Games Studies Exercises
25/9/2024 - 6/11/2024 / Week 1 - Week 7
Tee Jia Ern / 0348512
Games Studies / Bachelor of Design in Creative Media
Exercises
LECTURES
Week 1: Play
- "We were designed to play."
- The practice of play differs throughout disciplines, cultures, and lifestyles.
- According to Heorodotus, historical games served as a means of education, healing, and transformation.
- When starvation struck the Lydians in Tyrsenia, dice, knucklebones, and balls were used as a diversion.
Week 2: Games since early 1990s
Game Violence Debate
- Violence has been attributed to violent video games, movies, comic books, and rock music, but it has been difficult to establish a direct causal link between media violence and actual violence.
- Modern study typically focusses on specific media use situations and searches for both potential beneficial benefits of digital play, such as games, and potential negative effects.
Towards 3 Dimensional Technology
- Increased focus on game graphics was linked to developments in audiovisual technologies.
- As available memory and processing power increased, 8-bit gaming technology was replaced by 16-bit systems, which were followed by 32, 64, and 128-bit systems.
- In the 1990s, home computing equipment with real-time 3D graphics became widely accessible.
Consoles and the PC
- During the 1980s, multipurpose home computers and video game consoles competed in homes.
- 1981 saw the debut of the IBM PC.
- In the 1990s, the PC emerged as a significant gaming platform.
Ideology in a Game
- The game Civilization has been very well-liked and significant.
- Additionally, it has been criticized for, among other things, reducing intricate historical processes to a toy version of history with naturally evolving miniature civilizations.
Doom Aesthetics
- Doom's futuristic industrial setting, graphic violence, and techno soundtrack indicate a change in game design towards a more adult-oriented popular culture.
- References to other shooter and maze games, as well as movies (such as Alien, Terminator, and Evil Dead).
Gameplay Immersion
1. Sensory immersion through interactive visuals and sounds in a virtual environment
2. Challenge-based immersion with play activities (sometimes near an ideal, flow experience)
2. Challenge-based immersion with play activities (sometimes near an ideal, flow experience)
3. Imaginative immersion game that allows players imagine themselves in a fictional universe (for example, through text alone)
Examining game design and gameplay from the following angles:
- The nature of games
- Theoretical and conceptual viewpoints
- Cultural viewpoints
- The nature of games
- Theoretical and conceptual viewpoints
- Cultural viewpoints
Post Modernism
- Question about everything
- Uncertainty
Post structuralist
- Criticism of structuralist viewpoints
- Biases resulting from cultural conditioning
Simulacra and hyperrealism (redefined from Jean Baudrillard)
- Models of reality without a starting point, a hyperreality
- Hyperreal world e.g. Disneyland
Week 3: Play and Games in History
Challenges for Game History
- Required a social and cultural analysis of play and players in addition to an aesthetic and formal analysis of games.
Difficulties in researching historical games:
- Absence of museums and archives, as well as public preservation Playing older games on the original devices is difficult.
- Lack of qualified historians who work with video games.
- Obstacles to the general public's understanding of the cultural relevance and worth of games that are viewed to be questionable low culture or mass culture that is manufactured by industry.
Perspectives of Digital Game History
- The history of digital games is not yet recognized as a field of study by academic institutions.
- Various viewpoints are available:
Art Historical Perspective
- Aims to explain the development of digital games in formal and artistic terms.
- Provides context for the aesthetic and creative standards for game audiovisual and interaction design across several decades.
Software Industry Perspective
- Concentrating on market developments and historical occurrences in the business.
- Placing the gaming industry in relation to the software industry's earlier history e.g. Martin Campbell Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog (2003)
- Industry critique e.g. Kline, Dyer-Witheford and Du Peyter, Digital Play (2003)
Technology History Perspective
- Fans are already documenting the different gaming devices from the past.
- Academic gaming technology history is to comprehend the broader social and cultural dynamics that underlie the changing hardware.
- Articles published in journals like Technology and Culture, from the Society for the History of Technology
Social Historical Perspective
- Examining technology through the lens of social history.
- For instance, how the emergence of a phenomenon like digital gaming is connected to changes in the family or work life, the quantity of free time, and the financial resources available to people from various social backgrounds.
History of Mentalities Perspective
- Mentality is a broad term that refers to a period's collective awareness.
- Histories of mentalities attempt to explain how particular concepts or behaviors spread throughout particular environments.
Games Historiography
- Creating meta-history
- Understanding the history of games, the nature of the action, and the narratives, interpretations, and other discursive guidelines that guide this type of writing.
Graphical Virtual Worlds
- It became simpler to see MUD-style games as an alternate virtual world as their graphical interfaces became more realistic.
- These games, which are referred to as MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), usually center on the development of player characters, the gathering of virtual goods, and different forms of social interaction.
Week 4: Play as Research
Learning to Ask
- Issues with carrying out independent study projects in game studies are covered in the following.
- Choosing the appropriate research question is essential since the way you ask it will determine the results you get.
Spiral of Study
- Since authentic research follows a hermeneutic cycle, new information will impact or modify the initial hypothesis.
Readiness for Change
- Fixing on a specific strategy too soon could cause you to overlook a crucial detail later, but looking for an approach for too long can also be problematic.
Narrowing Down
- Research questions that are too broad or ambiguous are difficult to formulate into a successful study.
- Narrowing down is one useful strategy.
- For instance, instead of trying to comprehend the "nature of interaction in a multiplayer FPS," one could concentrate on observations made in a specific FPS game map.
Focus on Purpose of Study
- There is no right or wrong methodology, instead, each Game Studies project must think about its objectives before choosing the best methods and tools.
- Realizing that every field of study has related histories of thought is crucial.
Humanities Methods
- Modern game studies have been especially impacted by structuralism and semiotics.
- Languages and games are examples of systems that are analyzed to determine their constituent parts and underlying logic.
Social Sciences Methods
- They emphasise the scientific approach and provable facts more than the humanities, although they nevertheless concentrate on human realities.
- For hypothesis with a quantitative focus, it is crucial to formulate hypotheses that can be empirically measured and falsified.
Design Research Methods
- Design study includes a variety of meta-design techniques that examine game design techniques and their underlying reasoning.
- Finding the right balance is crucial. While researchers often want to create high-quality research and game designers create high-quality games, design researchers want to contribute in both theoretical and practical ways.
INSTRUCTIONS
Week 1
Exercise 1: My favourite video game & what makes this game highly playable & impactful
Exercise 2: Review an Established Game Developer/Game Designer
REFLECTION
Experience: I decided to choose Minecraft as my favourite game. Minecraft pocket edition which is the mobile version of Minecraft is my childhood. For the established game developer I chose an indie game developer named Toby Fox the creator of Undertale.
Observations: Minecraft won the hearts of fans with it's open world sandbox game and simple intuitive gameplay mechanics. There is no fixed end goal in Minecraft so the players are free to explore and discover ways to play the game. This is the main reason why Minecraft gained popularity. Meanwhile Toby Fox created a trope subversion of killing monsters into having mercy and sparing the monsters. The narrative, memorable characters and multiple endings makes it fun to play multiple times.
Findings: I did some research to shed some light to cover the games of my chosen topic. I learned a lot about the analysis of games and the video recording software.
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