Wednesday 20 November 2013

Defining A Genre (personal enquiry draft 1 - research)

I think the diversity of the genres that have popped up over the the years are one of the more important occurrences. This is also very much linked with the technological limitations at the time, gaming had to reach a certain point before a lot of games were even possible. I decided to research in to various games that I initially consider to be the first of their kind, upon researching them I found this not to be true however the games I did choose are considered by many to be the defining games of each genre. These are games that are the first to include certain conventions that have since been in most games of that genre since, conventions such as the alarm phases or the lack of weapons in Metal Gear to the lack of health items and ammunition in Resident Evil.

I would like to go into a lot more detail on one of these games, talking about how it established genres as we know them and why the game is important. The genres that made the biggest impact out of the ones I researched are the FPS, Stealth and Survival horror genre. Out of the three games in those genres I chose I've only played Metal Gear solid and Resident evil. So I will more than likely elaborate on one of these. Metal gear added a lot to stealth in 1998 and continues to add to it now with new innovative mechanics each game, the success of Metal Gear Solid, which sold over six million copies, was crucial to popularising the stealth genre, and in the years that followed, stealth-based game-play became a feather in the cap of a number of different series. Splinter Cell and Assassin’ s Creed were exponents of heavily stealth-orientated play. Resident evil also another game where its conventions carry forward in to other games and established our understanding of survival horror. It took a genre and reshaped it in to a new one, which added a great sense of realism and a lot more tension. Whilst the voice acting was terrible it was probably one of the best games on the PlayStation. Now however this franchise has fell a bit flat, whilst Resident Evil 4 felt like a fresh re-imagining of resident evil, 5 and 6 became to action orientated and have slightly lost what made them great in the early days. 



References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2009/10/30/ign-presents-the-history-of-survival-horror?page=4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqpAIUZbZo
http://www.gamesradar.com/the-sneaky-history-of-stealth-games/

Tuesday 12 November 2013

Gaming history -1980s-90s



Huh?! What was that noise?

These two decades are considered to be some of the most important so far due to the innovation that occurred during them and how they spawned the infamous "console war" which still rages today. From "blast processing" to the creation of handheld system, the 80s saw leaps and bounds in technological advances. Which meant as technology progressed games were always at the cutting edge. Some of my earliest gaming memories include playing Streets of Rage on the Mega Drive, this being one of my first experiences of video games, I look back on it now and question how good it actually is, is it just nostalgic to me now? But in its time it was considered one of the best games on the system and is popular among many gamers.

It wasn't all fun and games for the industry in the 80s towards the start of the decade sales of games and consoles began to slump due to over saturation of the market. There was a massive recession in 1983, revenues that were previously at 3.2 billion fell to 100 million. It was caused by a variety of things but the main cause was over-saturation. Nintendo however managed to rescue it, with its Nintendo Entertainment System in 1984. Launched in Japan a year before as the Nintendo Famicom, its massive popularity made Nintendo see the potential of this console and decided to market it in North America. Nintendo did originally plan to market the console with the company Atari however after some debates about licensing Nintendo decided to market it on its own. Another big thing that came out of the early 80s is more diversity in game styles and genre, this is something that has constantly expanded since the 80s. Action, RPG, beat em up, hack and slash and platformers all come from the 80s. Games like The Legend of Zelda and Metal gear helped established genres in the 80s and still continue to develop the genre and new games in the series today.

A sample of the quality of NES games, amazing at the time but not so much anymore. (Metal Gear)


The next and probably most important innovation of the late 80s is the arrival of the gameboy. Its younger colour sibling was the first console I personally owned and never really put down for the next 5 years. It offered amazing NES like 8-bit cpu graphics on the go, if you could live with the cost of batteries and the inability to see the screen it was fantastic. Its success greatly depended on the game Tetris which was released soon after launch and massively boosted sales. This was the creation of an all new type of games console. The next couple years saw the a considerable improvement graphics wise with the release of the Sega Mega Drive and soon after the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) which offered colour realistic Graphics and rich colours. Then in 1995/6 the playstation and N64 were released which ushered in the era of 32- bit gaming, offering colourful animated 3D games with "realistic textures". We also owned a PS1, i remember playing Tomb Raider and not being able to get past the first level for hours. In fact one of my all time favourite games, Metal Gear Solid, is on the PS1. The machines internals allowed for a cinematic movie like experience, with real voice acting which made for meaningful stories. The level of detail and scale also increased and allowed for more of an artistic license with character and environment design.

Along side the rise of the console the pc always remained ever so slightly ahead, following the success of the oh so useful Apple 2(see below) in the 70s, personal computer power grew a lot through the 80s. Whilst PCs were much more powerful in comparison to consoles but this also meant they were A LOT more expensive as consoles were aimed more at families and young people. 1993 saw the release of one of the first FPS games, Doom 3D which was also one of the first 3D games. Games also came on CD-ROM disks which allowed for a lot more storage in comparison to ROM cartridges. In the late 90s the pc also saw the release of the classic pc game, Unreal Tournament which was praised heavily for its Bot AI and is also one of the first games to integrate online play across the internet. In the next decade comes the consoles we know very well, consoles that include full HD realistic graphics, gameplay and online play is taken for granted by many. I shall continue this in the next blog post.


In the start of this TED talk, Maeda discusses what the Apple 2, a revoloutionary piece of tech can actually do

References:
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_how_art_technology_and_design_inform_creative_leaders.html?utm_source=email&source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share - Ted Talk
http://www.consoleclassix.com/info_img/Metal_Gear_NES_ScreenShot3.gif - Metal gear Pic
http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,2029221,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games#Golden_age_of_video_arcade_games_.281978.E2.80.931986.29
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/Corporate/Nintendo-History/Game-Boy/Game-Boy-627031.html
http://www.classicgaming.com/features/articles/computergaminghistory/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Genesis
http://www.geeksquad.co.uk/articles/gaming/2012/07/the_history_of_pc_gaming


Friday 1 November 2013

A history of Computer Games part I: A history of computers - 1970s

Why do we play games? Why did we start to make and play games? For entertainment purposes... Right?

These were the questions I found myself asking after my recent lectures on the history of computers, common sense would tell you they are and were made for fun however initially that's not necessarily true, the first ever game was in fact made to demonstrate the hardware developed for a laboratory annual exposition by a scientist that also worked on nuclear weapons. The game was tennis for two and was created by William Higinbotham and took a few weeks to create. From this point onwards it was more recognised as a form of entertainment and was seen as something that could potentially become profitable however things were quite slow until the 70s. This is later proven by the boom in different consoles in the 80s but ill go in to detail on this in a later blog post.

The Jacquard Loom built in 1801 was considered one of the first steps towards modern computing, it was able to produce different patterns by inserting different cards with holes in it. Although the loom did no computation based on them it was it was considered a conceptual precursor to computer programming. Another major step in computing was the difference engine, it is essentially the first attempt at the calculator. This was more of a concept as it was never actually built due to needing very precise parts which could not be produced at the time but it has been built since and has been proven to work. It is also one of the first examples of input and output as it would punch the results in to a piece of paper afterwards.
Here is an example of a Jacquard Loom and the hole-punched paper output i mentioned.

If you were to do a quick internet search for women in technology you wouldn't find too much. Very rarely do stories of women in the tech business vary from people saying "where are the women?".Women in fact helped pioneer technology as much as men did, An example of this is Ada Lovelace. She directly helped create the first computer and through her notes she is recognised as the first computer programmer.

Here is the game Tennis for two running on its original machine, you also saw the device used to control it which is potentially the first ever control pad

From a young age we had a computer, I vaguely remember only being able to use it after 6pm due to the dial up connection however at other times I remember playing Command and Conquer for hours on end. This was probably my first experience with gaming other than my brothers Sega Mega Drive. Computers, are something we have taken for granted for many years now, our generation has grown up with them and they will continue to be integrated in to society more as companies and designers innovate. Computers have been around for hundreds of years however its not until the 1950s that technology started to become powerful enough to run basic games and the know-how to produce said games came about. This brings us back to Tennis For Two which was first introduced in 1958 created at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Probably one of the biggest advancement in technology in the past few hundred years is the Cathode Ray Tube or CRT display which first came around in 1897 and has been adapted and perfected over the years. In 1947 the first interactive electronic game using a CRT screen was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr and Estle Ray Mann. This was the first recorded interactive electronic game although this is argued. It was never marketed or released to the public but was patented in 1948. This was considered one of the biggest steps toward arcade and home gaming. As mentioned earlier, the first video game was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham and was called Tennis for Two, it was played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope. Many adaptations of this game and other attempts at sports based games came from this also but this then led to another notable game, Spacewar, made in 1962 and is the first game to be based off something that doesn't actually exist. This then essentially became the first arcade game later in 1971 and was then followed by the arcade version of pong a year later, this year also marked the creation of Atari. Four years later pong was released for home consoles. The first ever video game console you could plug in to the television was the Magnavox Odessey By many pong is considered to be the first game to be created however this is a common misconception, this is just one of the first few games to be released on console. At this point games and gaming consoles began to look more recognisable with handheld devices to control it and the ability to plug it into the tv.

The golden age of gaming soon follows however i will continue this in a future blog post.
Image,Video reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PG2mdU_i8k - Tennis for two video
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Jacquard_loom_p1040320.jpg Jacquard loom picture
http://phandroid.com/2012/02/10/relive-the-golden-age-of-gaming-with-cpsemu-cps2-emulator-for-android/ 80s games image
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4dPSOncwVQ - A cheesey American documentary that proved rather helpful


General Reference:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-arcade-for-amusement-only
http://classicgames.about.com/od/history/tp/HistoricWomeninClassicGames.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two
http://www.bnl.gov/about/history/firstvideo.php
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/jacquard.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
https://www.atariage.com/
http://classicgames.about.com/od/classicvideogames101/p/CathodeDevice.htm









Tuesday 22 October 2013

Introduction

I suppose I should introduce myself and what this blog is about, I am a student at Leicester De Montfort University studying Game Art Design and I will be keeping this blog to document my studies and thoughts over the next three years. I will try to keep this blog relatively professional and formal but I will be sure to keep it interesting and personal too.

Previous to starting this course, I studied A-level Applied Art (double award), AS- level Art History and A-level photography at New College Nottingham. I chose these subjects mainly because they all link together, I found myself framing my art work more efficiently using the techniques learnt from photography and looking more at the lighting conditions before I start sketching. Many things inspire me, I always try to draw from life as I think it is the best way to improve and progress however I find that film, TV and music inspire me most. Films like Koyaanisqatsi, Fight Club and pulp fictions are all great films to look at in terms of camera work, I find studying the camera work of films can help with composition.

 I cant really remember a time where I wasn't drawing, it doesn't really feel right if a day has gone by and I haven't picked up a pencil at some point. I'm really looking forward to next year, my tutors call it boot camp due to the amount we learn and the work we do, so far it's living up to the name.

I was gaming from a quite young age too, mainly on older consoles, nothing really impressed and inspired me too much, I just took it for granted like most things as a kid. Its not until I played games like Metal Gear Solid and Shadow of the Colossus that I was truly impressed and inspired, I began to look at games as more of an art form and started to be more analytical of what I played. In my opinion the perfect game comprises of 3 things. Firstly, an amazing, interesting story filled with interesting and relatable characters with realistic emotions. Secondly, jaw dropping visuals, whether realistic or stylized, they must be interesting and engaging whilst trying to be innovative in some way. For example the visual style of the latest Deus Ex game (Deus ex: Human Revolution - Square Enix) is based on the Renaissance oil paint technique; Chiaroscuro meaning light and dark in English. Thirdly and probably the most important is passion, you can really tell when the people behind the game are actually passionate about said game. The designs, characters, environments and story telling are all unique. I think as an artist you must show how passionate you are within your work or the work will pass by unnoticed. The experiences you have in the life, the places you go and the people meet all fuel this passion.

Over the next few years I will share my experiences and I hope to show my progression as an artist. I also hope to better understand the games industry, its intricacies and how it all works. I hope I haven't sounded too pretentious in this post and I am looking forward to seeing what the next few years bring.