Values@Play
Find the value of “PEACE” in videogames, hopefully in gameplay situations.
To start the assignment I thought the value of peace would be easy, since it’s a concept that a lot of games that involve any type of violence (a lot) touch, so my goal for this assignment is not to only look for the obvious cases but to cross the line of the simple value of peace and try to explore it in more non-expected situations.
To start my first game when I can find the value of peace is with the obvious answer of the game Peacemaker.
As the game states the game is all about a simulation of the Israel-Palestinian conflict where in many situations the conflict will continue, but as shows in the previous video in second 00:43 there is the possible solution of being able to simulate a specific situation where both countries stop war and are at peace.
The previous sample is of course the first thing that came to my mind for the assignment, and of course to go in the same type of games, Civilization is also a game where during the experience you will be able to sign peace treaties which shows another perfect example of the value of peace as Peacemaker so for that reason I won’t go deep in that example.
Now to go a little deep into Peace in videogames I look at Wikipedia for the definition of peace: “a state of tranquility or quiet” or “A state of security or order within a community”. As this definition shows the concept of peace can be very related to war games, not as a specific event, but as a main goal. To demonstrate this I show the following video of Command and Conquer.
As the video states, the purpose of Kane (game character) in the game is to fight a war with the ultimate goal of achieving peace as a final event. So if we look at any aspect of the game, it’s not wrong to assume that all the actions of play either by allied or enemies are with the purpose of achieving peace at the end. Additionally if this example of peace works, we could assume that most war games nowadays are all about peace, as a sample I put Call of Duty, where the end of the game is to end the war and thanks to that all of our actions are tools toward ending the conflict at the end, or also knows as achieving peace.
To conclude maybe the value of peace itself is not what the goal of war games like Command and Conquer are trying to show, but since they are touching the concept of war, they are also involving the concept of peace in their games. But for what the value of peace show in a game, I believe that Peacemaker is probably the only good example thanks that the game is trying to show this as a design aspect, and other games might be able to do it more slightly like Civilizacion or even Spore where you may take the peace or war path, but its not the main goal of the game for these last two examples.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
The magic of opening a new game
Of all the topics covered in class, there was one that called my attention above all other, it was when we talked about how new games have achievements and new ways of calling players attention and attracting them into buying your game. All of this was normal but is this really necessary? And why was this not necessary 15 years ago on the time when we just went to our local game store and just pick a game depending on the name and the box.
Let’s begin by thinking how the gaming industry advertisement worked 15 years ago; at that moment I was a kid so let’s think how the industry tried to approach a kid during that time. The first part of a game advertisement was television, as expected (today is more common) like nowadays this way of advertisement was the way to get the public to get to know what products are currently on the market.
The next step of game advertisement was the box art, which was meant for people to go into the store and according to the name of the game and the box art (which included the front of the box and the game images on the back) they decided if the game was worth buying it. An example of this I can recall buying the game “Spider-Man –X-Men: Arcades revenge”.
If we do a simple analysis of the game cover above, it is very appealing for a player at a young age, first of all it has a great quantity of characters that means that you are going to play with them or at least fight with them. Also this characters are really famous (thanks to comics and cartoon shows of the time period) which make it really exciting to play with your favorite heroes. But most important, what this box shows, is the battle between the characters which tells us that it is going to be an action packed game which we will enjoy a lot for a great amount of time.
Thanks to all of these messages that the box communicated I bought this game and was deeply satisfied by how fun it was, and the same goes for old games like “Rock’n Roll racing” where just the name of racing with awesome music was enough to buy a game, and just the excitement to not knowing what type of game until you opened it, made it a magical moment when you opened the box and played it for the first time, and that is what I call “The magic of opening a new game”.
Now if we jump to today, what are the aspects we think about, when looking to buy a game, if we compare it to the last statement, television commercials are still presenting us with games, but, nowadays we have a new aspect that a lot of people keep in mind when buying a game and that is Game Reviews.
The main purpose of game reviews is to show the public the quality of games, and suggest them if the game is worth buying, according to other people, or other “experts”; opinion, but is this really good for the industry? Nowadays game development if we compare it to 15 years ago, fewer games are coming out but more important, games are less risky. The reason for this last part is that taking risk for a new game idea may result in a terrible review which will result in terrible sales. If we think about the first years of gaming taking a game where you would play like a porcupine or as elf might sound like fun, and thanks to that legends like Sonic and Zelda were born, but if we think about it, if we just come out with an idea nowadays of playing a game as a first person view and it focuses on running and not killing we might think is a lot of fun, but when we take Mirrors Edge (which has that main concept) and evaluate it in its Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay and Lasting Appeal (IGN reviews) of course we will find that it has some glitches, but if we go deeply in the game, it is the unique idea makes it a great game that is worth playing.
Thanks to this review standards that exist nowadays for games, companies have started to look for other options for calling players attention, like Downloadable Content and Achievements, where we come to create the terms of “achievement whores” who are players that play terrible games just to get the easy achievements. This new ways to get players, may not be wrong, but it is not the right way to go, because it shows that the industry is just giving up on quality and worrying more on random sales which is why now we have so many games that qualify as “shovelware” which are games that are just developed as fast as possible without worrying about its content.
In conclusion the industry has changed a lot, personally I miss the days where we could just go to the store pick up a game just by looking at the picture and live the “magic” of opening this new game, now when we buy a game we already know what graphics to expect, what time is it going to take me to beat it and we know a number which means how much I will enjoy it. Personally this is wrong and it has taken the fun out of a lot of games, that if we were able to play it almost blindly like when we were young they would be tons of fun.
So what can we do to recover “The magic of opening a new game”? Actually I don’t know, but if we as game developers stop worrying about the dumb aspects of game reviews, press comments and more about what can I make that will make gamers go “Wow!, this is awesome” maybe that could be the next generation of gaming.
Let’s begin by thinking how the gaming industry advertisement worked 15 years ago; at that moment I was a kid so let’s think how the industry tried to approach a kid during that time. The first part of a game advertisement was television, as expected (today is more common) like nowadays this way of advertisement was the way to get the public to get to know what products are currently on the market.
The next step of game advertisement was the box art, which was meant for people to go into the store and according to the name of the game and the box art (which included the front of the box and the game images on the back) they decided if the game was worth buying it. An example of this I can recall buying the game “Spider-Man –X-Men: Arcades revenge”.
If we do a simple analysis of the game cover above, it is very appealing for a player at a young age, first of all it has a great quantity of characters that means that you are going to play with them or at least fight with them. Also this characters are really famous (thanks to comics and cartoon shows of the time period) which make it really exciting to play with your favorite heroes. But most important, what this box shows, is the battle between the characters which tells us that it is going to be an action packed game which we will enjoy a lot for a great amount of time.
Thanks to all of these messages that the box communicated I bought this game and was deeply satisfied by how fun it was, and the same goes for old games like “Rock’n Roll racing” where just the name of racing with awesome music was enough to buy a game, and just the excitement to not knowing what type of game until you opened it, made it a magical moment when you opened the box and played it for the first time, and that is what I call “The magic of opening a new game”.
Now if we jump to today, what are the aspects we think about, when looking to buy a game, if we compare it to the last statement, television commercials are still presenting us with games, but, nowadays we have a new aspect that a lot of people keep in mind when buying a game and that is Game Reviews.
The main purpose of game reviews is to show the public the quality of games, and suggest them if the game is worth buying, according to other people, or other “experts”; opinion, but is this really good for the industry? Nowadays game development if we compare it to 15 years ago, fewer games are coming out but more important, games are less risky. The reason for this last part is that taking risk for a new game idea may result in a terrible review which will result in terrible sales. If we think about the first years of gaming taking a game where you would play like a porcupine or as elf might sound like fun, and thanks to that legends like Sonic and Zelda were born, but if we think about it, if we just come out with an idea nowadays of playing a game as a first person view and it focuses on running and not killing we might think is a lot of fun, but when we take Mirrors Edge (which has that main concept) and evaluate it in its Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay and Lasting Appeal (IGN reviews) of course we will find that it has some glitches, but if we go deeply in the game, it is the unique idea makes it a great game that is worth playing.
Thanks to this review standards that exist nowadays for games, companies have started to look for other options for calling players attention, like Downloadable Content and Achievements, where we come to create the terms of “achievement whores” who are players that play terrible games just to get the easy achievements. This new ways to get players, may not be wrong, but it is not the right way to go, because it shows that the industry is just giving up on quality and worrying more on random sales which is why now we have so many games that qualify as “shovelware” which are games that are just developed as fast as possible without worrying about its content.
In conclusion the industry has changed a lot, personally I miss the days where we could just go to the store pick up a game just by looking at the picture and live the “magic” of opening this new game, now when we buy a game we already know what graphics to expect, what time is it going to take me to beat it and we know a number which means how much I will enjoy it. Personally this is wrong and it has taken the fun out of a lot of games, that if we were able to play it almost blindly like when we were young they would be tons of fun.
So what can we do to recover “The magic of opening a new game”? Actually I don’t know, but if we as game developers stop worrying about the dumb aspects of game reviews, press comments and more about what can I make that will make gamers go “Wow!, this is awesome” maybe that could be the next generation of gaming.
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