Author Archives: James Cook

Reflective writing

Over the past several weeks I have been reporting on various different subjects. The brief was to write a 500 word essay on each subject alongside appropriate sources and research. The first thing I do when exploring the area of interest is take extensive notes in the lecture. I write down core names, companies, locations and other important details. I tend not to write down what was on the slide as it is readily available on Blackboard. The other thing I do is write a list of questions I want to ask. I either ask these in the lecture or search online for them. I try to use a focusing research style where I start on something as broad as Wikipedia and then pull key words from that site. I then google those terms and narrow down my research until I find that I am close to researching something else. I then stop and reflect on what I read. The only thing I wished I had done from the beginning is referencing my sources correctly. By the time I was told the correct way I had already completed most of the essays. Next time I will do that from the very beginning.

I found the areas that interested me most was the lecture on AI and HCI. I particularly enjoyed the level of psychology and the “human element” of both of them. During my research I discovered that AI is more to do with people than computers, which was a revelation to me and as soon as I started thinking of it in that way I found it easier to understand why people are working so hard to create AI’s. I also loved the fact that HCI and AI pair extremely well and I would have loved a question pair combining the two. I really respond to the human elements in things which is why I also enjoyed learning about The Bauhaus. I appreciated the way that artists, craftsmen and designers were pulled together and revolutionised the way we see modern design. I struggled a little with pulling my research into my own words. As I read something that somebody else already wrote it felt a little like I was rewriting what was already said. I tried instead to research first and then type. Once I had finished typing I would re-read the essay whilst reading the research and checked my facts. For every single essay I used OneNote and it was unbelievably useful. The ability to just drag and drop Links, Videos and research into one document is amazing.  I think next time I will use a Dictaphone to record audio notes as these can be placed in OneNote.

Overall I enjoyed most of the modules, I feel that I need to practise Harvard referencing a bit more and I also need to build a list of reliable online sources for information. I think my strengths have been my research, when I get a lead on a subject I find it very easy to follow up on it and learn more information.

 

Sources

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/gamification-at-work-designing-engaging-business-software/chapter-11-58-curated-list-of-research-techniques

Copyright and Originality

Copyright is one of these things that in concept should be quite easy to enforce, in reality however this is often not the case. In a world where everything is copyrighted it is often difficult to be original or create something that is truly original. We all become inspired by other’s work and that is never a bad thing the issue arises when we begin copying other’s work and claiming it is ours. This is why copyright laws where brought into place.

The Positives and Negatives of Copyright

Positive

Negative

Automatic Copyright Protection:

As a creator anything you create is automatically copyrighted. This is why it’s good practise to document and evidence your process.

Ambiguity: The Copyright laws at the moment can be vague and ambiguous allowing for some wiggle room on the definitions and terms. What defines fair use can often change. Cases such as “Ice Ice Baby” vs “Under Pressure” (Rolling Stone. 2017) constantly probe the definition of this term and bring it to the public eye.

Protects the Creator: Copyright is good because it protects works and makes sure the creator benefits from the use of their works. It protects their ownership of the item.

Limiting: Because everything is copyrighted it is becoming increasingly difficult to use others works in your own. This is often prevalent in the music industry when a similar beat or jingle is used.

Control: Copyright allows the original owner to have control over their work. If they object to the use of their work for any reason they have the right to stop their work being used. This is good because it means for things like music and Art the creator has a say in where and how these pieces are displayed.

Accidental Infringement: It sometimes occurs that an artist or musician will create a piece that accidently infringes copyright of someone else’s work. Now that copyright is an automatic thing it means that it is quite difficult to produce original work. It is why research is extremely important. Blurred lines is an exceptional example of this in action. (The Guardian, 2017)

So as we can see there are clear advantages and benefits from copyright law. There are, however, some very big problems with copyright. The major one being originality and ownership issues. Copyright stops people combining pre-generated artefacts to create something new. Everything now is automatically copyrighted, whether or not it has been shown or displayed. This is an issue as it means that being original is extremely difficult and even if you’re sure you made something original it could steal be infringing copyright laws accidently.

I think that in an age of immediate information and social media it is unlikely that anything is original anymore. We learn by copying and watching others, so by that logic everything we create is going to be heavily inspired by something else that we have seen or heard. I think the knack to making something seem original is do your research and try to abstract from the original source of information as much as possible.

C.S. Lewis writes, “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two-pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”(Lewis, C.S. 1973)

 

Sources

Pros & Cons of Copyright Laws | Your Business. 2017. Pros & Cons of Copyright Laws | Your Business. [ONLINE] Available at: https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/pros-cons-copyright-laws-5170.html. [Accessed 06 December 2017].

Pros & Cons of Copyright Laws | Your Business. 2017. Pros & Cons of Copyright Laws | Your Business. [ONLINE] Available at: https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/pros-cons-copyright-laws-5170.html. [Accessed 06 December 2017].

Business Insider. 2017. Nothing We Do Is Original Anymore, So Find Things Worth Imitating – Business Insider. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/nothing-we-do-is-original-anymore-so-find-things-worth-imitating-2012-8?IR=T. [Accessed 06 December 2017].

Rolling Stone. 2017. Vanilla Ice vs. Queen and David Bowie (1990) | Songs on Trial: 10 Landmark Music Copyright Cases | Rolling Stone. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/songs-on-trial-10-landmark-music-copyright-cases-20160608/vanilla-ice-vs-queen-and-david-bowie-1990-20160608. [Accessed 06 December 2017].

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 2017. Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents. [Accessed 06 December 2017].

The Guardian. 2017. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke to pay $7.4m to Marvin Gaye’s family over Blurred Lines | Music | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/10/blurred-lines-pharrell-robin-thicke-copied-marvin-gaye. [Accessed 06 December 2017].

Mere Christianity:

Ann, K., 1973. C. S. Lewis. Regal Books.

 

“Hard” AI, more like A Hard Lie. (Essay 5)

AI or (Artificial Intelligence) according to techopedia is defined thusly:

 

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with artificial intelligence are designed for include:

  • Speech recognition
  • Learning
  • Planning
  • Problem solving”

Human beings often have a hard time imagining something they have never seen/heard before. When we are introduced to a new situation we often rely upon a previous experience to help us understand what is currently happening. I believe this is why people prefer to use “human” like AI rather than Logic based AI. This isn’t to say that I think people incapable of logic but more that as a society we rely on what we can understand easily rather than the logical thinking. People design AI with human tendencies because it is the easiest for us to understand, not only this, it is also easier for us as we know and understand the perspective of a human being.  When people think about AI they often think about “Hal” or “Skynet” and the fact of the matter is that this isn’t possible with our current technology and way of thinking. AI is currently incapable of being nothing more than a very clever illusion of persona or rational thought. Ai is very good for monitoring tasks and doing mundane jobs that a person might find boring/challenging ( such as overlook the digital ecosystem of a game.)

AI is often represented in mass media as something that is potentially dangerous and scary. Nearly every article I read after googling the term “Artificial Intelligence” showed results of how “deadly” AI will become in the future. People are often unaware that as impressive as AI is, it is not sentient and capable of free will. AI is not able to decide what it wants to do. The most important aspect when designing AI is the intent behind the design, as this intent will shape the decisions of the AI.  If mankind where to ever achieve true “strong” AI I think it would probably take the form of cybernetic engineering and body- computer integration. I think that we will probably end up augmenting ourselves to the point that “AI” and Intelligence would be one and the same. I think the consequence of humanity achieving a true AI would be the eventual destruction of humanity, either through annihilation or assimilation. Thankfully I do not believe that true AI is possible. I think that people are very good at anthropomorphising technology and applying more credit to a program that could be very simple. People are often a little disillusioned when they find out how AI actually works.

http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2017/06/07/ai-inside/

 

Sources

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ai/

http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/intro.html

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/190/artificial-intelligence-ai

 

HCI (Essay 4)

 

With the continued improvement of technological capability we have been able to invent new and improved ways of Human Computer Interaction (HCI.) With technologies such as voice recognition, search memory, Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented reality (AR) we have new ways to use and communicate with our devices. This is only made possible through extensive research and a mixture of engineering and psychology.

Voice guided UI is the process of using your voice to issue commands to your device. It is extremely common with modern mobile devices and now there are even personal “secretary” devices such as google home which only respond to speech recognition. Within the next 5 years it is predicted that the adoption of speech recognition UI will rise to 85%. Speech recognition is awesome because it synergizes with modern working life and is very easy to learn to use. Speech recognition is consistently being improved to allow people with different accents and speech impairments to use it effectively.

VR and Augmented reality have become very popular in recent years. Although they may seem similar they are in fact quite distinct. VR is virtual reality and is a computer generated environment and is designed to trick the user into thinking they are in that environment. AR is more of an overlay to describe or add to our current “real” environment. It is used in games recently in games like Pokémon GO. AR is also used for educational and behavioural gamification. Some games and apps add “collectible” overlays to encourage people to travel to certain areas within certain times. AR is often used combined with real life scenarios and VR creates its own environment.

Observation is one of the tools used by Games designers when researching the players. They observe participants playing the game using Biometrics. Biometric research is an automated way of recording someone’s physiological data. Readings are often taken by monitoring heart rate, brainwaves and galvanic skin response (how sweaty they are). Biometrics are a good way of recording data as you do not have to keep interrupting the gameplay with questions. It also allows us to compare “spikes” on the data with how the user reports they were feeling afterwards. This data is used to test how the player is interacting and responding to the game environment, which is really useful information for gameplay but is very important in producing a state of “Flow” (Flow is the state at which a person becomes fully immersed and involved with the activity, with energised focus). Biometrics fail when there is no justification from another source to give them meaning. A raised heartbeat could be due to immense excitement, happiness or stress, but there is no way to interpret it definitely.

I think by using research we can anticipate “roughly” how someone may react when confronted with a certain scenario. Games like Left 4 Dead change the difficulty of the game depending on how well or badly a player has played so far. This is a good way of reacting to the player and challenging them. I think that ultimately we can predict what somebody is going to do based purely on the choices they are provided. A good game will have multiple ways of dealing with a scenario and hopefully will be tested sufficiently so that the majority of people would respond in one of those ways.

Sources

https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ui-design/the-future-of-human-computer-interaction-whats-next/https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-07626-3_71

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/game-user-research/

Understanding players through biometrics

Cognitive Psychology Applied to User Experience in Video Games

Indie ( Essay 3)

The indie scene is hardly a new thing. In fact the Indie scene was prevalent and thriving during the early 80’s. When games where being designed for early computers they were often simple games created by individuals at home. This is because there were hardly any game developing companies at the time and people were beginning to experiment and have fun with new technology.

They were distributed through magazines and “micro fairs” which were essentially trading fairs for designers to meet their player base and sell their games directly.
Shops never sold games at the time. You could either mail-order them programme them yourself or buy the tapes from the developers.

At the beginning of the 80’s there was an emergence of DIY attitude within society and people were experimenting with creating their own things. People were experimenting with home computing and the simplicity of the script language at the time meant that game development was quite accessible.

Jeff Minter is an Indie developer who started creating independent games commercially in 1981. He created games such “Attack of the Mutant Camels” and “Hover Bovver.” He has recently been working Polybius a shooting/ racing game that was released on Playstation in 2017. In 2014 he was working on something he called the “minotaur project” in which he would design games for IOS but in an old console style. This project unfortunately was an overall net loss but led Minter to the creation of Polybius.

Indie is far from new it would be fairer to say that it was the ignition for video games and due to online gaming markets that opened the accessibility for developers, is only recently making a comeback.

The development of mobile phone apps and online software such as steam has meant that Indie developers have a better chance at competing with large scale game companies. In recent years there has been a huge increase in the number of available indie games on the market. I think that the term Indie has become partially meaningless as it no longer applies to any game that is created independently. Indie has also become a style, a label.

I do not think Indie is completely meaningless as the term still applies to games that are independently created. On the other hand Indie is often a trendy term used by indie developers to help aid sales. Mainstream games often try to mimic indie game style to cash in on the indie movement. I also think that due to mass influx of Indie games on the market in such a short amount of time has created varied meanings of the word Indie. It can be a style, a descriptor or literally a buzzword used to get people excited.

 

Sources

http://tig.wikia.com/wiki/History_of_Independent_Games

http://www.minotaurproject.co.uk/frontpage.php

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jeff+minter&rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBGB771GB771&oq=jeff+minter&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.1536j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

Applications of interactive narrative and games system concepts outside the gaming industry (2nd Essay)

Game Concepts and narratives are often used in everyday life. Some of the best would be in Ice breakers and training for new jobs placements. Our brains are great at learning guidelines and rules if presented to us in the medium of a game.

I used to work in Waitrose and when training we often had pick your own adventure style training sessions. We were presented a situation and asked to respond appropriately. This was a great way to learn the policies and procedures of the company without any boring talks or meetings. The interaction was key in this instance. The use of games in this way also meant that people who are easily distracted or have a hard time reading and absorbing a lot of information could learn these rules quickly and easily.

Games are often used to assist in the forming of a group. When people are presented with a fun challenge they tend to bond together quickly and have fun. This means that they can each show their skills in a “safe” game environment with no consequence for failure.
With the invention of social media the gamification of the world became easier. Things like the Fitbit introduce a competitive, level based game into people lives and helps to motivate them to work out more to beat their friend’s score. This is known as Behavioural gamification, when a game is created with the intent to change people’s behaviour, another example of this is Pokémon GO which aimed to get people walking. Even in an app such as “Waze” (a popular social media sat nav) there is a level system and notification system. It actively rewards drivers for being part of the community and driving safely.

Games are not only used to entertain but also to recruit people. The U.S. Army has been using a “Virtual Army Experience” to facilitate the recruitment of new soldiers. Application forms now often feature multiple choice questions so that people can feel as though they are in a situation whilst answering.

Gamification is also used to facilitate change in the world. In 2009 a game was released by the University of Washington called “FoldIt.” This was an online puzzle game involving protein folding and uses a puzzle type interface to allow people from all over the world to manipulate and figure out various protein structures. Due to people competing with each other and a massive 240,000 player base the solution of the structure for M-PMV (Mason-Pfizer monkey virus: an AIDS causing virus) was found in 8 days. The game utilized people’s puzzle solving skills and did something in 8 days that scientists had been trying for 15 years.

In conclusion I feel that game concepts and interactive narratives are now a key part of modern learning styles and for a good reason. Games are an intuitive and fun way of learning new information and skills. They are also extremely important in a social aspect. They are used to get people to socialise and make daunting tasks seem more manageable.

 

Sources

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.701.4161&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Top 10 Social Gamification Examples that will Literally Save the World

Click to access gamification.pdf

 

Why I think The Bauhaus continues to influence Modern Game Design. Task 2.

A board game on a wooden table.

Scythe

The Bauhaus was an art school that was active in Germany between the years 1919 to 1933. It was designed to help pull artists back into the making of the piece and not concentrate on an end result. It was also motivated by the worry for fine art in a changing and technological society. It had a huge emphasis on practical skills and craft and helped to pull fine art and craft together. Experiment and problem solving was extremely important in the school. It tried to bring artists back into contact with everyday life.

The birth of design is  attributed to the Bauhaus as for the first time art and craft came together, thus forming Design. A good example of Bauhaus is Ikea. Removing all the whistles and bells from a design leaves us with a simpler, ergonomic creation that suits its purpose.

The Bauhaus honed in on making its students as multi-skilled as possible. Not only would they be teaching art but also design, crafting and knowledge. This led to a generation of artists and designers that could create a wider range of ideas in a more practical way.

One of the principals of The Bauhaus is ” Form follows Function” This means that the creation should appear as what it is to be used for. A good example is a chair. It is fairly easy to guess what it is for and it is extremely easy to use and understand. Yes a chair could serve other functions but it only has one major and obvious use.

The Bauhaus has influenced games design in numerous ways the obvious being multi skilled people. Creativity is not enough to create a game that anyone can enjoy. The concept of teaching various design skills didn’t even exist until the Bauhaus. There was no such thing as a graphic designer before the Bauhaus came along.
The Bauhaus teachings are often used in the composition of games whether they be Video games or Board games. Careful consideration of formal elements are combined with design processes to create something that is easily understood and appreciated by the player.
A good example of this is Scythe. Scythe won the Best board game artwork & presentation from Golden Geek in 2016. It has a careful consideration of the scores and units of each player and melds the information from these into the design. Without these integrations of mechanics into the design I do not think that modern board games would be able to support the complex rule systems that make them so fun.

Another good example of Bauhaus principles is the score counter that is commonly found around modern gaming boards. It is an un-intrusive design aspect that included functionality into the design.

In conclusion I feel that the Bauhaus has been an important influence in Games design and will always be a key part of design in general. It’s ideas paved the way for design and art to co-exist. Video games today are often judged on their textures and graphics, perhaps even more so than their game mechanics. This balance of design and Art was only made possible by the Bauhaus.