XX - Games Britannia part 2

The second instalment in games britanica is central to board games and how they have effected each other.It starts off with Monopoly, which was made in America yet the original game board was set in the Britain. This is due to the game that it was influenced by called Landlords which worked with a similar setting. Monopoly is unique because its game board relates to a location and the desigenrs keyed into this and made regional game boards based on different countries. This is part of the major success of monopoly as it could be played worldwide with the same set of rules and a different game board which felt special and personal to players world wide.

The great depression greatly influence the next generation of board games, with more family themed games appearing. Games like scrabble became very popular and have remained so until this day.

In today’s market, board games have a lot more competition, in the form of digital games, and other table top gaming formats. However they are still holding their own, many games such as monopoly have converted to the digital age and you can see gams of them being made and played all the time. New games are made online to imitate board games. Turn based strategy games are effectively a board game, being able to move units a set amount of hexes before your turn is over etc.

XIX - Story isnt important in games? o_O ... Lies

Chris Crawford talks about the fundamental requirements of a good story and a few mistakes that games might be making in comparison to other media forms.

The first argument that I relate to his document is his stress that games are about things, instead of people – yet stories are supposed to put more emphasis on people and not things. I disagree with this almost completely as games must be looked at as their own separate entity. They are not the same as a movie or a book, although very similar. The aim in a game isn’t to let you be a backseat passenger, watching all the action, you ARE the character and thusly you must play as the character doing things that your character would/could do.

Things being less important than people is true in the sense of attachment in a story, but in an MMORPG game for example, spending 3 days of training in order to fight a boss to get a powerful artefact is undoubtedly going to create attachment to that item, especially with all the built up story around it that you get from other people or players as well as the narrative.

I think MMORPGs are a great example of how objects and people mesh perfectly together, the story plays a huge role with these games (however note that most people choose to ignore the story) and other characters and other real players impact upon the game world in ways that nobody can expect. Invasions, luring monsters, stealing, killing, foulplay, alliances, etc. This all adds to make these games successful, the sheer amount of control over the story of the game. But the narrative is always driving players to find the rare items and it makes it bloody hard to get them too. Knowing that you now carry with you sword that you spent a week looking for that was used by some great ancestor and fought off the scary bad guys who stole it away many years ago gives a great sense of pride in yoru character and helps to further immerse yourself in the storyline.

He also talks about conflict and how they are usually the main focus in games, which is bad because there are many different types of drama that developers could draw upon. Well as a gamer I have played many games and I can say that although the majority of games do draw on violence (if its popular, it will make money) but so many others do use other drama types, and many use a mix of them all. Fable for example is a violence driven game, but it also uses many other drama types to solve its quests. For example if you wander off the beaten path you will find a man cheating on his wife and your given the option to turn him in or play along with his little scheme, either way you get rewarded so you choose the character you want to be.

He also talks about puzzles and them not being a fundamental part of a story. But depending on how you think of a puzzle, I don’t see how this can be further from the truth. If you think about a puzzle in relation to a story, if its all set out in front of you and you know the ending before it even begins, then you wont bother to read or watch on. This is the same with games, the story needs to unfold or be unlocked as yoru play on, and in more advanced games with multiple paths available depending on the choices you make this is even more important. The puzzles themselves define a game, how do I get from point a to point b with only my trusty spoon, if I team up with character A instead of character B I might get to X faster, but A could try and steal it all on me. These decisions wouldn’t be very important in a movie or book as you have no control, but in a game these things shape the future story and puzzles of the game, after all you can consider a game just a series of many puzzles, decision you have to make.

XVIII - Remediation

Remediation is the representation of one medium in another. This is effectively the evolution of storytelling, a crude way to look at it is beginning with talking about stories, then writing about them, then reading them, using the radio to remediate these methods, then the tv, then cinema, then games. We see each of these fields crossing over into different platforms all the time; movies, books, poems, radios, podcasts, everything is in games while also we see games and everything they contain in movies and books. Likewise without movies, games would never of been how they are today, and without games, many movies and the like would never of been the same if they existed at all.

There are 2 main types of remediation, Immediacy and Hypermediacy. The differences between them is that one tries to hide the media format it is in and attempts to draw you into the story to the point of total immersion. You forget your watching a movie or playing a game, grow real attachments to the characters and become emotionally tied to the story. The other highlights the fact that it is all structured for the enjoyment of the user, to better their experience – hand crafted for the betterment of the media. These are things like HUDs in games, or the narrator talking about himself in a movie.

Here are some great examples of remediation:

Ground Hog day – Relive the same level over and over

The Matrix – kill the bad guys, respawn and they come back again

Kill Bill – Insane superhuman fights

Heavy Rain – Interactive story / choose characters path

Knights of the old republic – Live the life of the universe made from books / movies

XVII - Females Play games ? .......

The video game industry is mainly built of men. There are very few women in the games industry and many of those that are in the industry take up the less vital roles or the ones that can be used in other fields such as marketing or HR management. A big factor to this is due to the industry being aimed at male gamers, it just isn’t very inviting to females.


That’s not to say that women are not considered when making games, it’s just that they are aimed primarily at the male gamer. Typically when you think of female games you think of puzzle games and social games, but over the past few years as online social gathering has become so immensely popular, this dividing line between female and male games has become a lot thinner and it’s becoming common fact that genders play both game types.

A lot of people would say so what; they play the games but don’t want to make them? Seems fair enough to me. But the problem is the target audience; it is a lot easier for woman to make a game aimed at other women than it is for a man, simple because they can get into the mind-set of a woman easier than any man can – at least without some form of psychology degree and many many years of studying women.

Over the past few years the amount of female gamers, the amount of time playing and the types of games they play has been increasing and signs indicate that this pattern will continue, then it makes sense that we will see more female game designers come into play and this could well mean that more and more games will be aimed with a majority of female gamers as the TA.

XVI - La Decima Vittima

La Decima Vittima is a 1965 film in which people need to risk their lives in order to get great rewards. The idea is to survive through ten rounds before you can get your reward of a million dollars and become a legend. There are many real life elements incorporated into this movie to draw people in and make it more believable, even with the comedic aspect. This is true to games as well, games like dead rising 2 has the main character killing for sport, money and the enjoyment of others.

I believe that although this film does not relate very well to today’s audiences, there is still a lot of complex emotions at play within which if made today could be expanded upon and would make for a very successful movie/game combo. Character progression with romance and the threat of death draws the viewer into the movie and wanting them to survive in much the same way as video game does.

Many movies have imitated very similar settings since this movie, lord of the flies, battle royale and the new movie the hunger games.