I’ve never been much of a fan of MMOG or virtual worlds. To be honest, until this assignment I’d never played and had little involvement in any of the games listed. The only game I’ve ever had any involvement in is World of WarCraft and my involvement in that was watching it slowly ruin my friend’s actual life. MMOGs and virtual words like World of WarCraft consume players. The main difference between the two is the objective. While there’s plenty to keep you occupied in WOW, the game is largely goal-oriented, navigating dungeons, leveling up, and defeating bosses. Second Life... Continue reading

In developing our (Vignesh Pro Studios) game, we wanted to stray from what Fron et al call the “Hegemony of play.” Our goal starting out was to create an environment where the user didn’t control a character, but rather objects and the world surrounding the player. We wanted to create a situation where there wasn’t necessarily a win or lose condition, but rather have the player “experience” our virtual world. Mostly our game was geared more towards game art, rather than mechanics. We wanted to replicate the rotoscopic views seen in films such as Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly... Continue reading

In today’s world of digital gaming, there is a clear segregation in the demographic that’s being appealed to. “Real-time strategy games conceive of space as a domain to be conquered; first-person shooters create labyrinthine battlefields in which space becomes a context for combat.” [Fullerton et al.] Each of these game types are geared towards the male gender. Fron et al. label this as the “Hegemony of play” developing games for the dominant gaming population and ignoring “minority players such as women and non-gamers.” [Fron et al.] This mind-set continues despite the fact that “inclusiveness has produced some of the best-selling... Continue reading

It seems lately that every game I rent, buy, or play derive from the same concepts: there can and must be one winner (whether it be a team or a single person), and the winner is usually the person who kills or destroys the other players or the computer characters. The Fluxus and New Games Movements sought to break away from this gaming standard. Three particular games I found that uniquely challenged the standards in the gaming world are: Rock Paper Scissors Tag, Velvet-Strike (Counter Strike patch), and Spacewar. Fron et al’s Sustainable play speaks of a number of games... Continue reading

In 1990, a revolutionary new game was introduced to the United States. Final Fantasy was the first in a series of console role-playing games introduced by Square Enix. In the first Final Fantasy, you start of by choosing a group of four "Warriors of Light". You're allowed to choose from six classes: Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, Red Mage, White Mage, and Black Mage giving the player up to 24 combinations to choose from. Final Fantasy was revolutionary in the sense that for the first time, the player controlled a party of multiple characters (positioned on the left side of the... Continue reading

The first literary reference to the game of chess appears in an ancient Persian romance, Karnamak, written around 600 (Yalom, 4). Although it wasn't until almost four hundred years later (just before the end of the 10th century) that the chess queen made her way onto the board. In 990 a ninety-eight line Latin poem, now called the Einsiedeln Poem, appeared, containing the first indication the queen had made her way on the board. Yalom suggests that the chess queen likely made her way onto the board in the last decades of the ninth century and was modeled after Empress... Continue reading