Topic: High Scores

After watching the documentary "The King of Kong: A FistFul of Quarters" (a film I will be referencing throughout the semester) I came across an interesting difference between the "original" gamers from the late 1970's and 1980's and the modern gamers. This difference is in the reasons and goals that the players have in playing video games, especially for hours after hours.

The obvious fact that the original video games were not nearly as sophisticated as the ones today, so the main aspect of a game was to see how high of a points total you could achieve. The film was based on a man trying to get the world record in Donkey Kong points, but whether it be that game or PacMan, Frogger, Centipede, etc, game players would spend hours and hours in trying to acheive the highest score possible.

This has changed in recent years. Most games that are made now are played with the objective of completing the game. The idea of a high score is not as important as it used to be. While the object of scoring points in some games still remains, the goal of getting a high score does not matter. No longer do you type your intials into a roster where they will stay until someone beats it. In the popular games such as Call of Duty, Fallout, Halo, etc the objective of the game is to complete it and much of the time once this is done the player moves onto a different game.

Of course, there are some games that still use a points system but they are not as prominent as they once were. Players do not spend hours playing a game to get a high score, they play to beat the game. I think this is something interesting that I had not thought of until after I watched this film.

The film gave me a lot of of ideas to think about which have not occured to me before. Even though I have been playing video games ever since the original Atari and when they still had Arcades, it is not as easy to see the evolution of video games and the type of gaming culture that changes with it.

More Planning

Yesterday was a pretty straight forward day. I spent a majority of the class period writing out what different types of coding I was going to need to know how to do in order to make my game. It was a very helpful exercise to be honest because it helped me to understand what I actually needed to do. Once I wrote it down I realized that there was a lot more coding that I was going to need than I originally thought.

The hardest part of the game I am going to have to code I think will be the collision detection between the characters and the actual "maze" part of the game board. Because Fred (or the enemies) are not going to be able to go outside the designated boundaries I am going to have to code the board in a fashion that keeps them in this space. I don't know if this will be the most difficult but I do think it's going to be the most time consuming.

After this I spent the remaining time planning on re-organizing/formatting the game board. I like the original draft we created last semester but I need to make sure that all the blank spaces are even and that the board is not too crowded. I may have to remove a section of shelves to make more space for the game movement. Hopefully it all goes well.

Research Topic

Through out the semester I will writing about a certain subject that has to do with video games. What I have decided on, which is something that I find pretty interesting, is what I call "Video Game Society". I want to look at the differences between Classic video gamers (such as the original Pac Man/Donkey Kong, etc) players and the modern gamers. It is not unknown that with the invention of household consoles such as Playstation or Xbox that it is easier for people to become deeply involved in video games.

I also want to look at how the older game players few the modern game players and what they think about the new types of games that are being released. There is a major difference in games from the Donkey Kong era to the Call of Duty era and I would like to find out some information on what people think about this. Do the older game players find these newer games to be fun, addictive, or challenging or are the original games more complicated and addictive?

I think that also looking at the evolution of video games and game playing will add a great deal to this research topic. At this moment I think that there is a greater increase in the number of hardcore game players but I would like to see if I can find a difference in the amount of effort that it takes to be a constant (possibly compulsive) game player.

Designing the game

Today was a pretty simple day in what I did during class. I basically went through the different scenes (or the seperate section of the game) and wrote in detail what they will look like, what the player will do on certain scenes, and what actions would happen. I also noted what type of music would be in the scene, even though I have not developed any yet.

I did not think much about this assignment at first, but the more I wrote about the different scenes and stages of the game, I realized that this is going to be very helpful. I knew in my head what was going to happen, but by writing it all down it became more concrete. Now I can look back and see what I had planned on doing and this should help me keep track of what I need to do and hopefully make a project schedule easier to follow because I know have a written list of things I need to accomplish.

My Semester Goals

For this semester I basically have one solid goal I want to achieve. I want to fully complete my game. This sounds like a major goal, and it is, but I believe it should be a capable achievement. The main thing I will have to do is to learn and initiate the flash coding to have the game work as I want it to. From last semester, I still have all the elements that I will need to create the game, such as the characters and the game board. I will just need to edit them somewhat and change certain elements and do some resizing. But since I have more time this semester and more skills to do this it should not be a problem.

What I mainly have to concentrate on is learning the code such as collision detection and other effects. This is my main goal for the semester. I plan to have at least a simple, fully functional game that works. Even if the effects are not as well done as I would like them to be.

I will also be researching a specific area of video games and post weekly blogs about what I have discovered about this specific issue. At the moment, I want to look into the video game culture and the differences between the old school and new school types of gamers. Depending on the information I find

A New Semester

I have returned after the Christmas break and will soon be back to working on my game. There are some elements I need to fix, such as the game board and a few of the characters (mostly with resizing) and elements I need to add such as the coding. What I will also be doing this semester is researching and blogging on a specific subject that deals with video games. At this moment I am thinking about aiming towards the video game culture, specifically dealing with classic gamers vs. modern gamers. Hopefully I will find some good sources that will give me some useful information.