Today's Lecture on the study of Games

Hello again,

Today's topic was split between some of the current applications that are being used by people on the web to assist them in communicating with other people. We started by looking at the emergence with of Instant Messaging services. With a lot of people now using MSN Messenger it's interesting in to look at where the concept began. The program called ICQ was one of the first to be adopted on a large scale, this allows people to have lists of friends who they can chat to it also gives you the ability see who was both online and offline and allowed you to leave messages for those people who will received them when they next log on.

This IM service could be said to be an extension of the chat rooms and programs such as IRC or internet relay chat where people could join a channel or room with other people. IRC was a major player in the market with a lot of people using it, it's use has wained of late however they are still frequented by the more 'hardcore' section of the community.

Some of the available programs out there now are
mIRC - http://www.mirc.com
ICQ - http://www.icq.com
AOL Instant Messenger - http://www.aim.com
Yahoo Messenger - http://www.messenger.yahoo.com
Gaim - http://gaim.sourceforge.net

We then went onto talk about the advent of portable music/audio and pod casting, we mainly focused on the MP3 debate of DRM or data resource management, which involves the restriction of the use of the files. This is a bit of a contentious issue with me as I feel that if you put protection on something people will just find ways around the security. It's been interesting to watch the industry move from no protection through to the overbearing protection and now there has been a shift again away from this type of protection. It also brought up the growing use of RSS Feeds. An RSS feed is a way to syndicate and update content, basically you have a reference feed to a particular site and the RSS feed readers collects any changes to the site and informs you of the change.

Next we looked at Peer-to-Peer and Filesharing programs, this is a very litigious area at the moment as the major record and movie companies have been spending extraordinary amount of money pursuing people who share their propriety information, through associations such as the MPAA and the RIAA. There are a plethora of different file sharing programs out there, the problem being is that the distribution companies sue the program providers and get them shut down, the people just start using a different program, this has happened quite a few times now with KAZAA and Napster, with having now moved to torrent software. The increase in litigation has created a subculture among the internet users with the increase in things called 'darknets', this concept of a close nit community who will only share between members, the only way to become a part of one of these communities is to know someone who is a part of one and be invited to join.

Then to finish off the first session we looked at the rise of VoIP or Voice over IP and voice chat. Basically this refers to using the web's transfer protocols to talk to other people rather than using the phone lines in the traditional way. The rise of VoIP was in the beginning causing the telecommunications companies some concern as they feared that people would stop using their service. As history shows this has yet to happen as there are still bandwidth related issues plaguing the VoIP software over long distances.

The next part of the lecture was focused on the study of video games. The study of video games seems to have been split into two camps, one camp sees computer games in a Narratology sense in that they represent a story being told, or viewing games in the same way you would view a piece of literary art.

The other camp focuses on Ludology, in contrast to narratology, is not concerned with the story elements of the games but rather the Game and Playing elements. Basically Ludology follows the argument that the story elements in many games is there for decoration only, and is incidental to just playing the game.

Researchers have kind of moved on from the two differing camps to now look at video games in a technical sense, by looking at how they came about and how they are linked to the hardware they are being played on.

The lecture then went on to look at computer games as mediums of communication or expression that have precursors in more traditional media, this approach tends to favour the semiotic approach to video games as outlined by Sassure, that games can be pulled apart into it's pieces and studied that way.

We then looked at another way of studying games in the form of 'Games'. By comparing today's games to the ones played in yesteryear's and looking for similarities and differences in what makes games what they are.

In today's readings, the first chapter of Half-Real: Video Games, Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, it was interesting to look at games as a being defined by their rules. The makers of the games have to find the delicate balance between creating rules that are reasonable to the player, and making the game difficult enough within those rules to be able to make the game challenging enough to make the person want to play the game, but not so difficult that they get frustrated and stop playing the game altogether.

By definition games have rules that tell us how the 'World' operates then we confronted with question of whether we should be studying the game itself on it's own as a self-contained system of rules; or the player of the game who affects the flow of game play and narrative according to those rules or some combination of the two which becomes difficult to balance.

We then finished by looking at examining games for what they are, their ontology, how their world shapes what you re in the virtual world. Some other questioned raised include the aesthetics of the games, i.e. what makes the games fun to play and how is this concept of fun develop through the playing of the game.

I found this short video on www.youtube.com which I found to a be rather amusing summary of computer game development over time.


Well that's pretty much it for today's lecture, till Monday ppl. ^_^