Top Films

I realise that all of my blog posts have been entirely focused on my course and so I decided to make a list of my top films, I would just make a list of my top 10 but as I'm a film fanatic I decided to make several lists in different categories as well. Just bear in mind that all of the lists will probably change within the next few months.

Comedy
1. Happy Gilmore
2. Anchorman
3. South Park the Movie
4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
5. Dodge Ball

Action
1. Die Hard
2. Terminator 2: Judgement Day
3. Goldeneye
4. Total Recall
5. Sin City

Horror
1. Event Horizon
2. Alien
3. Psycho
4. Pan's Labrynth
5. 30 Days of Night

Sci-Fi
1.  Aliens
2. Terminator 2: Judgement Day
3. The Matrix Reloaded
4. Star Wars episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
5. Blade Runner

Superhero
1. The Dark Knight
2. Kickass
3. Ironman 2
4. The Incredible Hulk
5. Spiderman 2

Zombie
1. Zombieland
2. Shaun of the Dead
3. Land of the Dead
4. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero not Zack Snyder)
5. 28 Days Later

Creature Feature
1. Aliens
2. The Thing
3. Predator
4. Jaws
5. The Host

Game
1. Scott Pilgrim (too many game references to be in a different genre)
2. Tomb Raider
3. Tomb Raider 2
4. Doom

Animation
1. South Park the Movie
2. The Lion King
3. Toy Story 3
4. Hercules
5. Shrek 2

Top 10 Films
1. Pulp Fiction
2. Die Hard
3. Fight Club
4. Happy Gilmore
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
6. The Dark Knight
7. Aliens
8. Event Horizon
9. American History X
10. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Gender in Gaming

In the last of my critical game studies lectures, the topic of discussion was gender in gaming, focusing on the statistics of boys and girls that play games and who we percieve to play games. As the class consitis of roughly 25 boys and only 2 girls the discussion and overall atmosphere tended to be biased towards the thinking that almost all gamers were boys.

However, when reviewing the official statistics of gamers, we found that the spread was alot more even where almost an equal number of girls played games to boys, in fact the statistics even showed that older woman played more games than teenage boys. This largely comes down to games such as solitaire and bejeweled being hugely popular amongst the older demographic.

Although I agreed with the statistics on the percentage of gamers in each demographic, I hugely disagreed on the amount of time each group was said to play video games. I mainly disagreed with the fact that it said that on average teenage boys played games for roughly 6 hours each week, which works out at about 52 minutes a day. The main reason that I disagree with this is beacuse I play games for atleast 20 hours a week, minimum. I know that me playing games for that long doesn't effect the overall statistic, but almost everyone I know that's a boy, either teenager or young adult, plays atleast 12-15 hours of gaming a week. If it had said that they were young children or a bit older, I would have agreed with the statistics but as they were teenagers, I'd expect the average time spent playing to be higher.

We also discussed who we percieved to be gamers, which sparked an interesting debate on who everyone thought the stereotypical gamer was, in which everyone strongly disagreed that the stereotypical gamer was a an unsociable teen hiding in their parents basement. We all aqgreed that although this may have been the image of a gamer back in the 80's and early 90's when the medium was still trying to break into everyday life, in our current age of next gen consoles and the explosion of casual games, this image couldn't be further from the truth.

We also discussed the role of women within the games industry, where it came as no surprise that more men than women were currently working within the industry. What did come as a surprise however was the difference between the two, for example 95% of the design team was male and only 5% female.

The biggest question that comes to my mind when seeing these statistics is, how does this affect the content of games? Seeing statistics like this helps back up the theory of boys dominating the gaming market as it looks like 'boys making games for boys.' More often than not, the content also helps back up this theory as the articles on the two links below show.

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/114/1143135p1.html
http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/116/1160730p1.html

This was just a quick exploration into the gamingh demographic and I'm hoping that by the time I'm working in the industry things would have changed for the beeter as I believe that more girlsn in the industry and playing games will bring more diversity to games and the more girls that play games will distance gamers worldwide from the stereotypical teenager living in their parents basement.

Essay 2

With particular reference to the readings you have undertaken this year what are the major design issues you have faced in developing a game for Key Stage 1 children?

Throughout the development of the Key Stage 1 game, there have been many design issues that needed to be covered in order to make a game that would appeal to the target audience as well as being suitable for them and covering the targets of the assessment. The majority of these issues were discussed and solved during the initial design and development stages of the project, where we discussed as a group what we wanted to create and also what we thought we would be able to create. Setting a limit on what we were going to do was important in stopping us from over reaching and helped us focus on the core issues that we needed to consider in the design of the game.

After several meetings amongst the group and occasionally the project managers, we had embellished the original idea of having a haunted house game by making it a progressive room to room learning experience where the player had to solve various puzzles, all related to the KS1 curriculum, in order to reach the games boss and escape the house. We eventually decided that the layout would consist of a series of levels that the player would progress through by completing a series of puzzles.

Greg Costikyan’s article, ‘I have no words & I must design,’ was a useful source in helping us solve many of the issues of designing the game such as the player’s interaction and the use of goals and struggle in making an enjoyable and challenging game for the player. As the game was intended to be a learning experience, player interaction was fundamental in the design of the game. Without allowing the player to fully interact with the game we, as game designers, would have failed to give the player the learning experience we had promised and would have failed to make an enjoyable game. This issue was easily resolved as each level of the game has two puzzles that the player has complete control over to help them fully interact with the game, along with the ‘side mission’ of collecting cookies that are scattered throughout the game and the fourth room of the game being a fully interactive mini-game.

The main goal of the game is for the player to guide the character to safety and escape the house; however, in order for the player to do this they must complete individual goals within each level, the goals being the completion of puzzles. In order to keep the goals interesting as well as informative for the player each puzzle is different so that the player feels that they are progressing through the game and achieving their mission, rather than being stuck in an endless cycle.

The struggle that the player must face in the game comes from each individual puzzle that they must complete in order to progress and then the boss in the final room who must be defeated in order for the player to escape. The struggle needed to be in keeping with the player’s abilities and as an interactive learning game, needed to be relevant to the player’s needs, therefore each puzzle and the questions the boss asks the player where focused on the KS1 curriculum. Using the curriculum to help us design each challenge made the overall design process easier as we knew what issues we needed to cover in order to make the game relevant to the target audience.

Another theme in games that Costikyan said was an important design feature is endogenous meaning, which is a term for any in game object or currency that is only relevant within the game but that the player feels that they need or want. Endogenous meaning is an important part of any games structure, it helps immerse the player in a game and is often important in motivating a player to complete certain goals or tasks. When designing the game, we could not find a suitable way to include the use of money or a shop within the structure of the game, and could not find any reason to include some sort of upgrade system but we still felt that the player needed something that would make them value the world within the game and so the ‘side mission’ of collecting cookies was created. The cookies don’t really hold any value in the game and certainly don’t outside of the game but the collection of as many cookies as possible, gives the player a sense of accomplishment.

The character design was left to me as one of the artists and in order to create a character that I thought the target audience would like I spent a fair amount of time researching different character styles. One of the styles I looked into was the Scooby Doo characters as our game shared several similarities with the cartoon; I also looked at video game characters like the sprites from the Pokémon games and various creatures from the Mario games. As well as choosing a suitable design for the characters, I had to create two characters, a boy named Alvin ‘Al’ and a girl named Anita ‘Annie’, in order to make the game more acceptable and open to both genders. The design that I settled on for the two main characters, Al and Annie, resembled South Park’s characters, sharing the overly large heads and having their walking animations as the ‘hopping’ walk. For the boss character, I decided to use the Boo ghost from the Mario games as my template, this seemed to be the most suitable form for the ghost to take as it wasn’t too serious or scary and fit in well with the cartoony style of the game that we were trying to create.

Another article that was a valuable resource when designing the game was ‘Formal Abstract Design tools,’ by Doug Church, which had a strong segment on the role of story in designing games. This was an important issue to cover as an important feature in any game is the story, whether it’s a simple narrative or an epic yarn, story is what pulls the player into a game’s world and immerses them in it. During the design process we felt that it was important to include a story to keep the player interested and to explain how the character had ended up in being trapped in a basement in the first place. Within the actual levels of the game there is no story driving the player on as we wanted the player to focus on the puzzles and the mission of escaping the house.

As we had decided not to include a narrative or any other form of story within the structure of the levels, cut-scenes were added at the beginning and end of the game. The opening cut-scene was designed to introduce the player to the characters and show how they got themselves into their current predicament and the end cut-scene was designed to show the players success and show the player a happy ending for helping the character escape.

A very important issue to cover when designing the game was what art style to use; we wanted the style to be appropriate for the target audience to keep them interested in the game and so went for a cartoony style, with similarities with various children’s programs such as Scooby Doo and similarities with games such as the Mario franchise.

Every level within the game is meant to be from a different time period and so it was important to keep a link between each level to avoid confusing the player or making the game look like it had been patched together. Each level shares similarities with the level before, such as the background from the first level being almost identical to that of the second level. The colour scheme used is also of importance, bright colours were used for most of the game to fit in with the cartoony style but between levels there was a strong contrast of colours to show that the player was progressing through the game, for example the Egyptian level is filled with bright yellow slabs along the walls and brightly coloured hieroglyphics, whereas the second level has grey bricks along the walls and bright red pots scattered over the floor.

The layout of the game was an important issue to discuss as it needed to be presented coherently for the player to help them track their progress through the game. The player simply moves from either left or right, depending on the level, completing each puzzle as they come across it before progressing to the next level. The layout style can be considered to come under spatial segmentation, which is when player progression is controlled levels and/or checkpoints within those levels. Spatial segmentation boils down to three main areas; level structure, aesthetic design and background, such as having a rolling background as the games first three levels have and a static background for the fourth and fifth levels.

The components that make up spatial segments aren’t necessarily included as they are part of challenge segmentation, which is where the puzzle element of the game comes from, both forms of segmentation are discussed in length in an article called ‘Rounds, Levels, and Waves: The Early Evolution of Gameplay Segmentation’ by Jose P. Zagal, Clara Fernandez-Vera and Michael Mateas. Although in each individual puzzle the player doesn’t have to face waves or bosses, the combined puzzles of each level act as mini bosses that must be defeated(solved) in order for the player to progress to the next level, where they will have to repeat the process to progress even further through the levels.

The final two issues that were of a big concern during the design and development process were pacing and possibility, two important aspects of games that are discussed at length in  the an article by Marcos Venturelli called ‘Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design – A PopCap Case Study.’ Pacing is the speed of progression and flow within a game and possibility is the number of options that are available to the player, as designers we have to consider both as one when designing a game in order to find the right balance for the game’s purpose, for example casual games have a high pace and very little possibility whereas big budget console games have a slower pace but a much higher possibility factor.

When designing the KS1 game, we tried to give the game a fast pace so that the target audience wouldn’t get bored but gave them some possibility. As the player cannot control the character, just completing the puzzles, and there is a linear path to follow, the game is forced to progress at a faster pace. In doing so, we gave the player very few possibilities, their path is straightforward and they cannot stray from it, meaning that the only true possibility in the game was the amount of cookies the player collected, how many tomatoes they threw at the man in stocks in the mini-game and how fast they completed each puzzle.

In conclusion, there have been many issues to consider when designing and developing the Key stage 1 game, covering every aspect from the art style to the core game mechanics. As a team, I believe we have successfully dealt with these issues in a way that has made the game more suitable to its target audience and its initial objectives, to help Key Stage 1 students learn their curriculum. I believe that many of these issues could have been overlooked had it not been for the various articles that I and as a team, we used to help us find and solve them.

Kill the Rabbit!

For the flash game assessment that I was set, I originally planned on making a tower defense game about Vikings pillaging a Church. At first I loved this idea and was quick to make all the artwork so I could begin coding the game. However, I soon realised just how complicated a tower defense game can be and so decided to come up with a new idea, plus most people were planning on making a tower defense game.

After a bit of thought I decided to make a shooter, I quickly came up with the idea of an old man sitting on a park bench who begins to lose his sanity and the only way to get it back is to kill rabbits. It's a bit of a random storyline but the coding is quite simple so I should actually be able to make the game work and who doesn't like shooting rabbits.

I've added 'Satanic cowboy' by Dog Fashion Disco as the background music because it's kind of crazy and when you shoot a rabbit it has the notorious Wilhelm scream. Enjoy!

Group Project

Key Stage 1 Group Project

One of the assignments on the course is a group project where we have to work as a team to make a Key Stage 1 educational game. The game that me and my team are working on is called ‘Al and Annie’s History Mystery’ and is a puzzle solving game set inside a haunted house. The player must solve all the puzzles in each room to progress through the house to the end level where a ghost will ask them some questions and once the ghost is defeated the player escapes the house.

Our team consists of five members, Joe is our main coder, Ryan is the sound guy (plus backup coding), Scott is the main tester (plus backup coder) and me and Phil are the artists. We are both the concept artists and the digital artists.

I am really enjoying my role in the team and can’t wait to see the finished game, but as that’s still going to be a while I thought I’d share with you some of my work on the game so far.

 These are the two characters that the player can play as, Al and Annie.

This is the first level, minus the puzzles, it’s a simple design that just rolls from right to left as the player completes the puzzles and heads up the stairs to the next level.

   This is the statue of Anubis that I drew for the first level.



 And finally, between the start menu and the first level we decided to make a cutscene depicting how the characters got into this situation in the first place, I can't take full credit for the cutscene as Phil did parts of it and Joe was the one that put it in the game.

Un-Edited Retro Game Review

Retro Game Review: Donkey Kong (1981)

Donkey Kong is a platforming game developed and published by Nintendo in 1981 for the arcade. It is one of the first video games to be made; yet alone being a ‘Retro Game’ it is one of the forefathers of the games industry. However, it is because it is basic that it is a good starting point to review a game critically, analyse its key gameplay aspects and see what makes them good or bad.

I have chosen to base the analysis/review of Donkey Kong on the article, ‘I Have No Words & I Must Design,’ by Greg Costikyan. I will back up this review by using articles by other writers that I believe are an important aspect of retro games. Costikyan breaks down all games into 5 key areas, ‘Interaction’, ‘Goals’, ‘Struggle’, ‘Structure’ and ‘Endogenous Meaning’ and I will use these areas as a starting point for my review.

Interaction is an extremely important part of games, without interaction it is impossible to consider something to be a game, and with video games, the loss of interaction makes them seem more like films than anything else. Interaction in games is the player’s choices/actions that they take and how these shape the gaming environment. As with most ‘Retro Games,’ the interaction of the player in Donkey Kong has very little effect on the game’s environment. With modern games, such as Call of Duty: Black Ops, the players actions drastically alter the state of play and have a direct consequence for the player/s. With Donkey Kong, however, there are very little choices and actions for the player to take, in fact the only actions the player can take are to jump and climb ladders. By today’s standards this is an incredibly simple game with very few choices for the player, but it was considered groundbreaking games design when it was first released, and has had a heavy influence on the majority of games that have since been made.

The next area that Costikyan talks about is Goals, which covers the player’s incentive to play and how objectives guide the player’s behaviour. The goals in Donkey Kong are just as simple as the player’s interaction, the goal on each screen is too reach the top level, with the overall goal being to defeat Donkey Kong and saving the ‘Lady.’

If there is any ‘Retro Game’ that masters the area of struggle, it has to be Donkey Kong. From the first screen it is evident that the game will test the player’s abilities. The struggle starts off simple; the player must jump over the barrels thrown by Donkey Kong and reach the top of the screen. The different obstacles that the player must pass in each of the screens add to the player’s struggle, and each screen is more difficult than the last. The game goes one step further to increasing the player’s struggle, once the player has defeated Donkey Kong the game restarts from the first screen with an increased difficulty; this process loops round continuously until the player loses all of their lives.

When Costikyan talks about structure, he believes that mutual player agreement that the game's rules and significance create structure. The games structure shapes player's behaviour, it doesn't determine it, and therefore players have the freedom to choose what they do within the rules. The structure of Donkey Kong consists of four screens that the player must complete to finish that ‘level.’ The first three screens consist of a series of obstacles that the player must jump over to reach the top of the screen, where the player will then enter the fourth screen which is considered the boss level as the player finally gets the chance to defeat Donkey Kong, thus beginning the cycle again on a higher difficulty.

The last area that Costikyan talks about in his article is Endogenous meaning, this is created within the structure of a game and these meanings are only relevant within the structure of that game. The endogenous meaning that is created within Donkey Kong is the sense of accomplishment that the player feels every time they reach the top of a screen, and the eventual joy of defeating ‘THAT DAMN DIRTY APE!’ Although the endogenous meaning of Donkey Kong may not seem that significant, especially when contrasted with that of modern games, it must be remembered that there was no real sense of endogenous meaning when Donkey Kong was released and that by creating this in the first place, it has helped with the development of thousands of games since.

The idea if segmentation in retro games and how that has influenced the development of latter games is an important issue to analyse when looking at the game. The idea of segmentation gameplay and its influence was first discussed in an article called ‘Rounds, Levels, and Waves: The Early Evolution of Gameplay Segmentation’ by Jose P. Zagal, Clara Fernandez-Vara and Michael Mateas. Gameplay segmentation can be broken down into three different types; each type of segmentation covers their own area of games, Temporal Segmentation - covers gameplay elements relating to limiting factors, synchronising and/or co-ordinating player activity over time, Spatial Segmentation - covers all aspects relating to 'virtual space,' for example, levels, and Challenge Segmentation - covers areas relating to challenges within the game.

Segmentation plays an important part in the core game mechanics of Donkey Kong, all three types are present in its functions but the most influential form of segmentation in the game is the concept of Challenge Segmentation. The wave factor of this form of segmentation could be considered as the barrels on the first level come in ‘waves’ and the player must get to the top of the screen to stop them, but the main focus is the idea of Boss segmentation. In the game, the aim is to reach the top of the screen to save the ‘Lady,’ and after reaching the fourth screen the aim is to defeat Donkey Kong once and for all. The game then repeats itself on a higher difficulty, which introduces the idea of defeating the boss to progress through the game. This style of gameplay has been hugely influential on the development of modern games, many incorporate challenge segmentation into their games as one of its key features, and without games like Donkey Kong creating this concept in the first place, most of these games would have suffered as a consequence.

Temporal and Spatial segmentation are also present but have a smaller impact on the gameplay, temporal segmentation exists in the game in the form of a timer for each screen. This isn’t as bigger influence on the gameplay as the timer is extremely lenient, giving the player plenty of time to reach the top, its sole purpose is to ensure that they actually have to play. Spatial segmentations role in the game is the different screens that are involved in completing each play through. Donkey Kong can be argued as the first game to include different level screens, which is a huge influence on modern games.

The final article that I will use to review Donkey Kong is ‘Formal Abstract Design Tools,’ by Doug Church. In this article, Church discusses the tools that, as games designers, we must consider when making a game. The three areas that he looks at are Perceivable Consequence, Intention and Story.

In Donkey Kong, an example of perceivable consequence would be, when a barrel is rolling towards ‘Jumpman (later becoming the eponymous hero, Mario),’ the player realises that they must surpass this object or die and so they press the jump button. It is important that the player realises the danger of the barrels and isn’t killed meaninglessly, therefore frustrating them and stopping them from continuing. In Donkey Kong, the designers made the dangers clear to the player from the offset; any barrels that are thrown at you by a very large, very angry gorilla should be considered to be dangerous.

The second area that Church talks about, Intention, is very closely linked to Perceivable Consequence, as intention is when the player plans and thinks about their actions and the outcomes of these actions, therefore planning how to overcome obstacles, etc. Using the same example as for Perceivable Consequence, the player knows that they will die if they are hit by one of the barrels rolling towards them and so, they plan to jump over and pass this obstacle.

Church’s final area that he discusses is Story, the narrative thread of the game. Whether the story is driven forward by the designer and the player progresses along a pre-determined path or the player has more influence over the story, the story is the main thing that drives the game forward and gives the player a purpose to play. As a ‘Retro Game,’ Donkey Kong has a very simple storyline but is effective when combined with the style of gameplay. The story line is based around the playable character, the aptly named Jumpman’s girlfriend, known as the ‘Lady,’ being kidnapped by Jumpman’s pet ape, Donkey Kong, after he is mistreated by Jumpman and seeks revenge. However basic the storyline may be, it gives the game a decent narrative and the player the incentive to defeat Donkey Kong and save the ‘Lady.’

In conclusion, Donkey Kong may not be able to hold up against modern games in terms of the areas that I have discussed, but it is one of the games that created the foundations for all other video games to be developed and has been hugely influential. In the process, creating one of video games most successful characters, Mario, and establishing Nintendo’s largest franchise.

New Games Journalism Vs Old Games Journalism

New Games Journalism
New games journalism can be any article on games, from a review to talking about its development, that has been written in the style of what we know as 'New Journalism.' New journalism is a writing style that was created in the 1960s-1970s, where the writer focuses more on personal experiences/emotionse, rather than writing about the subject in a more analytical style. For example, if I were to review the new Call of Duty game in this style, rather than discussing the game mechanics and design style, I would discuss my experience playing a match online. In this blog I will discuss one of the NGJ articles that I read, called 'Bow N***er' by Ian Shanahan.

'Bow N***er,' discusses the writers experience playing Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast on-line, and how players interact in this game. The article focuses on the writers experience playing against someone that is disrespectful and doesn't play by 'the rules.' The article is written in the style that the writer is his character in the game and such is the style of new journalism, trying to get the reader to connect with how he is playing the game. The first person storytelling of the article, crossed with the implied Good Vs Evil battle, gives the reader a emotional review of the style of gameplay, with an analysis of the core game mechanics and aesthetics brushed upon briefly in each paragraph.

In my opinion, NGJ is a highly successful form of writing. The fact that the style focuses on player experience is an effective way for readers to find out what a game is actually like to play, the weak point of NGJ is that if the reader wants to read about game mechanics and core features in great detail, they need to read OGJ as NGJ doesn't focus on this.

Old Games Journalism
Old Games Journalism is the traditional approach to reviewing games. The writing style is alot more formal than NGJ and tends to focus entirely on game mechanics etc. rather than player experience. The article that I will look at for this style of writing is a Half Life 2 review by Kristan Reed.

The article is instantly recognisable as being in the style of OGJ, it is a straight forward review of the game, without any personal experience or emotion discussed. The article talks about the games' visuals and its development process, then moves on to talk about player interaction within the game world, which moves on to story and style of play etc. The article is written more informally than most OGJ, in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand all the areas that are covered. This was a very in-depth review of the game and gives the reader a clear understanding of what does and doesn't work about the game in terms of its mechanics, aesthetics and otherwise.

I find OGJ articles to be a very effective writing style, successfully informing the player on key parts of a game, covering every aspect of a game other than player experience and emotion.

Final Opinion
To sum up, both forms of journalism are an effective way of informing the reader on a game. If the reader simply wants to find out what a game is like, NGJ is more effective as it doesn't bog the reader down in any speifics, but if the reader wants a more in-depth view of a game, then OGJ is the better style. Personally, I prefer to read a bit of both in my articles, I want to know the specifics but at the same time I want to know what it is actually like to play the game, how the player actually feels whilst in the game world.