Feel the Magic
October 10th, 2008
The other day I was reminiscing with my brother about our childhood as wide-eyed, avid game fans. Back then gaming seemed to possess this wonderfully infectious energy about it that saw you and all your friends enchanted by its very greatness.
My brother then asked me if games were still this magical today, and I think it is. The only difference between now and then is that now I’m older, and have a greater understanding of everything that is going in within the industry, hence the excitement of the unknown has somewhat faded. Where as being a child, in a time before internet, you could only know as much as your surroundings would let you.
I don’t think that the magic has wanned and I don’t plan on going to go all starry-eyed and talk about the “good old days”. No doubt there are certain generations or time periods in the history of games which I prefer over others, but overall we’ve run a pretty steady trek. It’d be hard to waiver one time being significantly more better than another.
Despite the evenness of our history, I can’t deny it, there is a magic to familiarizing yourself with something new. When you slowly begin to make sense of the experience for the first time there is this uplifting feelings that fills up inside you. No doubt many of us who have played games for a long time, experienced this feeling as kids. I guess you could say that we had this feeling during our gaming prime. So hold that thought for a moment and let’s think about these guys:
All those Mums, Dads, Aunties, Uncles and the elderly that are now traversing their gaming prime, going through that same experience like us for the first time thanks to developers like Nintendo and PopCap Games.
We might all be too brute to acknowledge it but we were all beginners at one stage or another. We all started off playing fairly privative, simplified games and yes we didn’t like the feeling of others who were better at it than us but we endeavored and here we are. These new people coming into the market are no different from us 10, 15, 20 years ago when our fascination piqued. They too are now settling into their gaming prime and I think that’s fantastic. So let’s try and encourage this rather phenomena than dismiss it.
I Was Born in a Cross-Fire Hurricane
September 14th, 2008
Those are the very words that drive fear into every man’s heart unfortunate enough to encounter the wraith of ‘Jumping Jack Flash’.
I usually try and steer clear of bold claims regarding my skills at playing video games. I play for fun and quite often challenge so there is really no need for it. Sometimes though, we all need to prove our worth and laud in our own greatness. Particularly for me - running this blog, it is my job to instill faith into you readers, to give you the confidence in my place as a writer and knowledgeable commentator (not that I am either of the two). In this case, illusion is an easy solution but, no not this time.
I snapped this picture of my high score of Elite Beat Agent’s final song: Jumping Jack Flash on the hardest difficulty with the Elite Beat Divas filling in for the much loved agents. I could return to the game and get a perfect run quite easily as the two mistakes made were caused due to improvising the final part of the song but no, I can’t, this game is too much. I filmed this with the family digital camera but unfortunately it only saves in .mov and Windows XP video editing software doesn’t like .mov.
What do you say now? Credible? ^_^
The Power of Language in Games
September 3rd, 2008
Language is a powerful tool. The overall significance of language regarding current art forms moves along a sliding scale dependent on the medium in question. Books survive only within the context of language, language is often crucial but by no means an essential part of music and film - as in games - is perhaps the least important. The further removed words are from creating the actual experience (and onto visual, rhythm and gameplay cues) the less significant the role of language appears to be.
Despite this paradigm, the youth of this medium (video games) places a heavy reliance on language to often fill in for the role of gameplay. We use narrative to create context in ways that gameplay cannot currently achieve. As gameplay evolves though so will its ability to self narrate the experience. We can already see this taking place with the role of context sensitive actions (Resident Evil 4) and in game narrative (Halflife 2) as examples. Hence, over time the heavy reliance of language disappears, changing its role to being another tool in the game design tool box. Ignoring the foresight though, language shall always be significant in games much as it is to movies and music. I want to use this article to explore several past examples of the diverse use of language in games. This isn’t intended to cover the complete history of language in games but rather a few noteworthy posts along the path of application.
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