Project Journal Week 4

I have over time been analysing my other team members work and felt that perhaps a better system of organisation would benefit my site, so I have now decided to change my blog to weekly updates. I hope for the examiners that this isn’t too much of a problem. During week four we discussed that our research into articles should be coming to an end, which is primarily down to the reason that we have our Literature Survey due in two weeks time. For me personally this week will be going through various books and journals based on film, as I have obtained a AS Level qualification in film studies, I felt I would be the most efficient researcher in this field in our group. Additionally to this, I will be going through my other team members blogs and extracting the journals most beneficial to me for my specific part in the Literature survey, which is discussed in our Team Journal for this week.

Thomas D. and Haussmann G. (2005), University of Calorado, Cinematic Camera as Videogame Cliche(2005) , 1st edition. pp 1-10
http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/retrieve/1568/e69f9c293984e49ba7ba7b7e7eb6.doc

The article states that many video game makers today tend to use the optical camera as the main viewpoint into the game world. But a video game camera is virtual, so they can “represent a potentially infinite number of perspectives beyond the classic, representational linear perspective.”

The researches discuss how the games industry is reliant on some film techniques, in this case , the optical camera viewpoint, and how it is hindering the growth of original ideas. Obviously there are times when the camera needs to be an optical viewpoint but the industry is over reliant on it. Overall I think this article was only slightly relevant to our topic, but it gave me many points that I simply had not even thought about before e.g. how games are copying film and how this can can hinder the growth of the industry in terms of truly original games. Below are some extracts from the document that I found interesting and perhaps could help us to think outside of the box when we come to create our piece.

“Videogames can mimic cinematic language if they like, but they don’t have to. Because they do not rely on an optical perspective, videogames can represent their onscreen space using any perspective system imaginable and, certainly, even those not yet imagined.” Mark J.P. Wolf has remarked: “except for a few torchbearers like Rez and Frequency, games have gone the way of increasingly representational graphics and gameplay, often trying to achieve the look and feel of movies or cartoons... But it would be quite a shame to limit game design to representational graphics and gameplay and to ignore everything else that the medium is capable of producing.”


“The real consequence of thinking of the videogame camera as an optical system is the retardation of the gaming experience and a contraction of the medium’s possibilities. Newman summed this situation perfectly ‘At least part of the pleasure to be derived from engagement with the cyberspace of virtual reality, according to benedikt, apparently comes from the ability to play with and within these elsewhere spaces replete with their uncommon, perhaps even predictable , spatial rules’ ”





Griffiths M and Davies M,(2005) Does Video Game Addiction Exist? The Handbook of Video Game Studies, 1st edition. pp 359 - 371

It highlights three key points at the beginning of the article, What is addiction? Does Video Game addiction exist? And, If it does exist, what are gamers addicted to and answers all these fully.

It also discusses online games, briefly stating that people who play them often take on other social identities to make themselves feel better which can reward the user psychologically and physiologically. It also goes on to show the link between Arcade Video Games and slot machines, in that playing games for money has grown from the Arcades into online and other forms of play.

This introduction of gambling into games outside of Arcades adds something else into the equation, which in theory, is even more addictive than traditional games. One of the most important aspects of this article is the P.R.E effect, the Partial Reinforcement Effect. “This is a critical psychological ingredient of video game addiction where by the reinforcement is intermittent - people keep responding in the absence of reinforcement hoping that another reward is just around corner. Knowledge about the P.R.E gives the video designers an edge in designing appealing games.”

Overall I found this article very informative and it made some good points about the emotions that are linked to addictive behaviour. Although the article seems a little off our focus issue, I felt it would still be beneficial to read an article like this as to get a broad range of journals within my reading. In this article the researchers set out to explore if video game addiction exists. It first discuses how the press have branded video game players as “joystick junkies” highlighting how addictive this media is. The researchers also show the scepticism by the academic community and how the definition of addiction is evolving.