Writing about Games.

Game Writing.

What issues face reviewers?

I’m going to start off and mention that I think having reviewers are a vital aspect of a successful games company, without them and other journalism, games would get lost, not having the necessary guidance of a reviewer or public feedback.  Having said that, there are several issues that face a “would-be” reviewer including:

·         External influences.  Everyone is guided by what other people say about a particular game so with the best will in the world; reviewers will subconsciously be influenced by others.

·         Being objective. It is very difficult to be objective because the gaming experience is not something that you can measure absolutely.  In fact most people view games in a subjective way, for example “I LIKE IT!”

·         Allegiances. For example, it is difficult to give unbiased review of a game if the people who designed it are paying your wages.

Who pays there wages?

There is little doubt that the majority of reviewers are paid either directly or indirectly by the game developers. For example a small number of reviewers are paid directly by the developer to give them feedback on key issues including: the games story line, user interfaces and graphic realism.

Alternatively a reviewer may be paid by a magazine to produce an independent report on a game but his work may be subject to editorial changes that are biased towards the developer. This is because the developer places expensive advertising with the magazine or has a direct financial interest in it.

There are very few totally independent reviewers who’s work is published without “interference” from the developer.  This work is mostly seen via online blogs and low key publishing.

Is an objective ranking system for games necessary for sales; is it even feasible?

If an objective ranking system existed it would undoubtedly enhance the sales of games that it ranked highly and adversely affect the sales of those games that were rank low, in the same way that being number 1 in the music charts affects compact disc download sales. However, I don’t believe that this would increase the overall sales of games; rather it would just change the distribution of titles.  I believe that the main factor effecting overall sales levels will continue to be direct advertising.

For an objective ranking system to be feasible I think that it would need to be based on a system similar to that used for the music charts.  In this system representative shops / internet sites could submit sales / rental returns to a central body that would in turn make a chart that shows the overall popularity of a particular title.  However, this would only measure the popularity of a title and not address the relative technical and creative issues of an individual game, such as, graphic realism, plot, character believability and users interfaces, let alone compare these issues from title to title. I think the complexity of doing this would make such a ranking system unfeasible.

What are your feelings about the NGJ?

I think that New Games Journalism (NGJ) is good in the sense that allows the reader to understand the experiences that someone else had while playing a particular game.  It also allows the reader to get a “taste” of the game and to imagine how they might respond to it.  This is very similar to travel journalism where the reader gets a taste of a particular place by reading about someone else’s experiences of that place.  However, as with travel journalism the experiences of the reader are not always going to be the same as those of the writer. This will depend on how each individual plays the game.

What are the particular qualities of NGJ?

Allowing the reader to get a taste of the game through someone else’s experiences is a very effective marketing technique.  It inspires and persuades the reader to play the game and in some cases actually plots the route needed to gain a similar experience. “Just like travel journalism”.  So in summary three key qualities of NGJ are that it is:

·         Inspirational

·         Persuasive

·         Guiding

What other forms of games writing can you find?

·         News (General gaming news)

·         Previews

·         Reviews

·         Interviews

How do you feel about your own writing, do you value objectivity or subjectivity?

My own writing style is generally subjective.  I enjoy describing, enthusing and storytelling rather than using lots of factual information.  This does however sometimes cause me to write more than I need to, especially when I am writing about a subject I really enjoy.

Bioshock Inspired Mood Board - American Art Deco.

My Personal Gaming History.

My Personal Gaming history.

I started to build an interest in the Gaming society, while I was in the last years of primary school, with the release of the Sony PlayStation 2. This was the beginning of a lifelong passion for gaming. Before the release of the PlayStation 2, I had never owned any console at all, even though I knew a lot of people who had the original PlayStation, and the Nintendo 64, so this was my first chance to enjoy playing without being chased by my friends outside. However I didn’t get my PlayStation 2 till Christmas, a month after release, but it was definitely worth the wait.

The first game which came with the console bundle was “Maximo – Ghosts to Glory” or called “Maximo” in Europe. This game was a children’s Hack and Slash spectacular from Capcom. The overall plot to the game was quite interesting;

“Maximo, a brave knight, thinking he’d found a trustworthy assistant in the likes of Achille, decided to leave his apprentice behind and go out into the world. Achille turned out to be an evil super-villain, and now the land is in trouble. Four princesses have been captured, and the dastardly Achille has spread them across the world, stashing them away in four separate towers. To make matters even worse, Achille has taken Maximo’s main squeeze as a bride. The knight must now battle fierce creatures and explore dark lands, in the name of peace and love”.

(http://capcom.wikia.com/wiki/Maximo:_Ghosts_to_Glory)

The overall playing style was very easy to learn pick up and play with easy to learn, basic controls and story objectives, which gradually became harder as you progressed through the game. Now I think back and analyse “Maximo”, I notice the atmosphere was brilliantly created to set the scene of being in the underworld, however not making the whole experience too scary, because the game was rated a 12. The world assets, such as trees, treasure chests and weapons were very low poly, and the characters were too with the exception of the bosses. For such a simple game, with a low development budget, everything you could wish for in a Hack and Slash/adventure game was there. However I can’t say it was very memorable, only for being the very first console game to be played by myself. I think the reason for not being memorable was purely because I was finding my feet in the gaming world at quite an early age.

The most memorable game I have played in my time has to be Bioshock 2. This game, having won more than 50 games of the year awards, was such a well put together experience. First of all being set 10 years after the original Bioshock, it follows the actions of the fallen underwater city, named Rapture and test subject Alpha’s attempts to fight his way through the horror ridden world to find out who “has been snatching little girls and bringing them back to the undersea city of Rapture. Players step into the boots of the most iconic denizen of Rapture, the Big Daddy, as they travel through the decrepit and beautiful fallen city, chasing an unseen foe in search of answers and their own survival”

(http://www.microsoft.com/games/en-gb/games/pages/bioshock2.aspx).

On the art side of things in Bioshock 2, I love the way the game is set in the art deco period of the first game (1958), but there are slight changes, having being 8-10 years after the events of Bioshock, making the date of the second game 1968, which gave Art Deco a “broadly-applied stylistic label”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco).

The Bioshock franchise gave such a different style and look to the games of the modern generation of consoles. Also it was one of the first games to have an underwater setting linked so nicely with certain dates in time, such as world war 2 etc., to give it just a little bit more believability. Bioshock is an overall clever, visual attractive and atmospheric game, which will become, if not already, a classic game, thanks to 2K.

A chance to dream!

A chance to think the unthinkable. What I would like to see from games in the future is the ability to interact and immerse you within the game and its characters, LITERALLY. I would love to hear about an experimental simulating game, which acts so real, that you even enter an altered reality, as mentioned on the previous post “The future of gaming”.

Another asset I’d look forward to seeing in the future of the games industry is a game engine powerful enough to produce environments that would show no cracks in creation/development or having a console with another ability to scan the environment you’re playing the game in and changing the mood of the game, swapping the background music around at different scenes or sensing you’ve got the curtains shut or no lights on, then enhancing the gameplay to more tactical or changing the lighting of the game. I think these two assets would make the difference between a game and real life, which would be great!

Games I’d like to see take control of this potential/experimental equipment, would be the Call of Duty franchise, showcasing the involvement and interaction. Feeling the motions of the soldiers etc. And maybe even a good horror game such as; Dead Space or even Bioshock to make great of mood lighting and sensing when the player is in a nervous disposition, I think that’d be so scary to be able to change the game to how the player is feeling at the time, maybe that’s a little too far.

IGN: Future of Gaming.

IGN : Future of Gaming

This short video, introduces the ideas of future consoles, the way we could play, and a little section on holograms, which I mentioned in my previous blog. I thought it'd be a great way to get another view into the how the industry thinks the games world is going to develop.

http://uk.ign.com/videos/2012/09/15/future-of-gaming-next-generation-consoles-episode-3

The Modern age of Gaming

The Modern age of Gaming.

What problems do we face in our search for the ultimate entertainment experience?

The main reason why the Games industry has had issues from the early 80’s through to nowadays is because of the alarming rate of money it now costs to even create and release the simplest game. A good example of how much money matters is to take a look at the stats produced by Atari (In 1982) which “released a version of Pac-Man for its 2600 game console, also known as the Video Computer System (VCS). The game was written by a single programmer over a couple of months and had a total development cost of US$100,000. It was not a very good port, as the game flickered annoyingly and struggled to overcome the limitations of the VCS hardware. Nevertheless, it sold over 10 million copies at US$30 a shot, with a cost of goods sold of just about US$5.” This very early video game shows the struggles software producers and programmers, in that time, had by having to be reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars just to create the basis platform of a video game. However you can argue that the amount of copies brought by consumers, had Atari in a good position. On the other hand, and maybe most importantly, the feedback of the game was poor, causing the company in the years to come to keep producing endless games with improvements to each one, therefore starting an ongoing cycle of development.

In this last decade, we’ve seen sales and profits rise and fall, which is down to the ever-growing expectancy and demand of the public. Every time a major game hits the shelves, people are always looking ahead to the sequel. This decade has produced one of the best and well known games to be produced, the Halo saga. “In 2004, Microsoft released Halo 2. Over 190 people are listed in its credits, and the game took three years to complete with a total development cost of over US$40 million. The game did record sales in its first month, and has currently sold over 8 million copies at US$50 a crack”. Again, this is a newer, faster and more intricate console game than Atari’s Pac-man, but it still took the same amount of time to develop, however the only difference is the massive gain of money which was put into this project, $40 million. Comparing the two games within the 20 year gap in the industry, the development costs have raised an incredible 400x.  

Even after adjusting for inflation, the figures above are staggering. The cost of developing high-profile games has increased dramatically over the last few years, with costs for the next generation of consoles expected to continue this trend. “Estimates have ranged from a 20% to a 100% increase in development costs for next-generation titles”.

Quotes by www.arstechinica.com.

And what is there to look forward to in the future of the Games industry?

I think the potential is there to make big strides forward into the games industry by introducing realistic film techniques/real-time rendering to give the consumer a sense of altered reality within his/her gaming experience. The main items I would personally like to see in the future generations of games are; A.I and holographic materials. Firstly the introduction of Artificial Intelligence would significantly increase the amount of interaction between player and game. An example of how this could be used would be in a future version of the Mass Effect series (If it’s still going by then) or a similar game with the same user interface. The player could involve him/herself within the game and its characters by being able to respond to any and everything that happens, especially with the dialogue of the game.

Secondly, the introduction of holographic gameplay would majorly boost the atmosphere, as well as the overall game play. However I have researched into holographic evidence being used right now and it’s nothing compared to what my thoughts of it are (which are like holograms on Star Wars). But you never could know, the technology has moved on so fast in the last couple of years with the definition and detail of the graphic/visuals of games, so why could they look deeper into getting the player interaction to a level, as mentioned above, to a stage where it is as if he/she is the character and every movement they make, is thought about by the game engine and is turned into appropriate actions.

The only factor that can make these ideas turn into reality is money and lots of it. You’ve seen $4 million dollars can create Halo 2, so how many Halo’s does it take to produce a game that can think for itself, interact with the player on personal levels and develop a sense of altered reality? We will have to wait for many years to come in my opinion to see even a glimpse of my ideas and more to come.

 

James Abbott McNeil Whistler.

About two weeks ago, I went to the museum to start drawing dinosaur bones for that weeks project, however Chris also took us all on a journey of discover, by stating a brief history of 18th Century painters such as the brillant James Abbott McNeil Whistler (Whistler, as reference).

At first I wasn't very interseted in all the history of art, on the other hand, after researching Whistler's work on the internet I realised that the style in which he mark makes is similar to mine. I looked at a selection of his less-known works, such as the one to the right.

I noticed, aswell as the mark making, that the tone of his sketches are very dark and he is'nt afraid to leave a picture unfinished, which is a particular method I tend to do when I'm coming up with ideas/concept thumbnails.


The majority of his work, however, is landscape paintings which are more precise and not anything like the brilliance which you see hear in these two images.

I do value any artist who shows sketches aswell as the final finished product, because it shows how his right side of the brain works, in terms of thinking of composition, mark making and shadows and if you can see if he made any mistakes, deliberate or not.


And as you can see in the image to the left, the amount of dark colours is second to none. Overall I find the style of his etching a joy to observe, purely for the method in which he creates the peices, can be there for all to see, if you choose to look closer.