I was thinking about all of the discussions we had in class last Tuesday…the main point that stuck out to me was that there are a very limited amount of female first person perspectives in movies and in games (except the game we discussed in class).  Naturally, I set out to find such an example.  However, either this perspective doesn’t really exist, or I just have a limited range of movie and game knowledge.

So then I began to think about all of the strange perspectives I have experienced with movies, and I thought of Cloverfield.  I’m not sure which category this perspective falls under because the idea is that the film is shot from a hand held video camera.  Therefore, the characters interact with the camera as if it is another character and sometimes the camera goes back on the person filming.  Personally, although I found this technique to be interesting, I did not particularly enjoy the unsteadiness throughout the film.   If you have not seen the film, I posted a link to the trailer below.  It shows a glimpse of the style of Cloverfield…Enjoy!

Cloverfield

Today’s class discussion introduced the concept of platform point of view. The following link portrays the result of a cross between Super Mario and Half-Life 2. Point of view, along with Mario’s newly acquired weaponry, allows the audience to witness the role of point of view within a first person shooter. Combining these two genres of videogames applies multiple aspects of Galloway’s concepts.

Super Mario Bros in First Person

A second link provides a trailer to the movie “Gamer”. Although the movie correlates with numerous class discussions, the direct interaction of a first person shooter and “looks of film” are evident within this trailer. Emphasizing states of Otherness creates anxiety and estrangement within the movie and within the movie’s videogame.

Gamer – The Trailer

As I research and browse the web about the development of text-based games, I came across something very unusual yet quite intriguing.  It’s something called “play-by mail” games. This is a form of text-based game that is played through postal mail or email. I had no idea about the existence of this type of games. Apparently, chess was played through mail for a long time.  Other games include The Glory of Kings, Atlantis, and Triad Weyrs. This site provides many games including a map-based war-game that players can play by post or email. There is a price that players have to pay in order to get turns in the game.  Here is another site about a Play-by-email game called Atlantis. The players get a chance to have their turn every Sunday.

I found a game called First Age Avalon which is by far the most complex and intricate text based games I have ever come across.  There is even a economics system in the game which is huge.  The game it’s self is a text based MMORPG which explains the economics system.  This reminds me of the intuitive nature of the parchment game that we did in class on a much grander scale.

Link: http://www.lojban.org/tiki/The Lojban MOO
Lojban is a constructed language. I won’t go into a bunch of details here, but some of its main tenets are removal of ambiguity and establishment of cultural neutrality, to the extent that those are possible. For various reasons, including the relative lack of speakers, a lack of a “nation” to grow around, and even just a lack of things to do with the language, Lojbanists made a MOO. Its main “hook” is that you can make it do tons of things, but that all of the “magic” must be worked out using grammatical Lojban (ordinary speech and in particular English isn’t censored or anything, it just isn’t magical). This incidentally has the advantage of being easier to code, as Lojban is probably quite a bit easier for a computer to parse than most languages. (If you’ve ever used one of those free translation sites, you get an idea of how poorly computers “understand” English.)

Getting back to the point, I haven’t played around in it yet (my Lojban is still not all that great), and I don’t think anyone in the class probably will, but as a concept I thought this was interesting. It’s admittedly not IF exactly, and yet in some ways it is; it is more like IF than it is like a “text-based RPG”, in my opinion, based on the descriptions I’ve seen.

While browsing through a few different Google searches about Interactive Fiction, I stumbled upon an article that delves into answering a question which I have been wanting an answer to since I found out about this genre of gaming (which was when we began studying it in class). The article is actually entitled “What Makes a Good Text Adventure Game,” and a link can be found here if you care to read it.  Personally, I have always been drawn to the video games which I consider to be the “best” of their genre or type, and therefore I was very interested in an answer what a good “IF” game is (since I am only just figuring out what the games are period). The article discusses how a large vocabulary, as well as the ability to enter enough words into the game to make things specific are extremely important to making a good game. It also talks about how “good error handling” is very important, as the author notes (and I have even found from my little experience in IF games) it can be very difficult to know what is wrong with the words that I am entering without specific instruction as to what is wrong about them. The article also mentions some generic aspects of gaming that IF games should have such as a compelling story line to keep the player interested, as well as for the game to run at a fast rate so that the player does not become bored with it (although the author says this is almost outdated due to the pace that current games run). After reading the article, I have gained a much better perspective about IF games, and how they compare and contrasts to other genres we have studied in what makes them a “good” video game.

With Microsoft’s new Game Room for Xbox, they are bringing all the classic arcade games to a virtualized arcade environment for the Xbox, helping those who actually remember what playing games on stand-up arcade classics relive those memories.  Nostalgia aside, this looks like a really interesting way for new and old fans alike to appreciate these classic games in the mall-like arcades that they were first popularized in.  Not only that, Microsoft was able to emulate inserting coins and entering in codes on a virtual keypad, just as you would in an arcade.  It should definitely be an unique game to pick up when it launches on March 24th. As linked above, Engadget has an excellent quick walk-through video for those interested in seeing what the game looks like during gameplay.

I brought this game up in class on Tuesday and I thought I’d post some links here as well.  To get to the actual game just scroll way down and type the serial number (851108) into that text box and click Go.

http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

And if you, like I, are easily frustrated with this genre because of the seemingly limitless number of possible actions I’ll also provide you with this:

http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/walkthroughs/hitchhikersguidewalk.htm

So that’s the original version Douglas Adams & co. worked up, but here’s a newer version that incorporates a few minimalist graphics.  An interesting addition to the IF genre, in my opinion, that retains all the frustration of the simple text-based version and yet expands upon it by letting me visualize what it is I’m not understanding.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nolan.shtml

I found the interactive fiction information very interesting and wanted to see if there was any game or article that was different to take it even a step further. I found this game called CircumReality

http://www.circumreality.com/index.html

It is a multiplayer interactive fiction game but has a visual screen. The player is still typing in things but they are not searching and exploring the setting, they are searching and exploring the other computer-generated characters. Their whole claim to fame seems to be that they are not “killing” computer-generated characters, but befriending them and exploring their personalities by doing and asking things.

I did not play the game but think that it seems like a very interesting experience. It is in so many words exploring a humans personality as a setting or a landscape and using this to explore the game.

Though I regrettably missed Tuesday’s class, I found little difficulty in thinking of ways that music associated with my favorite game has impacted me and my tastes.  For those of you who don’t know, I love Starcraft.  I especially love professional Starcraft, which has a vibrant and lucrative circuit in South Korea.  It’s often hard for Americans to visualize a screaming crowd of thousands of people who have gathered to watch nerds play an RTS made in 1998, but trust me, it happens.  Not only does it happen, but it is televised, and as a television production professional Starcraft has its own high-budget intros and segues.  The musical accompaniments to these bits are often adoloscent pop rock with the occasional scream (Saosin, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, etc.) or various other pop songs, such as “My Life Would Suck Without You.”  Even Nightwish (God forbid) isn’t completely unheard of.  Either way they are almost always American pop songs, and always remixed to some degree.  The end result is that I inevitably develop sentimental attachments to music that ranges from “not my taste” to “straight awful.”  You know you love a game when it makes you get goosebumps every time you hear the right Kelly Clarkson song.  I dare you to watch these clips and not feel pumped for Starcraft afterward.

First, a tasteful clip of a bunch of nerds underwater set to Kelly Clarkson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hEsuyHgtzI

Second, a rather creative comic-book-style intro set to some lovely Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.  After the intro you’ll get a great shot of the crowds I mentioned.  If you’re REALLY bold you’ll watch the whole game in all its amazingness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlEtGZFuuBk

Once again my embeds don’t seem to work, so the links will have to suffice. On an ironic note, most professional Starcraft players turn the actual game music off while playing, as many feel it hurts their concentration (though there are a few notable exceptions).

When I think of games and music, I think of emotions. I think of how I get invested in games due to the music. I think music is one of the easiest ways for people to connect. When I think of successful games I immediately think of the songs I associate with them, that may just be me, but I think a lot of other people do it as well.

I also feel like music adds to a game and can really make or break a game. One game that I’m sure would be “meh” on it’s own, but is amazing because of the music is Adult Swim’s Robot Unicorn Attack:

http://games.adultswim.com/robot-unicorn-attack-twitchy-online-game.html

So we’ve discussed a few times in class the role of stories/narrative in videogames, as well as their ability to emotionally involve the gamer. The game Heavy Rain, which was released just about a week ago, attempts to take both of these gaming elements to a new level.  This review is a nice summary of the games innovations in both narrative structure (if a character dies, the story continues without them) as well as innovative gameplay designed to blur the lines between the non-diegetic world of the gamer and the diegetic world of Heavy Rain. Decisions, morality, and consequences all play a heavy role in the game. My brother and sister both played through the game this week and reported that it does indeed pack an emotional “punch” and even said that there were times when taking one action (like killing another character) would have helped them advance towards their goal, but were unable to do so because of some emotional reaction to the scenario in the game. Seems interesting to me when considering how far games can go, and whether or not they can “make you cry”.

Video game music is not staying in its own little container. It is slowly but steadily creeping out into the real world, mixing with popular culture and breaking away from the stigma of 8-bit “noise.” The world is starting to consider video game music “real” music, as silly as that may sound. The Ivor Novello Awards have expanded to include a video game category (The MTV Music Awards had a video game category from 2004-2006, but it hasn’t reappeared since then). Video game music has also become popular in clubs and with techno fans. There are also video game cover bands, who adapt video game music into full-length songs in their own styles (my favorite is Powerglove’s Power, Wisdom, Courage— it’s Legend-of-Zelda-turned-metal). So not only is music playing a bigger part in video games, it’s also becoming recognized in the regular music world as a legitimate form of music.

Being a music minor, I have found our discussion of the ways in which music enhances videogames to be very interesting. The presence of music draws the player into the game and makes game play more exciting and worthwhile, as well as more memorable. However, the presence of music in videogames has also resulted in benefits for the music industry itself. This article discusses various music games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and even DJ Hero. Additionally, it addresses the use of music in videogames and other mediums, which is actually helping the industry make up for losses incurred by decreased CD sales. Furthermore, in the spring of 2004, the composer Nobuo Uematsu joined the LA Philharmonic in a concert which featured Uematsu’s soundtrack for Final Fantasy. As that article also describes, an event titled Video Games Live was launched in 2005, in which the world’s finest orchestras performed music from popular videogames. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly obvious that videogames and their soundtracks have grown/are growing into a significant aspect of our country’s culture. Performance of videogame music has not been limited to professional orchestras, however, for various Youtube videos can be found of high school or college-level a cappella groups singing tunes from games such as Super Mario and Zelda. In that (somewhat long) video, it is interesting to note the audience’s quick recognition of the lyric-less melodies and the singers’ mimicking of the games.