Games create community. This is the basis of our love of games. At their core, games create social experiences. Whether it's an obvious one as seen by player interactions in multi-player games, or the more subtle community of fellow game enthusiasts that form around single player games. Last night I had the opportunity to see this community in action as I volunteered at the EK Powe Elementary School game night. Game night is the most diversely attended event at EK Powe and boy do all the kids show up for it. For my part I was left in the cafeteria e=where there were many games set up. We did everything from play Yahtzee to build puzzles. I was astonished by the good sportsmanship all around. No one got mad when they lost a close game nor did they fight over placing the final piece. Such a happy group of kids gives me hope for the future of game playing, and making, everywhere.
This is great behavior was exemplified in one group of kids who spent a large amount of time playing the Pokemon TCG in the corner of the cafeteria. Remembering how heated those games could get I walked over to see if I could work as a mediator for rule calls in some way. What I found over there however was not Pokemon. Sure from a distance it looked similar, but on closer examination, none of the kids knew how to actually play by the rules. Instead they had formed a complex game in which both sides did whatever they wanted and everyone just accepted that as the new rule. This may seem like it would make an extremely lop-sided game where only the loudest, most confident "rule maker" would have any chance of winning. However, the game was close. Any argument was washed away instantly with a quick compromise and neither side tried to take advantage of the others' ignorance of the actual Pokemon rule book (take notes Washington). Maybe one day they'll grow up. They'll separate out into strictly defined groups of people who only share their beliefs. They'll lose the ability to play for fun at the expense of rules and forget the benefits of compromising. But, for now, their future looks bright as they do what children do best: play games. -EK Powe game night summary -A game of Pokemon?
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Video games are more popular than ever before. They come in all shapes and sizes: In consoles, in handhelds, on PCs and on phones. It is hard to find someone, in a first world country, who has never played a video game these days and, with the expansion of games use in education and business, this dwindling number of non-gamers is set to take a nose dive. Among all this the number of people who don't want hard or long games is increasing rapidly. Though it may seem impossible to fathom for fans of games such as Dark Souls or pro-gamers who play for hours each day, not everyone wants to be challenged or forced to commit to a game. This growing community of casual players has created an entirely new axis of gaming for publishers to cater to. Casual games have to be several things: easy to learn, instantly rewarding, always accessible. Now more than ever these requirements can be checked off by the growing area of mobile gaming.
Mobile games seem simple on the surface. How much effort could it take to animate a bird to play between a couple of pillars? The essence of mobile games is in their simplicity. Everything about a mobile game needs to be simple from its menus to its rules. This simplicity is something that really sets apart the popular mobile games from the ones that flop. recently an app called TBH gained huge popularity among the high school crowd. Part of this success is how it, like many other popular apps has a seamlessly simply sign up process. Throughout the whole process I only filled out two text boxes. Yes, long gone are the days when people want to sit through electronic form after electronic form giving obvious amounts of personal information. This app has shown that you can gain access to the same amount of information in less than 30 seconds. Are mobile games the future? Yes, they are. They teach us important lessons about simplicity and accessibility that will soon shape the entire game industry. -What are 2D games? -Why do people like them? -Why are they important to the industry as a whole? Over the past week we've finally started working on 2D games again in our Advanced Game Design class. This year instead of doing this solo, however, we are kicking it off this year with a group project. The teams are trios and we have a lot of work ahead of us especially since this time around the objective of our games has already been decided for us.
Our game needs to inform people about the Durham-Orange Monorail project. This is a real life project that was started way back in 2011 as a small tax on Durham and Orange county residents. The idea was to make a monorail system that could run all the way from NCCU to UNC Hospital connecting a large area of heavy work traffic. This would ease the traffic as well as replace several bus routes that were responsible for parts of this journey. It is projected to provide 26,000 trips today which would help take cars off the road and give a cheap option to get between important places such as the Duke and UNC Hospitals. In 2017, this project finally has entered its final stages by getting approval from the Federal Transit Administration to enter the engineering phase. This project hasn't all been flowers and good news though. In fact there was for a long time large kick-back against the project from people who didn't want it going through their communities. They worried about the noise pollution and danger it may cause if it runs through a residential community. However, these concerns were mostly outweighed by the overwhelming evidence that the monorail project would bring none of these problems to the communities it went through and that its benefits were greater than many of these risks anyway. Many of the opponents wouldn't give up that easily and so even to this day it isn't rare to see an anti-light rail sign along the road or placed in front of City Hall. -What's new from the Advanced Game Design Class? -What is the Durham-Orange Monorail Project? -Benefits? -Opponents? Video games are expanding. Long gone are the days of independent developers and arcade tokens. Replaced by expensive consoles and thousand strong gaming corporations, billions are poured into making the best graphics, best physics, best story, and the list goes on. Theater is a long standing industry. Studded with tradition its exsistance dates back far beyond even written words. Miraculously surviving the sands of time what can this ancient artform get out of the robotic 1001110 of games. It turns out that the answer is quite a bit and is something that may start to bring these vastly different industries very close together.
Games have proven that stories can include audience members. Now it may seem odd; how can an auditorium full of strangers interact with a story and not fundamentally throw it off. Yet everyday games craft experiences for millions of strangers, an audience even the biggest shows can't boast of. That's why now, more and more, theater is turning to audience participation in order to engage the spectators and heighten tension. I've seen these plays like this up close and let me be the first to tell you: they are special. From Shakespeare Abridged to the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee there's always something about seeing audience members onstage that brings you full into a show. Whether you're the unfortunate "volunteer" or not, seeing a genuine human up there gives you a feeling of power, a feeling of challenge that we would normally only associate with video games. Even more immersive plays have also come out. In Rift's production of The Trial by Franz Kafka they used the audience to tell the entire story. They gacve the audience freedom to walk around and observe the set until they were eventually drawn into the story at an execution site. Does it sound like a game? It should. Many exploration based games use these same techniques to push the player along a secretly linear track. People if left alone try and find a story. It doesn't need to be shoved in their face. This is something playwrights are only beginning to find out and something that will continue to bring games and theater even closer together in the future. • Where do theater and games meet? • What theater can learn from games? •Where theater is heading for the future The most recent addition to the Pokémon saga may be the weirdest game in the series yet. But does that make it worse than the previous games? I'll be honest: when I first saw this game I thought it was the death of the series. The weird cast of Hawaiian characters and increased hand holding just didn't click with me and for the first time in a while I found myself wondering if I'd actually buy the game at all.
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AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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