Gaming Cultures; are they really all that bad

Online cultures are ever growing with internet access becoming easier and cheaper to acquire, more people are becoming members of online cultures, from chat-rooms, Facebook, Myspace, and online games. I myself am a member of Steam, a program that allows you to have I.M. conversations with people from all over the world; it also has its own store and member profile pages.

I am also a subscriber to ‘World of Warcraft’, which is not just an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online Role Playing Game), but it is also its own gaming society, cities full of people buying and selling with other players, it even has an auction house for people to sell rage items for extortionate prices, well in certain situations anyway. I am a Member of guild known as ‘The Shadow Vanguard’ with currently around 250 members from all over Europe. There are many, in fact most of the people I know on ‘WoW’, I only know as a virtual character, and have never met in real life, yet we become good friends. I think being a part of these gaming cultures takes up a majority of my spare time.

Game cultures are often criticised because of the lack of social interaction, yeah you might get square eyes from sitting in front of the computer, but you are given the ability to interact with people from all over the world, discuss many different topics, not just games. You can also gain a lot of knowledge from this, for example a friend of mine, has been learning Dutch from someone that he has met via these gaming cultures.

Music, how much does it influence our gameplay?

Music plays a very important role within games, and that is basically to create atmosphere, just think about it, whenever you play games such as survival horrors, the one thing that creates the most tension, when you walk though the dining room door is the music, it help to create that sense of fear, it help you to believe that you are there walking through that door way, not knowing what it is that awaits you. Games that are very renown for this are Resident Evil, Silent Hill (a person favourite even though I was scared s**tless as kid.) But it’s not just the music it’s also the sound effects, the creaking of floor boards, the wind whistling thought the crack in the windows, these all add to the eeriness, and making you feel more a part of the game The themes from certain games (like films) becomes so well know that it becomes part of the identity of the game.

One remarkable men that I have found out about is ‘Chance Thomas’, he did the music for games such as King Kong, X-men, Lord of the Rings, Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire. Thomas was the first composer to score an amazing Oscar winning film and Registration more than 1 million downloads of his game music.

The amazing thing about his guy its it was by pure chance when he started a spark, in 1997, that by May 6^th 1999, the game score would be allowed to compete for a Grammy from the 42^nd Gammy Award Ceremony in 2000. Here is the link to the article that I read that contains this information. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3433/working_the_grammy_angle.php

Game Engines, The Backbone

Well as you can tell by the title, this week’s entry is about game engines. I personally have no knowledge about these, what so ever, therefore don’t expect anything amazing to follow.

A game engine is a software system designed for the creation and development of video games. The core fundamentality’s provided by a game engine usually include; a rendering engine for both 2D and 3D engines, and physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence (A.I) and several others.

The process of games development is frequently economized by, in large part, reusing the same game engine to create different games.

Another thing I am going to look at in this entry is meant by subtractive and additive. Well within all things these have a very similar meaning.

Subtractive, as you all know for you basic maths skills, this meaning to take away, or remove certain elements. Within game engines, this means removes certain aspects of the whole thing to optimise performance.

Additive, once gain something you first start to understand from maths, the meaning is to add certain elements, most of the time to an existing element. Within game engines this could mean adding certain components to make the game engine perform the required actions, of improve overall performance.

Introduction to the Games Industry

Because the aim of this task is to write about the current state of the games Industry i have focused on what conserns be most, and that is the loss of jobs due to this global recession

In light of the current credit crisis, the games industry is doing exceptionally well, the industry is doing exceptionally well, the industry has continued to grow in leaps and bounds, and also hit a new sales record in 2008 with a raise in both video game hardware and software by 19% over 2007. Its fair to say though that it’s not as high as many had predicted.

A telling strain in any industry is the presence of major job cuts; the game industry is no exception. In late December Sony reported that it would be cutting more than 8000 jobs, and that they will be decreasing its investments into its electronic research by 30% by March 2010.

In October Electronic Arts (E.A.) announced that it will be cutting 6% of its work force. But after failing to meet sales and predicted targets for the year, they said they there will be deeper cuts and cancelation of several projects.

With these announcements many companies have been changing there tune about just how strong there games are.

Song Computer Entertainment Europe head David Reaves, told Eurogamer.net that the industry is not recession-proof, but is essentially doing well.

"It's a function of the economic situation that you are going to find people who are resilient, who do not play with their pricing, who are very efficient; the videogames industry is inherently very healthy."

Creativity

OK will start by explaining what I think creativity is.

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new. Scientifically, creativity is usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness.

Creativity can be as individual as a finger print; this is because creativity can be affected by several factors, these include, the thought process of the designer, the social environment, and there personality traits. It could even be affected by divine intervention.

When new consoles are created a lot of companies try to master the new technologies, creativeness goes straight out of the window while developers are trying to outdo each other technologically. This also results in remakes of older games. After companies have mastered the new technologies they then can use these to create more creative games. This is kind of like watching a movie that has been remade, for the sake of special effects, spectacular but shallow.

Certain games manifest creativity in different way, depending on the type of game. For example World War 2 based games mainly show creativity in the A.I. the graphics are helpful, but they are based on realism, so you can’t really call it creative. There A.I. used though help make the game more creative, oddly enough I think this is because of the realism. But not all shooting games are like this, one game in particular is XIII, this is a FPS (First Person Shooter) but the style of this game is different from others because it has a Comic Style. Personally I find this quite creative.

Fantasy games are my personal favourites. There are all said to be creative but just like I said about creativeness in games, most of them are all based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. Even for me I'm starting to get annoyed with all the repetitiveness, a lot of game designers just throw the same things into a very similar environment, and set you with very similar storylines, mainly ones where you are an unsuspecting pesent and it’s up to you to save the world from an ancient evil.

Creativity in game development is not a sole person’s responsibility, there are several factors that a good game requires, and most of them require a certain amount of creativity. These are mainly the people who come up with the game, and the concept artists.

As an up and coming artist, I'm still unsure of how I will show creativity in my work that will be acknowledged by others. After I have studied more about Art, and Game Design, I will have developed more skills, and then hopefully I will be able to be acknowledged as an Artist.

Idolness?

When I look at why i haven't written my blogs, i can never come up with an answer apart from i cant be bothered at the moment, i know this sounds really harsh and Mich i know you will really hate this fact but, when i start writing my blogs I get so into it, its unreal Ive already written several tonight i don't mind writing some more, i think being as each one is a different topic it seems to keep my attention. I'm also quite surprised at the things that we never really look into as gamers, but i think its amazing how games are broken down into so many different sections, that create it as a whole but thats a topic for another time.

Game Technology - User Interface

The way that games have developed is astonishing but I’ve never really looked at how the User Interface has changed so this is actually quite interesting to me.

Starting from the beginning, ‘Brown Box’ this is the same console that was designed by Ralph Baer, the controller for this was just simply a couple of knobs, that control the form/character you play as. The Odyssey followed a very similar principle in User Interface. Pong on Tele-Games has got to be the simplest design that I even seen. In 1985 the NES moved away from the traditional controller format, and went for a D-pad format allowing the player more control of the in game interface and character, also they added 2 extra function buttons (the famous A,B). The Nintendo Gameboy also followed this format very closely.

Since the release of the NES all controlled have followed these basic principles, but adding more functions to the controller. Strangely enough Nintendo were the first to move away from original D-pad design with the N64 controller, adding an analogue stick and a third handle, personally I didn’t like the idea of the third hand on the controller because is move to far away from how natural the previous design worked.

Sony later improved on Nintendo’s design with the Dual Shock controller, adding a second analogue stick and positioning them so they were more comfortable to hold.
Sega came back on the scene with the Dreamcast, and personally I think they took a step backwards with the design of the controller, making it surprisingly large in comparison to their competitors designs, it was also quite uncomfortable to hold.

Sony brought out there Dual Shock 2 controller and the only thing I can say is all I they did is change the colour.

Microsoft not long later release the Xbox, there controller design still followed the basic principles of its competitors but they focused the shape of the controller around comfort for the player.

The only real changes since then have been the Revolution Controller, this is extremely closely related to the original NES controller, but this is because of the way the controller is designed to be used, instead of just sitting holding the controller they are designed to get the player to interact more with the gameplay.