Having played both of these games briefly, the interesting thing I felt I should talk about is how my personality in real life could be altered by playing these games for an extensive period of time. I am going to talk about the things I felt affected me while playing these games, which are social consciousness and emotional investment. While describing MMOGs, Pearce says that "they are public places that thousands of people enter simultaneously to share an entertainment experience". I think it's not just a space for sharing an entertainment medium but also a social forum to display one's... Continue reading

I have never really played MMOGs or been part of virtual worlds, though I have always been around people constantly raving about it. I am going to base my comparison of the forms of World of Warcraft and Second Life on an audacious premise. I am going to explain my understanding of the difference based on the method of recommendation I received from people who play these games regularly. One observation I have noticed in these worlds I cannot mention enough that continues to reinforce the notion of productive play are the lengths people will go to make themselves feel... Continue reading

The inspiration behind the idea for this game was to somehow explore rotoscopic animations in a game.I have never played a game with rotoscopic animation and I wanted to discover the difference in experience in terms of graphics. After watching movies such as "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly", I always got the impression that this sort of visual effect was used to illustrate isolation, surrealism and out-of-mind experiences. I tried to come up with an idea with which I could exploit this visual style to be part of the game. I eventually ended up with the idea of a... Continue reading

I am going to be discussing The Monkey Island series in this blog post, specifically "The Curse of Monkey Island". A lot of my female friends have liked this game and I always wondered why they found this game particularly intriguing. I have a few theories on this issue which I will share by drawing on particular topics from the readings. In the "Hegemony Of Play", the authors ask - "Is it possible that the difficulty in producing 'games for girls' or games for adults, or games for 'everyone' lies in the inherent properties of the technology of digital games... Continue reading

It is interesting to note how most games, regardless of their inception, evolve to be an interesting study in team play. A lot of successful games have the intention of an individual’s exploration through a world or type of game mechanic. Eventually, all of these games get modded into a community based platform involving team play. It is as though the experience of a game cannot be fully realized unless it is a collective realization. I think this raises a few interesting questions – “As social creatures, to realize the nature of play, do we have to realize it together?”... Continue reading

It is interesting to note how most games, regardless of their inception, evolve to be an interesting study in team play. A lot of successful games have the intention of an individual’s exploration through a world or type of game mechanic. Eventually, all of these games get modded into a community based platform involving team play. It is as though the experience of a game cannot be fully realized unless it is a collective realization. I think this raises a few interesting questions – “As social creatures, to realize the nature of play, do we have to realize it together?”... Continue reading

Quake 3 Arena is an FPS (First Person Shooter) game released in 1999 by id Software. They redefined the FPS genre by designing the physics engine and maps specifically to generate an environment with extreme action and movement. Players have interestingly molded their tactics with the game creator's philosophy to form their own style of "play". I found that certain characteristics of Quake 3 Arena, in a bizarre way, seem to obey certain game definitions and characteristics by Huizinga, Caillois and Suits. Huizinga says that a game "proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space" (Huizinga, 107). After... Continue reading

In the middle ages, nobles and members of the church opted for a different method while talking to the common people. Even though the game was previously condemned by the church, they accepted it and used it extensively while conversing with the public. In Italy, Jacobus de Cessolis used chess to communicate with the masses through cleverly constructed sermons. He used chess as an "allegory of society" (Yalom 68), and carefully illustrated the place of the common man. He considered chess to be an ideal comparison to the social hierarchy of the time. He didn't dismiss the lower classes as... Continue reading