Task 6 - Writing About Games, Previews, Reviews, Commentary & Lies.

After looking at Kieron Gillan’s blog, I must say I didn’t even have a clue what he was talking about half the time with them big and fancy words he kept using, but tried to make best since out of it. First of all I think game reviewers in general face the issue of getting across more than “Is a game good or not?” for example In one part of his blog I think he tries to say how anyone could go out there and be a journalist and say yes this is good and this is bad etc which it what journalism used to be like? Instead of it being as simple as that there needs to be more to it, so now-a-days we have sort of break open a game, split it into millions of tiny pieces and analyse it bit by bit individually. I think he was getting across was that anyone could come straight out of college and just start saying what in their opinion is good and crap about a game forgetting everything they have learned through education. This could lead to controversy by giving false reviews. Not everyone is going to like a certain type of game but at the end of the day those that do like it and want to buy the next big release do matter and it all about getting the honest truth across for those that want to buy the next big game. In example the people paying the wages of the journalists for example newspapers or magazines companies etc are basically paying them to analyse a game in full depth and sell that to the reader. Another problem they face with this is that they can write whatever they want and they could be the best journalist in the world but as soon as the reader finally buys the game presses start on the controller, the talk of what they have heard shuts up and the real experience begins of what they think about it. Personally for myself I’ve seen people saying what utter crap a certain game is but personally playing the game can be a different matter and some games I’ve played in the past I’ve quite liked despite what others think.

Another problem what they face is how they personally feel about a game, for example if a journalist is asked to review a specific type of game they aren’t too keen on then the review isn’t going to be worth reading. I don’t personally know how the journalism industry works but if they do split it up into types of genres they work on then would get a lot more accurate response, but even so maybe a problem is they sometimes need more opinions on aspects a game holds.

One final thing is that he internet is now providing a lot better and easier way of getting game reviews, those that write out what they think about something and publish it in a paper  won’t be seen by the entire world, that’s why I think more journalists are working for online sites on the internet because it’s just faster. I mean with the internet you can read up and get an overall rating quickly of a game, including more access to images and even videos, where as a magazine is just something to read on the go or for those without internet. A magazine you would have to keep paying out for each month or week when if you have internet its right there and free and most gamers are more likely to have internet cause games are mostly played at home anyway.  It’s kind of getting off topic but I personally think that the internet is now taking over the world, no magazine will ever beat the internet from now on, no matter how good the reviews are written. I remember buying a game last year and the guy behind the till asked me if I wanted the official guide for it. I said “No I’ve got the internet.” He then replied with “Well the problem is you’re not going to have it there right in front of you while playing.” In which I thought “What exactly is stopping playing the game and having my laptop right next to me? That’s what I usually do.!” With the internet you’ve got the source of all human knowledge at your fingertips! No guide is going to be better than that!

Reviews give honest people’s opinions and are ranked of how good they are, I mean there’s no denying that now-a-days video game companies are all competing against each other to make ‘the best’. It’s just adding competition out of everything, when really if they all worked to together and put their ideas together they’d always be making the best. I guess it’s just how the business world works and in this case the journalists are sort of saying “yes this is good and this is not” and giving each game a ranking of what they feel is appropriate. They way they rank a game (in my mind) is how something in the real world is compared to the game itself. It’s basically a comparison in today’s world of how realistic they match up, for example a real world sports game would be rank of the level of how realistic, where as a fantasy such as Mario would be ranked on how unrealistic it is? But above all I don’t think the reviews are worth anything, to me it’s all about putting the controller in your hand and experiencing the game play. Like Keiron said when that happens you forget all the reviews you read, images and videos you’ve seen and finally see what it’s like first hand, only then you can truly know if it lives up to your expectations or not, which is true, I’m sure everyone has played a bad game in the past and got rid of it or played a good game and kept it or vice versa. In all they can write about anything and give it a 10/10 but when you play it yourself you might value it as a 0/10.

I never heard of New Game Journalism until now, but after reading what it is, I’ve seen how it’s a clever idea. I think now-a-days games are becoming more and more realistic and by relating everything to the real world is probably the way forward. Before games had all these new fancy graphics etc is was more or less the case of writing what a game does and what it doesn’t do to depict what makes it a great game. Now it’s a little more complicated than that now, we’re living in an age where the computing power is getting better and better with each passing month making it possible to create bigger and better things and from videos and theory’s I’ve seen and read about, we’re getting to point where technology is starting to take over and everything is done by machine. I think it’s good how we are now relating things to real life experiences compared to the computer game world. It sort of allows us to keep track of how we are actually getting better, is everything ‘perfect’ to how it is in reality within the gaming world? I think one good quality of NGJ is how we can be more critical and accurate about things, constantly comparing things to one another eventually solving problems and questions in the gaming world. All the questions haven’t been answered in the gaming world which makes it interesting to study, where as all the questions in film or music etc have more or less all been answered to the point where it’s boring (If I say so myself). It can be scary to think about what we may achieve in the future but NGJ puts everything under the microscope and can try to unlock the answers. I still think reviews are pointless but maybe they are a way of having a better understanding and contributing towards things in the future. What I’m trying to say is that gaming is primarily based on technology and that we’re going further and further down the route of making them as real as possible so maybe constantly analysing the technology against the real world is the best thing to do to unlock all these answers we haven’t found yet? More qualities that it has, is that it focuses on the gamers themselves instead of just the games by being more personal about it which makes it somewhat more entertaining.

One thing in gaming everyone mostly does is that they look at a game as whole rather than breaking apart everything bit by bit. There’s games journalism and reviews and apart from that I could only find the story line scripts for games which depending on the type of game people may not take that into account that much, they’ll just want to shoot the heads off aliens and get to the last level as quick as possible as best they can by looking at the bigger picture. When I think of something I never sort put it together as the big picture because in that sense there’s not that much you can say about a game and then people will disagree with you and controversy is caused when you say something is just good or not good. I like to look at things more subjectively like many of the reviewers do now-a-days, they take all the parts of the game and then analyse each one and sort of try to say what parts abut it you may find good and what may not be so good. It’s hard to describe aspects of different games because we all like different things. By breaking a game a part I could say what I personally like about it but that will vary from one person to the next, to keep on top of this I like to say everything from both points of views then there’s no argument and I’m not being one sided. It might be being too technical about things but at the same time always think that the whole mind map about a game is a better way of putting it together by adding every idea you can think of into it rather than always going for the bigger  but more simpler picture where there isn’t as much. I think most people prefer the bigger picture because they just want to sit back and play a game because they think it’s awesome, when behind the scenes there’s a lot more to it that should be put into consideration cause it’s the smaller parts that all fit together to make a game. You can look at a game and not think much of it until you actually play it from there on you can start asking questions of it, were as I like to seek the more complicated questions that haven’t been thought of and answer them myself, this way I can know just about everything rather than the basics and it feels like I’ve accomplished a lot more but you’ve got to have the time to do it, it’s almost as if being a gamer is like being a reviewer in some ways, you try to split everything apart and answer all the questions you can find instead of just looking at something and saying “yes that’s good and that’s not” cause anyone could do that getting both points of view opens more to talk about and that way you gain more knowledge and further more a better opinion or why something could or could not be good for you! The New Games Journalism basically tells you why something is or isn’t good for you as a fan of various games titles or people interested in different types of genres in which it does by relating it to experience therefore giving it a more accurate approach. You can see how NGJ is a better and cleverer way of reviewing games but I still think that playing first hand is overall better than reading.

Game reviewers sort of put pressure on the gaming market for different companies to sell their games, but I think the press maybe actually helping the companies make their games better by criticising them so they can improve next time around, it’s a cycle of previewing then trying and then reviewing each time, kind of like trial and error almost for the industries, the people writing about it have to know just as much, if not MORE than the people actually working to complete the final finished game to come out and say what they think of it and to rank it on sort of table they’ve devised themselves. I think it’s crazy but it just shows how they are now thinking beyond just the limits of the game itself but the player playing the game is taken into account along with the feelings you get when you experience the game play compared to something in reality by bringing it to life a bit more which is more entertaining. It’s funny because as companies battle to sell their games, the media is battling to sell their best reviews.

I don’t know if what I’ve said makes any sense but that’s just the way I see the link between Games companies and the media.

Lockwood Publishing & Outso Lecture 08/12/10

The guest lecture from Lockwood publishing and Outso was more or less the same information as what the previous guys have come in and told us about. They basically came in and talk about what they have achieved from studying and graduating on the same course as us. They went on for a while about how they went and did some work in their 2^nd and 3^rd years of the course working for two companies that honestly I’ve never heard of before and I not sure many others may have heard of before. It was intriguing to know how popular one of the companies has only been around for 4 years but in that time has built up a good reputation and just two years ago was when it started to produce games and gain that better reputation. Reminds me of the Game Art course itself and how it hasn’t been around that long and yet it comes as far as the House of Commons wanting to the work from the course (or something like that as Chris put it).  But it’s amazing in such a short amount of time something can become so popular, the way it’s going this course will be up there as the best in the world, which I think it is already to be honest. It shows how much dedication has gone into it and like how the company the guest was talking about has gotten far and she went onto explain (like we’ve been told before) how much every member of staff that work there in Europe are so committed to their work and are always look for better ways to produce work.

Of course we all know that it’s no walk in the park to become a success in the industry, we was all shown this week actually how much more effort we all have to put in to get far in this course. It no joke to those who take their work seriously and they are always going to be rewarded the most since we’re all simply giving it ‘adequate’ and inadequate performances at the moment in the first year. One them talked about how she’s an Art manager for one for the companies and how she gets to help with coming up with all the idea for the games they make, in particular she gets to come up with mini game ideas. They showed some videos for the games they made which looked cool, one of them was a golf game set in a jungle and they all helped design the settings for the game and some of the concepts. These games are sold on the PlayStation Network for Sony, which is the equalivant of Xbox Live and how you can spend points on there to download mini games. Another game had a Halloween type of theme to it and the game was meant for release by that particular event, so it also sort of shows how they work to deadlines, I mean every game works to deadlines but however they must be a lot of planning far before that to make sure the game however how small it is, that there is enough time to produce such game for when it should be released, and the whole mind map of everything to think about within the production itself.

One other thing Sophia talked about was how presentation is important, just lately we’ve been given a lot of information about presenting work in class, which is a whole big part of Art and game production, it basically has to look good and at an interview you have to present it well and sell as much as you can really to the interviewer, she even said how she gets tons of emails which are just a waste of her time because they haven’t presented it well, the links to their web sites or she simply cannot find a person’s portfolio which is all down to the person trying to get in contact. It’s important and it’s sort of taught a bit about presenting in time for our presentations that take place next month, as much as we’re all dreading showing our work to all three years, it’s kind of important even if it is for about 5 minutes. I remember my interview for the course early this year, it was nerve wrecking but at the same time I just drifted into it and sold as much as I could even though my portfolio was a bit all over the place, I explained as much as possible it was over quite quickly, but most importantly it was successful which I’m grateful of, and with an idea of how hard the course actually is now, I’m going to have to step it up even more. A lot of hard work is ahead but like I’ve heard and seen in the lectures and with the guests working on projects with companies that are globally famous, doing more will make it, or at least should make it all pay off in the end.

Black Hawk Down

I liked the film Black Hawk Down, it was a little hard to understand what they were attempting to do in the film but from what I understand is that the U.S soldiers were trying to catch two people in Somalia. The mission in which should have taken just 30 minutes went into an ongoing war for over 18 hours. Basically all that is shown throughout the course of the movie is guns blazing, violence, blood flying everywhere, and the sounds of helicopters etc. One thing I liked about the movie was how the director Ridley Scott drew out every single scene of the film and how accurate each one looked when viewed while watching the actual film. He basically only used a magic markers and highlighting pens to make the purposed scenes.

It’s really surprising that it is based on a true story; the mission starts with the trying to track down and get into the building to capture the two men. This starts at around mid-day to evening and goes on right through the night to early morning the next day. Some of the scenes were very gory and can really strike a lot of fear into anyone planning on going into the army, or just even tells you about what soldiers in the past have faced and the horror of how some of them have been severely injured and even died. One thing that was good about the scenery was the landscapes, buildings and objects around them. It was very dark all the way through the film, and at night it was very green as if we were watching the Matrix or something. I guess the green sort of gives the impression of night vision through the eyes of a soldier fighting at night. Some of the perspective views were really nice to watch when they in a helicopter, from the sunlight of the day time to the night then back to the early morning. They captured the scenes really well and the set that they used was made to look like they were really fighting in Africa.

They found some of the buildings of what they wanted to use in the setting for the film. They had to slightly edit some of the set like the buildings and the base camp for the soldiers. In the extra parts of the DVD they went on to explain how they carefully selected different parts of the areas they were looking at for the scenes and editing them to get them to blend in with the setting more for the film, some of them they thought were okay just use as they were like one particular building that looked like it was being constructed but was just left the way it was. In the DVD they even said that people would actually think they were filming in Somalia, when in fact they weren’t. It was just the time they spent adding the detail, planning everything and adding accurately capturing everything Ridley Scott had draw. It sort of tells you a lot of how what goes into the production of film making but at the same time it can all be related to game production to with the scenes and the artwork, the times and deadlines, and film capturing with the cameras, it’s quite like watching the DVD extra’s for The Lord of the Rings and they way they would find locations to use as backgrounds and imagery for their film, the costumes that they would create and repeat over and over again getting different sizes and such. They wanted to make the film look authentic and it honestly did look like they were engaging in battle within the streets of Somalia.

In The Lord of the Rings movie they knew the task at hand was to re-create a great historical piece of English folk law from a book into a movie. Not an easy task , but the time they spent on it and seeing all of the details of what went into producing them films can really be appreciated when watching behind the scenes footage just like Black Hawk Down the task was to re-create a real life event, so when they pick a deadline for such a film they really have to not stop working. People sometimes only watch films because of the actors and like to see how they perform in the roles they are given within the film which is definitely one of the most important parts, in Black Hawk Down they gave the roles to hundreds if not thousands of different people from different countries and cultures from all over the globe. It seems like a lot of effort but it’s actually a good way of making it more authentic, but the more authentic a piece of work is the better it pays off or at least should pay off in the end. They way Ridley Scott had produced so many sketches/story boards of the timeline between start and end of the film seemed like a lot but actually seeing his works produced as accurate as they were in the actual movie was amazing, what I found even more amazing was how he had just produced them with the magic markers, they weren’t exactly spot on perfect every time, but they at least 95 percent there every time. The cinematography in the film was great, from just imaging and knowing what all the scene in the movie were going to be like Ridley knew almost instantly which angles, zoom and placement of the camera he wanted them all to be at. This converted into game production would be knowing possibly where a level starts and ends, what do you see first, what do you see during the game play, what you see at the end, what do you see in the cut scenes and even what kind of interface you see when you even load a game and the menu screen comes up, or even when the game is paused. The aesthetics are all important just as much as the way something works and plays weather it would be in film or game etc. Getting a good grip of the story and were it wants to be set is what is basically needed first to then go on and then make the important decisions as to how it’s all going to look, like an Art director would etc asking the questions of “Is it this or that, which works better? For this type of situation.”

I can see why the Artists in general are paid more than game designers, because there’s so much to think about but overall and they are responsible for the biggest proportion of how everything looks in the final finished asset. Just like what we’re learning in game production it you’re always thinking about what your designing and texturing, where the lighting should be, what angle should the object or scene be viewed from for the best possible outcome, presenting what it is your looking at and how you’re sort trying to sell what it is to the audience to make them impressed with what you have worked on and achieved and of course make tons of money out of it (Ha-ha). The people that all behind the making of films and game are the most important, because it wouldn’t all be possible without them in the first place cause let’s face it a professional game or film couldn’t be made with just actors and voice actors now could it? The ones who come up with all the ideas should take most of the credit although the actor did produce good quality roles and made it really believable that they were U.S army soldiers with the way they handled the situations they were in, some of the funny parts of the film, in and around the camp and the connection between them and the story line itself was just as authentic as the settings produced which really adds to the movie as a whole making it more believable as if this is the way it would happen in reality, like the way we would make something in 3D and we’d render it over and over to portray how it would look in reality. I think it’s about the way we’d interact like creating a setting/background and the way we visualise it and ask the question of “How does this make us feel?” just like when we’re watching the film, playing a game or even painting a picture, there always some sort of connection there, like the feel, the sound or even the scent of it, which we have get right in order to get as many people into what has being produced. Even things like trailers for films and games are important because that’s what can catch people onto wanting to play or watch something and that’s sort of what I’ve learnt about watching this film.