is a good example) is untenable.

This can be used the other way, as a test of whether the computer game is a narrative medium: If the computer game is a narrative medium, stories from other media must be retellable in computer games, and computer games must be retellable in other media. On a superficial level, this seems straightforward since many commercial movies are repackaged as games, Star Wars is an obvious example. The other way around, games transferred into movies are less common, but examples include Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat, and Tomb Raider. Upon further examination, we will find the situation to be much more complex:

The arcade game Star Wars (Atari 1983) is based on the George Lucas movie of the same name (1977). In the movie Star Wars, an army of rebels fight a heroic battle against the evil galactic empire. The dramatic peak of the movie is when the rebel army and the protagonist Luke Skywalker must attack the evil empire's new weapon the death star. The Star Wars game is in three phases, in all of which the player controls a spaceship from the inside, presumably as Luke Skywalker. The first phase takes place in space, where we fight hostile spacecraft. The second phase is on the death star, fighting different objects on the death star surface. In the third phase we fly through a tunnel in the death star to attack an exhaust port. This makes the death star explode. First phase corresponds to an in-movie battle before Luke flies to the death star - except that the rebel fleet is absent. Second phase has no clear correlate in the movie. The third phase corresponds to a scene in the movie - again with the rebel fleet being absent. If you complete the mission, the death star explodes. So the game copies a small part of the movie. 2b1af7f3a8