I was excited when I first heard that we get to make Flash games for this class. Honestly, I thought we would get into Actionscript and Flash much earlier in our Computational media careers, but I won’t argue. When it was time to form groups, ours was one that kind of meandered together, most of us having just met each other for the first time. Our group was diverse: we had hardcore gamers and casual gamers, we had two females and three males, and people from everywhere—including UGA. We found each other that day, stuck together, and made a game... Continue reading

The game I chose to analyze for this blogpost is Assassin’s Creed II. The game is a third person action-adventure platformer, set in the near future but the main brunt of the game is played in a virtual machine called “Animus” which, in turn, is set in 15th - 16th century Italy. One thing I noticed early on in the game is the role of females. The women do not play the usual stereotyped female roles: the strong, sexy, dominating types nor are they portrayed as weak, frail, and in need of rescue. If anything, the game shows a couple... Continue reading

Being an artist and lover of all things art, the one article that appealed to me was Pearce’s “Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity”. She speaks of the mysterious ‘game artists’, game creators that used the gamespace as more than a mode of entertainment for the player, but a medium in which the player can create his/her own art. As she explains, “The game artist makes a conscious choice to share the art-making process, putting at least a part of the creative act in the hands of the player/participant” (Pearce). Thus the artist is inviting the player, giving the... Continue reading

Commander Keen was a series of platforming games from the early 1990’s. I had played this game around the age of eight, and so picking this game up again opened a world of nostalgia for me, mostly with the quirky 8-bit music and wacky monsters. The premise of the game is really simple: you play as an 8-year-old Billy Blaze and follow his adventures through space. The ‘world map’ that displays the level choices is top-down, and allows player movement. Once the player decides on a level, Keen is transported to that level and the gameplay goes to its main... Continue reading

The earliest versions of chess were played in India, Persia, and the Arab lands. Many sources debate as to where chess originated, but it is commonly believed to have originated in India. The Indian ancestor of chess was called chaturanga, developed in the 6th century AD. Meaning “Four Members”, it comes from the four military divisions of the Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry(3). Instead of a queen, it had a vizier, the shah’s second-in command. Yalom, in her book The Birth of the Chess Queen, placed heavy emphasis on the influence of culture in regard to the evolution... Continue reading