Multimedia Development

The reading this week focuses on game stories and why narrative is important, as so far we have only read and researched about rules. ' A Practical Guide to A Hero's Journey ' is the first of our readings for this week and looks at how a hero's journey can shape the narrative of a game.  In this article we look at the value of myths, as within society they teach us about ourselves, morals and how we should behave. Throughout history myths and stories have been used to encourage tribes and communities to be brave while hunting and fighting, and to believe that their deaths during war are good for the survival of their comrades. The same can be seen today with suicide bombers believing what they are doing is for the greater good and that they will go to their heaven and be with Allah. Narratives like these can be used to encourage entire countries to blindly follow the same ideologies. Germany after WW1 had severe problems with hyperinflation . Adolf Hitler took ...

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 ...

Having completed this weeks reading task on the 'Different Kinds of Fun' I have learned more about why we play games, and what makes some games addictive. The first of this weeks readings about fun in games I read was Natural Funitivity by Noah Falstein. This article focuses primarily around how we developed a want to play games from our ancestors. At the most basic level it looks at hunter-gatherers and their need to hunt and how that has traversed to us through thousands of years of evolution. Hunting has given us a desire to be physically active, but in recent years we have begun to simulate it through entertainment - like movies and video games for example. It has also given us a yearning for things that could technically help us with hunting, such as motorcycles and cars that can give us more speed. Sure we don't need to hunt nowadays but our ancestors utilised tools to complete tasks and vehicles have become tools to us for many reasons - getting us too and from w...

I have just completed the reading task for this week on initial design. The reading this week focused on initial design and creating mock-ups for games from board games to video games and everything in between. The main article  we read called Design Considerations by Greg Aleknevicus (the creator of Black Vienna Online ) goes in depth about what to consider when creating a board game, which is easily transferable to other mediums for games also. From the beginning I agree with Greg straight away on something that I loved as a child - physical presentation. Getting a new video game as a child I always loved looking at the front and back covers for the art and information, opening the box to see what art is on the disc, flicking through the manual and getting that new book smell  as well as looking at other things like physical copies of the in-game world map. Physical presentation was such a great selling point to me as a consumer as a child with video games that it i...

Having completed near an hour of reading I have decided to document my findings on Games MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics). I started with watching the slide show video which summarised a lot of what LeBlanc, Hunicke and Zabek explored in their publishing of ' MDA Framework '. Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics are defined as the following: 1. Mechanics - describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms. 2. Dynamics - describes the run-time behaviour of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others outputs over time. 3. Aesthetics - describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system. The slideshow and article continue to go into detail on each. My understanding of each has improved greatly thanks to it. I understand Mechanics now as being ammunition or spawn points in games, Dynamics as being how a situation develops because of your in-game choi...

Having read " Formal Abstract Design Tools " by Doug Church, published in  July of 1999, I have opened my eyes a little more to the fast progression of games in the past two decades. It is amazing to see how the same design principles that we use today were only being termed around the time of games like Mario 64   (1996),  which is used as an example in the article. Some of the tools  that Church talks about in the article are "Cooperation, Conflict and Confusion". Church talks about how the player of a game like Mario 64  or others, will experience intention or consequence. When performing tasks in the game there are only so many ways a task or action can be performed (which are created by the game designers) so it is up to the designers to create tasks that are challenging enough that the consequence is not completing the task to advance in the game, but that the player can work out the intentional action to perform the task and progress. This is all abou...

Cover of ' The Art of Computer Game Design ' by Chris Crawford, 1984 After finishing reading through the Reading Material for Week 2 I have learned some things I didn't know previously. For instance I did not know that the card game 'Magic: The Gathering' helped to " triple the size of the hobby games industry ". I also did not realise there was such thing as a cross between a LARP (Live Action Role-playing Game) and traditional theater, such as the play ' Tony & Tina's Wedding '. Reading through the articles made me realise that game design goes much further past the traditional board and card games and usual video games. I had heard about LARP and "Choose Your Own Ending" books, but they do not come to mind when you think about game design. I know that when it comes to creating my own game I will have to take different game types into consideration, and they could in turn become influences and inspirations for my own game...