Bauhaus

What were the Bauhaus main ideas?

The Bauhaus is one of the most important modern art schools of the early 20 century. Initially when it first opened in 1919 the art school was shaped by the Arts and Craft movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is shown by the romantic medievalism shown during the school’s early years. However during the mid 1920s this idea of romantic medievalism disappeared in order for the school to stress on uniting art and industrial design. The Bauhaus was also new and modern in the sense of pushing the ideas of liberal and applied arts in which led to it’s great amounts of influence on modern day art schools.

 

Does the Bauhaus influence modern game design?

The simple answer is well yes, the long answer is that due to games design being considered more of an art form, art schools in which the Bauhaus has the most influence are now starting up Game design courses teaching younger generations of designers and artist in the more creative and artistic side of the video game industry. The video game industry when it first started out had been mostly done by programmers and electronic engineers. This was until the late 1970s and early 80s when designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto started to make games like Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers. For the most part the Bauhaus and it’s modern way of teaching the arts and crafts will be a great influence on modern games design due to games design now being accepted as a form of art in which now is being taught as a creative art rather than just a form of computing.

 

 

Interactive narrative

 

The example i have chosen is the King’s Quest series due to the first game at the time was one of the first text adventure like games to be even more immersive with animations and graphics. King’s Quest is a narrative adventure game released in 1984 by Sierra online. The game itself plays like a old text adventure game only with graphics and animations. The key concepts of interactive narrative is to tell a story though giving players choice on how the story plays out. In the case of King’s Quest the game uses interactive narrative to take the player on an adventure though key commands and in some of the games a point and click navigation system.

 

For modern day gaming Interactive narrative i believe still has a place in video games. As of now games are being more accepted as an art form and along with newer technology game designers will be able to create games with the story as the main aspect. Actually it’s already starting to happen today, companies like Telltale games are dedicated to creating games with Interactive narrative in mind. Also companies like Activision have recently revived Sierra for the sole purpose of making Interactive narrative/ adventure games such as the new King’s Quest game created by developer “The Odd Gentlemen” and released in 2015. So in conclusion Interactive narrative is a very important genre of gaming that still thrives in the gaming market just by looking at the sales of Telltale games alone.

 

The Indie game movement

 

Why could you say that the “Indie” game scene is not a new thing and explain, give examples ?

 

The Indie game scene as a whole was around long before 2008 when games like Braid and Super Meat Boy were either released or in development. The Indie game movement started near enough to the beginning of the Video game industry when you had electrical engineers like Steve Russell who made Space war the 1960s. Even companies who are considered to be huge companies now started out as what we would call today “Indie”, Activision for an example started out when 4 employees at Atari named Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, Larry Kaplan and David Crane, got sick and tired of the lack of credit they got from Atari for their games so decided to form their own company and publish their games on the Atari 2600. The Indie scene was also quite big during the 80s during the rise of PC gaming when games would come in floppy disks in little plastic bags, and all of these games like Zork and King’s Quest would then, going back to my earlier point with Activision these games would transform companies like Infocom and Sierra Online into bigger companies rather than just Indies. In conclusion the Indie game scene is definitely not a brand new thing instead being Indie is just a part of the gaming right from the very beginning and even companies that we would all consider to be these big and “evil” corporations had their start as a small indie company.

 

Has the term Indie become meaningless?

The term Indie technically mean well independent. So basically the term Indie is not meaningless in terms of the video game industry  because  indie games are still operated independently from bigger publishers. The only thing with the term Indie being meaningless is that Indie gaming has grown to the point that the term “Indie” can be overused to the extent that people could begin to feel that the term Indie can be meaningless. Although there are some “Indie” games that use the term poorly like Ubisofts Ode  which is marketed as “Indie” but yet is linked with one of the biggest companies in the industry. This is a great example of the term of Indie being overused as bigger companies like Ubisoft had been marketing their games as Indie when that really isn’t the case.

 

Human Computer Interaction

select one example to outline the key concepts of human-computer interaction. Reflect upon the role of the “human”, the “computer” and the “interaction”.

 

In terms of video gaming i will use the Nintendo Entertainment System from 1985 to help outline the key concepts of Human-computer interaction. The Nintendo Entertainment System when it first came out had given players a new design of a game controller for players, before the NES, games used joy sticks like on the Atari 2600 to control the characters in games. But the NES was one of the first home consoles to introduce the directional pad or “D-pad” for short. This gave players much more control for 2D games at the time and is still being used by modern consoles, which improved the Human-computer interaction for video games. The NES also had improved graphics and sound so then console games could add more complex storylines in games like the Legend of Zelda and Final fantasy just to name a few. Therefore adding more immersion for the human so they can feel like that they are part of the world that the designers had created.

 

discuss the relationship between games design and human-computer interaction

 

For the most part it would seem that the relationship between game design and human-computer interaction would seem to be the way that players uses the controls for the games that they play. Game genres will have different kinds of controls to fit the specific kind of game design. For an example adventure games like Monkey Island might use a point and click control system while games like a 2D platformer will use a D-pad and 1 or 2 buttons for the controls. Human-computer interaction is also used to help imerise the user in the game, say for an example a horror game like “PT” uses sounds and the design to help the user be afraid during play like how the designers intended. If “PT” was to say have more cartoony sound effects then if gives the user  unintended feelings that might make them laugh instead of screaming in terror. So in conclusion Human-computer interaction is a main and crucial part of games design as it is how the user interacts with the game is one of the first things that a game designer must think about during development.

 

A.I

 

Some definitions state that AI is when a system thinks/acts like a human and other definitions state that it is when a system thinks/acts rationally. Why do you suppose AI developers wish to hold up human intelligence as a standard rather than pure logic?

 

I think that AI developers desire to have AI with human intelligence due to the fact the pure logic is extremely flawed if we look into science fiction like Star Trek where a race known as the Vulcans who live with the mindset of pure logic had not been able to adapt to certain situations like a human character would. So if we look into this from that perspective AI needs to have some form of human intelligence so then A.I’s can adapt to overcome any kind of situation an A.I could encounter.

 

A lot of people are scared by the prospective of AI. What do you think would be the ramifications of us achieving true “strong” AI?

 

The problem with a “strong” AI is that if we do create a intelligence that is similar to that of humanity then you had created something as flawed as humanity itself. Furthermore by creating something like a human then society itself will need to answer questions like what are the rights that a AI is entitled to? What kind of jobs do have an AI do ? And do we replace humans with these “strong” AI? Also I personally feel that there is not much of point of having a AI with human intelligence cause if we do create a “strong” AI then wouldn’t we make ourselves as humans redundant as an AI would have the intelligence of a human being but will also never age unlike a human, would also not need to eat, drink and sleep unlike a human being. By making something better than ourselves be just like a human we would then be replacing humanity itself and there would not be any much of  a reason for humans to exist. But most of all if we do create a “strong” AI these AI’s would be missing the ability to be unique in its own right. Every human is unique if we were to try and replace ourselves with a AI but the AI cannot replace us as people due to the uniqueness of every human being which is the one thing that a A.I would never be able to do. Instead we would create a clone army of AI’s that think exactly the same way.

 

Copyright in video games

 

What do you see as the positives and negatives around copyright?

Copyright in terms of using copyright for video games is a great way to protect your game to avoid competitors from effectively stealing your ideas. However as far as i know you can’t copyright a game design so if a game had a certain feature in the games design like a health bar you can’t just copyright a feature, you can copyright the content just not a certain part of the games design. However this could cause some problems in the sense of having a bigger company do what you are currently doing with a bigger budget and therefore giving the smaller creators a disadvantage. Copyright however can be abused by large organisations on small content creators on online sites like YouTube as these “YouTubers” lose money that they make from these videos even though it all falls under the legal term “fair use” in which has caused huge amounts of problems legally.

 

Is it possible to make anything new?

Making a brand new thing is difficult from the sense of when a designer or artist tries to develop ideas they take inspiration from either something in real life or from another artist, which makes things extremely challenging for something to come out these days and for people to say that it’s completely original rather than the piece of art or game being compared to some other product that is similar as creators might of had gone to the same place for inspiration.

 

Reflective summary

 

Throughout the module I felt that I had effectively made my opinion known and was able to argue my points with the research and knowledge that I had. However I do think that it was quite difficult to gather good enough research of my own. Overall i felt that the module questions were quite interesting and really had me thinking on how these topics could affect the video game industry as a whole. Although these questions i felt were mostly opinion based so it did make research difficult cause i didn’t want to just write about someone else’s opinion, so what i did was just had my research as simple explanations on the individual topics and my research was also just mostly on the examples i had used to answer some of these questions. Overall i felt that i had gained more knowledge and confidence on these topics and debating about them. However i did find trying to find research a bit more difficult.

 

References

 

Bibliography

Bungie, 2011. O Brave New World. [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtG6–4r_qk&t=608s>

ExtraCreditz, 2016. The Copyright Dilemma – On Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents – Extra Credits. [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XQdPGV1AJU>

Anon, 2016. G4 Icons Season 4 Episode 10 – History of the NES (2005). [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zueuOYTZ1I>

G4Icons, 2012. G4 Icons Episode #5: Activision. [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5reuUXssn4&t=190s>

G4Icons, 2012. G4 Icons Episode #6: Shigeru Miyamoto. [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6voK6C10RRU>

Lumb, D., 2017. Ubisoft’s next indie game ‘Ode’ is out in the UK. [online] Engadget. Available at: <https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/27/ubisoft-s-next-indie-game-ode-is-out-in-the-uk/>

TEDxTalks, 2015. Solving real world problems through Human-Computer Interaction | Mandar Kulkarni | TEDxVITPune. [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP4AWwp-5qY>

Yzzyxz, 2013. King’s Quest I playthrough (EGA version). [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0TLhR51uGY&t=269s>

coldfustion, 2017. A.I. is Progressing Faster Than You Think! [online] YouTube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQO2PcEW9BY>