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Week 8 Reading and Writing

For this week's reading I am looking at my previous Reading and Project posts on my blog and giving my thoughts on them.

Looking Back: Looking back on my previous posts I have to say that my writing abilities have improved indefinitely. The level of detail I am able to go into and my ability to analyse articles in great depth has also improved. This is beneficial across all modules as analysing articles and other peoples work is an important skill and plays a big part in our course.

My favourite readings so far has to be between the 'Games MDA' and 'Game Fun'. They are relevant to one another as they both look at the psychology behind why people play games, what they find fun and what keeps them coming back for more.
I find this type of research fascinating as I always ask myself "why?". Why do I like some FPS games over others? Why do I like playing multiplayer on some games and only want to play by myself on others? Why do I like team-based objective game types on Battlefield 1 over more solo-based game types?

Games MDA focuses on the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics of games. First and foremost I loved this reading because it helped me to understand the differences between them. This article lead me to look at 'Eight Kinds of Fun' and understand the basics of how people play and what they find fun.
Game Fun looks at the reasoning behind creating and finding games fun because of our ancestors. It looks at links between what our ancestors would do in their spare time between hunting and to pass the time.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I feel the reading tasks have helped with my analysing and writing skills and that I am gaining more from my research now. I find when I read articles or watch videos relevant to games in my own time I take a lot more from them by just being able to analyse them myself, and finding similarities and links between them and the readings done as part of this course.

I am happy with my project so far and feel that I will have a playable game that has good game elements and is fun, thanks to the readings and notes I have done over the past couple of weeks.
I feel the biggest accomplishment I have achieved from this module overall is being better able to analyse and utilise information in my own projects.

Image:
Source
I picked this image from my reading from week 2. I picked this image as it shows the cover of an old book on 'The Art of Computer Game Design' from 1984. The thing I love about it is that you can see the book is a bit tattered and has more than likely been well used. Books and studies like these are the reason that gaming progressed as fast as it did, and only three decades later we have very realistic open world games, and thousands of other games from various genres to choose from. It is books like these that have led to where we are now and they should be appreciated for the bibles to early video games they are. 

Looking Forward: Looking forward I hope to have a smooth running, albeit basic video game by the end of the semester. I do hope that we can work together in small groups or as a class next semester to create a much larger and detailed game, bringing together the things we've learned over the first semester as everyone will have different experiences, viewpoints, skills, and knowledge from their own journey through the readings and their projects.
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