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

The copyright system is one that allows people to complete and total ownership over their intellectual property, which is fair as it’s something you made so you should have control over it. The .gov.uk page on copyright states that “Copyright protects your work and stops others from using it without your permission.” Which is fantastic for the creators as it means that their work can’t be used, copied, distributed, adapted or even put on the internet without their expressed permission. The problem with having all this copyright protection it does make content hard to share, which I know is contradictory because surely you don’t want your intellectual property to be shared, that defeats the point. But from the point of view of a small-time artist or writer, sharing is one of the only ways to get their work out there to an audience and if their work does get copied or used without permission then there is little they can do about it as taking copyright infringement to court is expensive which not a lot of smaller time creators can afford.

– Is it possible to make anything new?

Yes, but that’s somewhat down to what your definition of new is. To explain my statement, imagine a robot made up of part of old robots, no part comes from the same robot, but they are all put together to make this new robot. Though the robot is made from parts of previous robot designs, it is still something new because the parts have been repurposed and put together in a different way giving a different look and feel, that is what I mean with my statement. One can argue that nothing can ever be new, and in some aspect yes, that is true because everything has already been done before but it’s taking what has already been done and working it with other ideas, other concepts to form something new. There will always be something similar to what you produce, but that does not mean that what you’ve made isn’t new, or what the other person may have made isn’t new, there’s just some similarities and that’s okay.

How copyright protects your work -GOV.UK [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/copyright [Accessed 6 December 2017]

A) Behavioural modelling is an important part of NPC development for games. Should emotive modelling be part of that development?

Emotive modelling should most definitely be a part of NPC development as where the universe games are set in can be crafter down the to most minute detail for the sake of immersion, all that can go out the window if the NPC’s the player interacts with are flat, lifeless characters. It makes the game so much less enjoyable and can give the player the feeling of the game dragging on if they have to regularly interact with NPC’s who have all the personality of a lump of wet soil.

An example of how emotive modelling failed is Fallout: New Vegas’s character Benny. He is characterised as being a charismatic, suave guy but any trace of that is lost with the flat voice acting and little to no emotive modelling making his character come across as flat and emotionless. Benny is an antagonist to the player so it would only make sense for the creators to want to make it so you hate this guy but when playing the game I only found myself at an annoyance with Benny, wanting to skip through as much of his dialogue as possible as I found interacting with him to be so dull.

That being said, Fallout: New Vegas is a somewhat older title, being released in 2010 but that doesn’t excuse Bethesda’s lack of emotive modelling. New Vegas is an open world RPG game, one that relies heavily on character interactions with a large number of NPC’s that fill the wastelands of the games world so with that, it’s hard to remain immersed in the game with such a lack of character in the characters.

B) Consider your favourite video game. If it contains AI controlled agents how individualistic are they and their behaviours, and, how might you set about improving them?

Though I’m sure many have already spoken about Skyrim when it comes to discussing the AI’s and character interactions but there’s fair reason for that. In the world of Skyrim there are hundreds of NPC’s dotted across the towns, cities and spaces between making for countless encounters with the player providing they don’t try to kill you on sight or visa versa.

Of course with the sheer number of NPCs across the whole of Skyrim there will be NPC’s that share the same voices, same lines of dialogue or same reactions to the player as scripting entirely unique behaviours, dialogue and hiring as many voice actors to fill all the roles would be insanely expensive and the effort would be wasted on the casual player. On the one hand, the NPCs can remember if you’ve wronged them or the town they’re from, reacting negatively towards you for being a terrible person in the past or react to the groups in which you’ve aligned with or status condition you may have. But on the other hand, it’s a well-known fact that the smallest thing can suddenly turn all of the characters of a town into an angry mob trying to kill you such as in my first playthrough of Skyrim when I killed a chicken hoping for xp or food and then the majority of Riverwood’s residents were chasing me down, baying for blood.

To improve the AI of Skyrim I would definitely work to have not quite so strong mood swings among the people of Skyrim or have levels of aggression dependent on what the player was doing.

(2016) Let’s talk about voice acting. [online] Reddit. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/fnv/comments/5a4wk4/lets_talk_about_voice_acting/ [Accessed 3 December 2017]
Jay Green. (2014) The Making of Fallout New Vegas Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scqESZbRNkU [Accessed 3 December 2017]

 A) select one game of your interest and explain why does it have a good/bad game UI 

The Crypt of the Necrodancer is the game that whose UI I will be looking at as the layout is one that one an average game may seem cluttered but within the context of the game works so well. Now good UI has been described as something that “tells you what you need to know, and then gets out of the way.” (Desi Quintans 2013) Now with Crypt of the Necrodancer, the UI tells you what you need to know but doesn’t really go away as most of the information remains on-screen at all times, the only part of the UI that will ‘get out of the way’ is the pause menu screen. This approach isn’t all bad as there is still a good majority of screen dedicated to where the player and the world is.

Considering that the gameplay is made to be played in-time with the tempo of the music, having a UI like say Morrowind would be impractical and would make the game harder, possibly throwing players out of time with the music. The only brought up menu, the pause menu, stops the music whenever summoned and resumes the music at the exact point it left off when gameplay is resumed.

Everything on the games UI is necessary information to the gameplay and although a little claustrophobic the lack of boarders or boxes surrounding the UI prevents the screen from being too enclosed and tight, allowing the player to still be able to play the game and access the information easily.

B) discuss how technology augments human abilities. Reflect upon the implications of the future of HCI. 

Browsing through related articles for this question I stumbled upon an article on an article from a technology news website that explained how technology, specifically mobile phones and cameras augment humans and the weakness that is our memory. I thought that that was an interesting statement and the article explained itself very well saying that “nearly every human technological invention was designed to augment a fundamental weakness of human beings.” (Ben Bajarin 2017)

Expanding from that, cameras, video recorders, GoPros and other mobile devices are all, in some way, a form of memory augmentation. Why? Because they make better our ability to remember by capturing the image, sound and movement of the scene which can later be looked back on or posted to social media for others to see. Just from the evolution of cameras from large devices that had to be propped up on stands, with limited capabilities and constant errors to HD quality cameras that are in-built into most smartphones we can only assume that the technology will only become more adept to the active lifestyle humans leave.

A possible future for the devices that augment our memories could be the ability to record and keep track of actual memories from the perspective of the user much like the implant technology found in Black Mirror’s Season 1 Episode 3 ‘The Entire History of You’. The implant in that records memories which can be rewatched and reviewed like video clips on a phone. Sure the show has a darker take on technology and our relationship with it but the idea of this kind of technology being physically possible isn’t too much of a stretch.

Quintans, D (2013) Game UI By Example: A Crash Course in the Good and the Bad. [online] Available at: https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/game-ui-by-example-a-crash-course-in-the-good-and-the-bad–gamedev-3943 [Accessed 2 December 2017]
Bajarin, B. (2017) Technology is created to augment the fundamental weaknesses of human beings. [online] Available at: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/20/15841086/smartphone-camera-sensor-augment-human-memory-technology-mobile [Accessed 2 December 2017]
Lamble, R (2011) Black Mirror episode 3 review: The Entire History or You [online] Available at: http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/10738/black-mirror-episode-3-review-the-entire-history-of-you [Accessed 2 December]

> A) select one example to outline the key concepts of the interactive narrative genre?

In my opinion, The Stanley Parable is a game to which can be a shining example of the key concepts of the interactive narrative. Though categorised on Steam as a ‘first person exploration game’ The Stanley Parable is one game that highlights its interactive narrative by having a narrator that says what Stanley (the player) is going to do and where they are going to go, the player can then choose whether or not to follow the Narrators, well, narrative. Your decisions as the player directly affect the narrative of the game as shown by the Narrators reaction to such choices and in some cases the Narrator trying to coax the player back into his own narrative or getting somewhat passive aggressive when you continue to ignore him.

With the players decisions come multiple endings to the game, roughly nineteen in total, all of which are dependent on what the player does during the game and at what points the player chooses to listen to or ignore the Narrator. There is an ending in which if the player obeys the Narrators every word, Stanley destroys the ‘Mind Control Facility’ whilst the Narrator talks about how Stanley is now free and can do whatever he wants. That ending is both clever and ironic in the context of games as although the player may have freedom to do what they want in games; the majority of players are still controlled by games and the narratives that drive them even in the interactive narrative genre.

> B) does the interactive narrative still have a role to play in video games today. Give exemplary examples?

In a word, yes. Interactive narratives and games with them still have a major role to play in the video games of today because giving players the ability to choose what they do can immerse them in the game more so than if they were just following one set narrative path. On top of that, giving the player choices with consequences and changes in plot points adds a replay ability factor to the game, the option to play through the story x number of times to see all the endings.

Gaming companies have taken on board the interactive narrative, modelling their games to give the players choices that directly affect the game and how the plot unravels. Titles such as Life Is Strange, Dream Daddy: A Daddy Dating Simulator and Until Dawn are three exemplary examples of how the interactive narrative is being still being used and used well in video games. All three employ multiple narrative arcs dependent on what the player chooses to say/do, each with consequences that appear later in the game or right after the choice has been made.

Life Is Strange has the most interesting use of the interactive narrative though as it also uses a time travel mechanic that allows the players to change some of their choices right after they’ve been made, seeing only the short-term consequences as an indicator for what their choice has resulted in. The games immense popularity and multiple game awards show that interactive narrative does still hold a place in the gaming industry.

Ried, M. Bulitko, V. Interactive Narrative: An Intelligent Systems Approach [pdf]  Available at: https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/aimag.pdf [Accessed 1 December 2017]
The Stanley Parable on Steam. Store.steampowered.com Available at:  http://store.steampowered.com/app/221910/The_Stanley_Parable/ [Accessed 1December 2017]
Endings. The Stanley Parable WIki  Available at: http://thestanleyparable.wikia.com/wiki/Endings {Accessed 1 December 2017]

> What are the key components of Post Modernism?

As a simple way of putting it, Post Modernism is a critique of modernism and the structures of our modern world with the key point being made that there is no absolute truth. Expanding on this ideology you can see that often social constructs are brought into question or torn down by those with the Post-Modern view. Where the majority followed the belief of things being very black and white (Good vs Evil, male or female) the perspective of Post Modernism was the shades of grey in between, weakening the once powerful and unquestionable ideologies. These shades of grey offer light to minorities such as those in the LGBT+ community, ethnic/religious minorities and movements that strayed from the ideals of the time that were often barely regarded by the masses. Why should gender and sexuality be so binary and restrictive? Why should minorities be ignored or walked over? These are just two of the questions that PostModernism asks.

Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? 1989 Guerrilla Girls null Purchased 2003 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78793

The image above was created by an anonymous group of radical feminist, female artists called Guerrilla Girls who were dedicated to fighting both sexism and racism within the art world. Their entry to the art world ‘Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met. Museum?’ in 1989 called out the museums, critics, curators and artists for the lack of artwork created by women and artists of colour in mainstream exhibitions.  The Guerrilla Girls and their work falls under the post modern title as it brings into the question the sexism of the art world with the question as to why female artists can’t seem to get their artworks in museums yet so many of the nude pieces in art gallery’s are of women.