HCI

1. Select one game of your interest and explain why it has good/bad game UI

Fig1: LeBlanc M. (2014) Twitter

User interface is arguably one of the most important aspects of human computer interaction. Without an interface there would be very little to interact with and so the user’s actions will receive very minimal response if any at all. By this idea every game has some sort of user interface regardless of how simple it still counts. One of my favourite games has a UI that appears anything but simple by first glance but once understood, is one of the most intuitive UI designs I have come across.

Fig2: Messelink R. (2015)

Sid Meier’s Civilisation V is my all-time favourite game and part of a series that I have put easily over 1000 hours into and I would like to think I understand the interface very well. The icons used for each element of the UI make perfect sense once they have been explained. For example the symbol for espionage (top right) looks like the silhouette of a stereotypical spy. This theme is used throughout and symbols always match across assets. Notice the symbol in the top left used to represent a golden age is also used on the tab on the left as the unit selected is a special unit that can begin or extend a golden age. The consistency and logical symbolism of the design is what in my opinion makes it a great UI. Although many feel it is overwhelming to a newcomer I believe it is intuitive and actually simpler to understand than people think.

References

LeBlanc M. (2014) Twitter (https://twitter.com/martinleblanc/status/466638260195041280)

Messelink R. (2015) (http://publichistory.humanities.uva.nl/blog/age-of-empires-in-the-classroom/)

2. Discuss how technology augments human abilities. Reflect upon the implications of the future of HCI

The technology of a standard form controller is enough to allow people to play games provided they are capable of holding and interacting with the controller. There is however a small portion of gamers who are unable to do this and for them gaming at the same standard as an able bodied person seems like an impossibility. Thankfully this no longer has to be the case as technology has been adapted to use many different inputs to allow almost anyone to join in and compete. Special effect have been one of the leading teams developing and implementing this technology into people’s homes allowing the disabled to be as capable as the abled.

I would hope that in the future this technology and HCI as a whole continues to develop as I believe it could have a huge benefit in other fields. I think that the augmentation of human ability is something that has not been explored enough yet to understand what it could become but I hope to see more of it and I think it will have a long and interesting future

References

Special effect: https://www.specialeffect.org.uk/who-we-helped , https://www.specialeffect.org.uk/what-we-do

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

It is difficult to decide whether copyright makes our life easier or more complicated. Technically without it people would have an access to the endless library of ideas, references and sounds so creating art would be easier than ever before. On the other hand would the terms “artist” or “creator” exist anymore?

Personally I think that the world without copyright would look much more interesting than now. Of course it does not define it as an unnecessary law. If there was no guarantee that artworks cannot be stolen we can only assume that artists would pay more attention to make their works more outstanding and individualistic to prevent being personised. Perspective of being defended restricts creators to choose the border constituted by the law as the final point in copying others.

The other reason why copyright limits us is no possibility to improve already existing ideas by people who do not owe them but could possibly make some positive corrections. On the other hand the worst thing that every creator can imagine is modification of their work into something they did not mean and copyright can effectively prevent it.

Important issue about copyright is also finances. It seems impossible to be a full-time artist in the world where such laws are not instituted. Although Thus Höffner made comparison of publishing data in XIX United Kingdom and Germany where copyright didn’t exist that days and it turned out that more books were published and read in Germany.

It is a tough question if there is more good or bad things about copyright because it raises as well economic, cultural and ethical questions. We will probably never know how contemporary art or inventions would look like without copyright as every attempt of removing this law would even destroy the market.

Is is possible to make anything new?

In the age of internet and globalization it may seems that we have already seen everything and nothing can surprise us anymore. Even if we come up with an astonishing brand new idea there is always something behind it.

In general people’s creations cannot be made from nothing because it is not the way how human imagination works. “We are able to create new things as the brain takes familiar pieces and assembles them in new ways, similar to how a collage is made from fragments of photos”. It means that there are thousands of neurons in human brain encoding various characteristic of objects we’ve already seen. We can combine them together in infinite amount of ways and that is how our ideas originate.

If every idea is just a mixture of things which existed before is it even possible to create something new? The answer for the question depends on what is the definition of something ”new” for us.

If we assume that “new” idea is based on the past experiences but links them in a completely unexpected way,  it relates to a lot of creations then. It brings to mind a circle because every new invention stems from the previous one.

A good example of art based on the past can be found in Picasso’s painting. His version of Diego Velázquez’s painting “Las Meninas” is at the same time a copy of the famous masterpiece and something entirely new because cubism style applied in this work was not known before Picasso.

Las Meninas (left: Diego Velázquez, 1656, right: Pablo Picasso, 1957)

It shows that basing on the past is generally the only way of creating something which seems to be new. To be precise I would rather say “unexpected” because that is the shortest definition of something new.

references:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-imagination-works-human-brain-creative-thinking-allows-neurons-work-406628

https://www.gov.uk/topic/intellectual-property/copyrighthttps://www.quora.com/Why-is-copyright-good

http://www.bbc.co.uk/copyrightaware/what-is

https://theconversation.com/why-cash-and-copyright-are-bad-news-for-creativity-34696

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

The term ‘Indie’ refers simply to something that is independently developed. It is typically used in association with music but has more recently been related to games. Although the term is only now getting more use, the ‘indie’ games have still been around from the very beginning the only difference being that the original ‘indie’ games were ‘indie’ in a far more literal sense whereas recently the term has also been used to somewhat refer to a style of game as well. Following that ‘indie’ is simply independently developed, the entire gaming industry started with an indie game. Tennis for two is widely recognised as the first ever video game. Developed in 1958 on the oscilloscope, the game is a representation of tennis played by turning a knob to angle the ‘racket’ and pressing a button to hit the ‘ball’ over the net. Its creation is credited solely to nuclear physicist William Higinbotham and by that statement it can be defined as an indie game. Following that: Spacewar, the first computer game originally developed by Steve Russell, a student at MIT; and Computer space, the first commercially sold coin operated video game by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, are both by definition ‘Indie’. In fact the first notable game that wouldn’t be considered ‘indie’ was pong by Atari incorporated in 1972. It is worth noting that Spacewar and computer space were both later published by other companies but it is the original development of the game that I am referring to as ‘indie’

References

(n.d.) the first video game? Brookhaven national laboratory. Available at: https://www.bnl.gov/about/history/firstvideo.php

Bellis M. (2017) The History of Spacewar. Available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-spacewar-1992412

Modine A. (2008) Before Pong, there was Computer Space. Available at: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/13/tob_computer_space/

2.Has the term indie become meaningless?

After writing the answer to question A. yes it has. I’m not sure it’s even a word anymore. Joking aside I don’t think it ever had a meaning to lose besides its literal definition and that can’t change and even in severe overuse it can’t lose meaning. I think what is now defined as indie is exactly what indie is and always has been, small independent teams or individuals creating without the support of any larger external companies. The part of indie that may have been lost over the years is how big a team can be before it’s not indie anymore and I honestly don’t know that an answer even exists, the line between indie and small company is discernible only by legality and that slightly defeats the term indie as some individuals have created companies to deal with monetary issues but are still a lone developer and should still be considered indie. To sum up this mess of an answer it has a single definition, albeit a loose one, and hasn’t really had or lost any other meaning.

Reflect

The Research and Communication Skills part of the course was very challenging and enriched me with a bunch of new skills which can be useful in the future.

I find topics in general quite vast. There was no simple answers to the problems we discussed and I could not construct a satisfying answer to any of them without a thorough research. Each of them required a complex solution and sometimes finding sources of information was the most difficult part.

Very good thing about the essays were question pairs making me have a look at different problems concentrated on the same topic and see which one is the most appealing to me so I can expand it. I really enjoyed few of them but to be honest if I was supposed to answer all the question pairs I am not sure if I would manage with it. I found them really diversified in terms of difficulty level.

Answering for the topics I was not very familiar with such as Human Computer Interaction or Copyright was definitely not my favourite part of the course. Both of them needed a lot of research and thinking every decision through a couple of times. Nevertheless, this kind of topics was probably the most useful in my development.

The more pleasant part of essays was focused on describing the particular features of games I have already played because I was free to use any example I wanted. The work about User Interface in the game I really like was definitely the one which improved my skill of analysing. I would be happy to see more topics like this in the future because they make me look at games I knew before from completely new perspective and find some details I have not noticed before.

I have to mention the essay about indie game developers because it definitely changed the way I used to look at games. Before the course I was only admiring the graphics but this time I was forced to pay attention to creative process and see how much experiments with various styles does it cost to create not only good-looking video game, but also to adjust the style to game’s atmosphere.

As an international student I find another advantage of the module in improvement of my English language skills. It is very easy to pick up some slang words around here but there is no much opportunities to learn specialized vocabulary. Doing research of games related topics gave me a bunch of new words useful to describe my ideas and thoughts.

To sum up, I think that Research and Communication Skills module made me more engaged and experienced in different topics associated with games design. The other useful skills I learnt are analysing, researching, selecting essential points and academic writing.

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

Games development most often uses the simple form of Artificial Intelligence which is called behavioural modelling and is very important part of NPC’s creation. NPC’s are mainly just the background characters in games so their only task is to play the role regardless of circumstances, emotions etc.

The more developed form of AI when computer pay attention to intentions and emotions is called emotive modelling. First projects of the artificial emotive intelligence comes from late 90’s. One of them is  dr. Breazeal’s project called Kismet. It’s main aim was to align psychological elements to make robot understand people. Nowadays there are a lot of attempts from companies such as Google to improve emotive AI and introduce it into our homes as personal assistants but this could also be translated into games.

Kismet robot

First attempts of introducing emotive artificial intelligence into games design comes from 1985. Game called Little Computer People was released by Activision. The main task of a player was to take care of the generated character which had limited range of needs, emotions and behaviours. This type of games was becoming increasingly popular until The Sims came out in 2000 and it was a smash hit proving that people are very eager to play with intelligent characters.

The Sims

Emotive modelling of non-playable characters (NPC) could have really interesting impact on different types of games, although game mechanics would not be the same anymore. Imagine the RPG game where every NPC tries to solve quests and kill the same enemies.

In a study made by Deep Mind researchers there were AI „agents” competing against each other in 40 million rounds of a game about picking up fruit. In the future scenarios with less apple to collect they became more aggressive and started to fight. It proves that in a game with emotive modelling of NPC’s with the same goal they would attempt to eliminate each other.

It turns out that emotive modelling is very interesting tool in few games such as life symulators but would not work in other types of games.

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

A requirement of every good game settled in an open world are non-playable characters which are both individual and related to the environment. It is very difficult to match this two features and that is the thing game developers often struggle with.

Well-known example of NPC can be found in The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim. I mean adored city guard which became even famous because of his lack of individuality.  Each town in Skyrim world has loads of city guards but for some reason (probably laziness of developers) everyone looks exactly the same. Designers obviously tried to conceal this flaw by covering their heads with helmets but identical behaviour, voice and sayings reveal that it’s absolutely the same character. Also their mechanics does not differ at all. They run in the same pace, fight the same style and have the same amount of health points. The only distinguishing feature is the colour of their armour associated with town’s coat of arms but it doesn’t make a big difference.

There are a lot of ways to increase the level of variety among the city guards in Skyrim. One of them is obviously creating some more 3D models of guards with different faces and body building but it requires a lot of work. I wish that in the next parts of The Elder Scrolls game developers are going to record more voices, maybe create some more versions of the armour and make their mechanics differ. Changing their sense of humour, sayings and attitude depending of which part of country guard defends seems to be a good idea also.

Even though there is a lot of flaws in Skyrim guards everyone finds them so cool and being identical and bad in mechanics just make them very recognisable on the field of RPG games. It makes me insecure if the points suggested by me would improve them or rather spoil the inimitable atmosphere of Skyrim.

references:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/12/video-game-characters-emotional-ai-developers

http://news.mit.edu/2001/kismet

https://howwegettonext.com/the-boundaries-of-artificial-emotional-intelligence-aa10583302dc

Google’s AI got “highly aggressive” when competition got stressful in a fruit-picking game

Select one example to outline the key concepts of the interactive narrative genre?

One of the key concepts of the interactive narrative genre is that the consumer of the product has some kind of control over what is to happen in said circumstances, for instance actions made in the product can change the overall outcome of the product, for example in some role playing games the choices you select along the way can change the ending or what tasks/missions you must complete in order to finish the game some making the game longer and some making the game shorter, for instance making the choice to do all the side quests in a game instead of just sticking to the main story can result in many more hours of game play instead of a short play through. Although this can be in interactive games it can also be used in other types of media such as books where the audience is told to go to a different page for each answer or choice made overall resulting in a different ending, this is mostly found in children books but can be found in some adult/teen based demographic books too.

Does the interactive narrative still have a role to play in video games today. Give examples?

Interactive narrative still has a role in games such as role playing games, some good examples being Undertale where your decisions to kill or be peaceful change almost every aspect of the game, for example if you where to kill a certain character early on in the game then you have to fight their friends later on making the game a lot harder, also one funny thing in Undertale is that if you don’t buy cookies from a spider early on you need to fight a spider queen which is stupidly hard, I thing that is a good example of interactive narrative, Another good example is the game GTA V, this is a AAA title game in which the player has a lot of side tasks and main missions to complete but the big choice that the player makes is at the end of the game where you have to choose which character too kill each resulting in a different ending, the best being if you are able to not kill any of the three main characters. These type of game changing choices can be found in games like fallout 3 where there is a karma system in which the more bad things you do the worse karma you obtain, meaning less people will help you and you cant join certain groups which can make the game a lot more difficult.