Going Cardboard

In eddies lesson today we watched a episode called Going Cardboard I found it fairly interesting as it was all about board games, it was mainly following people that still play them a lot as a hobby. It was quite nice see that even though the digital games industry in booming; board games are still being made and enjoyed.

We were also shown how popular board games have come to be, by seeing an extremely large convention in Germany that was dedicated to board games itself. It was great to see so many people support this.

New Games Journalism

·    this lesson with ed we learnt about Old games journalism and explored mechanics, graphics and controls.

in this lesson we also looked at New games journalism and how it 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 prefer 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 plus sides and negative sides to them but each of them would only appeal to different target audiences or possibly the same because if someone who had been shown the new style review and wanted to know more about how the game works then they could read about it in either of these styles.

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La decima vittima

this week we watched a film called La Decima Vittima (The Tenth Victim). The film was based on people pretending to fake assassinate each other. In this film people could gain a licence and from this they would gradually receive a photograph and a name of their that they would then have to assassinate. All the assassinations would lead up towards the tenth and final target and  whoever killed the victim would get the prize of money.

I feel this film influenced pervasive games. These are games that are in collaboration with the real world and real time. During this lesson we also watched a short documentary which was based on the game called Killer.

In killer people of the real world faked to be assassins. While doing this they would receive a picture and a name of a target (another person)this is exactly how the film above was. It would then be their job to find out as much about the other player. Eventually they would have to assassinate them using non violent weapons such as a wooden spoon, nurf guns, umbrellas etc. 

Games Britannia: “Joystick Generation” :

this week in eddies lesson we watched the third episode of Games Britannia, in this we saw how Britain moved on to digital games, in this we saw games such as PAC-MAN and space invaders, two of the most famous classic arcade games which are still played today and have inspired countless games.it goes on to explore games from the 1990's it specificity talks about game characters that came about such as Lara Croft. We then moved on to when internet gaming first appeared and how MMO's became extremely popular such as World Of Warcraft.

I found this lesson fun as it was good to taje a look back and see how far games have come with a short space of time, 

Ancient game Tweaking

·       In this lesson with ED we were introduced to our upcoming assignment that was about tweaking an ancient game and making our own iteration to it and write an essay about our iterations and our discoveries, during this lesson we took our time to chose which ancient game we wanted to change and start thinking about what things could be changed, over this lesson and a few others we where given the time to play test our experiments and record our results and get other opinions on it, I chose the royal game of Ur and I feel my iterations went well and I felt my iterations where fun to play as well.

British museum trip

unfortunately I missed out on this trip but after speaking with fellow classmates they said it was a trip that I should have been on as I missed a good opportunity to see some wonderful things so I am thinking of taking a trip up there in my spare time during the upcoming summer holidays 

Ancient games (hnefetafl)

within this lesson we learnt about another ancient  this one was called hnefetafl this game was also a board game played between two player, the scenario for this game was one team would start in the middle of the board, this team would have a piece that looked slightly different and this was the king piece the aim for this team was to get the king piece to one of the four corners before the other team who would start at different parts of the board could kill it I enjoyed playing this game a lot as there was a lot of thought behind every move no matter what side you played.

Ancient games (Ur & Senet

This lesson we were introduced to two different ancient games one was called the royal game or Ur and the other was Senet after looking through a power point and learning a bit about each board game we had a chance to play both of them with a partner, the first one for the two I tried was the royal game of Ur as it was the one that looked better in my opinion and peaked my interest the most, this was because the board was a thin board but looked like a lot of action between players would happen  and that appeals more to me. After a few games of Ur we moved on to Senet and gave that a go this game I found not to be as fun as the first but was still an enjoyable game this game lasted a bit longer than the first one as this one allowed a player to get in front of the other player and block him from passing which meant a player could play defensive and win and this is not how I enjoy playing games personally.

Remediation

During this we learnt about remediation, remediation is the incorporation or representation of one medium in another medium, for example; taking something from one game or video and then changing it even just slightly before putting it in another game or video. Another example would be adapting a book that was written and turning it  into a film. Digital media is constantly re mediating I feel this is so that the people who never played the old classic games will still get a slight understanding of how it felt to play before technology can and changed it but also so that the people who played the originals will see that there is a link between the two and will want to play or watch or buy this new remediation of the original. is the incorporation or representation of one medium in another medium, for example; taking something from one game or video and then changing it even just slightly before putting it in another game or video. Another example would be adapting a book that was written and turning it  into a film. Digital media is constantly re mediating I feel this is so that the people who never played the old classic games will still get a slight understanding of how it felt to play before technology can and changed it but also so that the people who played the originals will see that there is a link between the two and will want to play or watch or buy this new remediation of the original.