New Games Journalism vs Old Games Journalism

Old games journalism explores mechanics, graphics and controls which I feel spoils things a little bit. I prefer to explore things for myself.

New games journalism just shows what the game looks like and what it's like to do things in the game from the player's point of view.

In my opinion new games journalism is much more helpful as I would prefer to know what I'll be confronted with when I'm dropped into the game world. I would prefere to explore the game at my own pace. But if I'm looking for information on how a game works I will check out an old style review.

Both types of game journalism have their pros and cons but each of them would only appeal to different audiences or if someone who had been shown the new style review and wanted to know more about how the game works then they could read the old style review.

Remediation

Remediation is the incorporation or representation of one medium in another medium, for example; taking something from one game or video and altering it slightly and then putting it in another game or video. Some more examples would be adapting a book into a film or a movie clip being torn out of context and having music play over the top of it. Digital media is constantly remediating it's predecessors which makes remediation the defining characteristic of new digital media.

Joystick Generation

On the third episode of Games Britannia we saw how Britain moved on to digital games, Woolley started in the era of arcade games, the 1980's. We saw games such as pacman and space invaders, two of the most famous classic arcade games which are still played today and have inspired countless games. Woolley the goes on to explore games from the 1990's when a lot of female video game characters came about such as Lara Croft. He then moved on to when internet gaming came about and MMO's extremely popular such as World Of Warcraft, a subscription based online role played game with millions of members played every day.

I found it interesting to see how much games have advanced, how we came from just pixels and beeping sounds to realistic character models, worlds and sound effects.

La Decima Vittima Thoughts

La Decima Vittima (The 10th Victim) was an interesting film, I'm not sure I totally understood it to be honest. From what I understood it was about a competition involving competitors being chosen to be either the hunter or the victim. The hunter was shown the victim's face and their goal was to hunt them down and kill them whereas the victim was only told that they were being hunted but not by who. The victim's goal was to kill the hunter before they get killed themself. A woman is assigned to hunt a man who has survived 9 rounds but they end up falling for eachother, which complicates things. I found the film pretty interesting but sometimes a bit ridiculous.

Tweaking Ancient Games

Over the Christmas break I was assigned a task to take one of the ancient games we played in class and make iterations to it. I chose to remove some of the game pieces from either player in an attempt to decrease the time before the game becomes tense and more exciting. I did this because I felt the game started off too slowly and only really became exciting when there wasn't many pieces on the board so every move had to be made much more carefully as each turn was a lot more meaningful.

My results confirmed that the game did infact become a lot more tense and interesting a lot sooner but some people prefered the longer build up when there was more pieces.

British Museum Trip

I wasn't able to attend the trip to the British Museum but from what I've heard it was a very memorable and informative experience and somewhat made my classmates thing about board games in a different way. It's a shame I didn't get to experience it myself so at some point I'll have to give the British Museum a visit.

Going Cardboard

We were shown a board game documentary called "Going Cardboard", it was about the game of the year awards which started in Germany 1978. People competed in these awards and it is said that because of these awards a whole new variety of games were brought about, changing the games industry forever. I found it hard to believe that this competition made board game creators come up with such interesting and unique ideas. People only realised that board games had been evolving for the past thirty or so years when a game called Settlers of Catan was created in America in the nineties.

Going Cardboard informs people who are wanting to create board games of what has been going on in the games industry to help them on their way. Going Cardboard also lets the board game enthusiasts hear from the creators of their favourite games and gives them a behind the scenes look at board games design while still in process which I found rather interesting although I'm not much of a board game enthusiast.

Monopolies and Mergers

In the second episode of Games Britannia it was explained to us how board games that originated from Britain impacted the country politically and socially. Whereas in America, board games were adapted to promote the American Dream of free enterprise and economic success. The original intension of board games being exported from Britain to America was to have the games used as instruments of moral instruction.

Another thing the episode explained was the crusading element of Monopoly which celebrated wealth and avarice in the wake of the Great Depression. Monopoly is considered to be the most capitalist of games and was ironically derived from a radical socialist game which was first published in Britain 1913.

The presenter then talks about how Cluedo, Scrabble and Monopoly were the somewhat holy trinity of British family favourite games and they still are nowadays as most households have at least one of these games.

Bibliography

We learned how to correctly reference books using the Harvard style of referencing. Here are some examples of how it should be done.


Schell, J (2008) The art of game design: a book of lenses. Amsterdam; London: Morgan Kaufmann.

Brathwaite, B. and  Schreiber, I. (2008) Challenges For Game Designers. Boston: Charles River Media/Cengage

Robertson, J. & Howells, C. 2008, "Computer Game Design: Opportunities for successful learning", Computers & Education, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 559-578.

Simon Parsons 2010, "Critical Play: Radical Game Design", The Knowledge Engineering Review, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 353.

Dicing With Destiny

We were shown the first of three episodes of a program called Games Britannia. It was about the origins of games such as Chess, Draughts and Backgammon as well as the history of ancient games such as Nine Men's Morris which is engraved in stone all over the country.

There was a section about how the Church didn't condone gambling as it was seen as the work of the devil. The church replaced dice with spinners in the late 18th century because the dice was seen to be affiliated with the devil. The church believes games should be played to pass the time and for fun.

There was also a section about the origins of snakes & ladders, which is derived from the game "Moksha Patam", a popular game in ancient India. It is known as the game of knowledge or the role of fate or karma. In Victorian England, 1892, Moksha Patam inspired the creation of snakes & ladders. Moksha Patam was meant to represent the quest of enlightenment although, unlike snakes & ladders, you could be removed from the competition by becoming trapped in the eternal loop of paradise. This game was created to pass the time and to be played while you are contemplating your life and its meaning although in modern western games we tend to lose interest quickly as we play games to win. That is why the "Exact Roll" mechanic has been removed from most western games.