Remediation

Remediation is the representation of one media in another. a good example of remediation is the Resident evil series of games which have also been made into films.

There have also been many other examples of similar crossovers. We were shown a good example of such by watching the german film Run Lola Run, in which the main character, Lola, is basically running the whole way through the film in order to get money to her boyfriend Manni and stop him robbing a store.

The main part of the film is divided in three "runs". Each run starts from the same situation but develops differently and has a different outcome. Each run contains various flash-forward sequences, showing how the lives of the people that Lola bumps into develop after the encounter. In each run, those people are affected in different ways.

During the first sequence of event lola is too late getting to Manni and she ends up getting shot by the police after they rob the store, in this sequence she learns how to turn the safety off the pistol.

In the second sequence of event she makes it in time but doesnt get the money that they need. Lola and the Manni see each other in the distance only to see the him get hit by an ambulance (ironic i know).

Then onto the thiiiird  sequence of events. In this sequence Lola manages to win the 100,000 marks at a casino then runs to meet her boyfriend manni and they basically live happily ever after.

After watching the film we went on to discuss that many of us thought that without the concept of "respawning" that we speculated came from games, the film would not have come to be.

Games Britannia part 2 & 3

After watching the first part of Games Britannia in Ed's lecture we went away to watch the second and third parts.

Starting with part 2 we learn that the people have tried for most of the time since the discovery that board games could feed “educational” games to children with the purpose of teaching them good manners and "improvement of the juvinile mind", that they have been commercialise in games like Mansion of Bliss and Mansion of Happiness. Games have also tried to encourage children to go to school and teach them history or economics.

An example of a modern board game that is based off of an older generation on is Monopoly, Monopoly is based on "the landlord’s game”, which was intended to illustrate the negative aspects of owning land in private monopolies. However the theme of adding money in a game then making people own proprieties and tax other players for walking on their properties would actually draw people in.

In my opinion the most interesting part of part 2 was the 'World Monopoly Championships' and the first UK Games Fair in 1982
Another part which i enjoyed and laughed at was the quite commercial/extremist moral board game War on Terror which was mean to basically ridicule the wars that have been going on in the last decade and even came with mock 'EVIL' balaclava.

Part 3

The final part of the series focuses on the rapid rise of digital games and the worlds that those games bring into play.
It begins with a discussion about Dungeons and Dragons, and a pretty interesting discussion at that. The most interesting part to me was the innovative early digital games like the 3D space fighting simulator Elite or Peter Molyneux’s Black and White, a game in which the player actually took on the role of a deity for a newly-formed world.

Royal Game of Ur Iterations

The iterations that I made for the game were few in number but I believe that they changed the game play and the player choices considerably. The new rules are as follows:

• 1D4 die used instead of 4 D4 die with each "point" facing up only counting for moving 1 space.
• when moving, the player does not have the option to pass their go.
• Jumping over and landing on enemies takes them, this rule does not work on enemy pieces that are on rosette squares.
• If you destroy and enemy piece you are given another go.
• "piggybacking", this means that a player can stack multiple pieces once they are on the board onto the same square and then move them altogether with one roll of the dice, the is a high risk/high reward feature because if the enemy lands on the stack then ALL of the pieces are destroyed. 

Games Britannia episode 1: Dicing with Destiny notes

In Ed's recent lecture we watched Games Britannia episode : Dicing with Destiny.
In the program, the presenter, Benjamin Woolley talked about an ancient board game that could have been used by druids for their priestly practice's, such as prophecy and divination. Woolley suggests that the game could have been played between the druid and the king to see if the king would win the forthcoming battle and also suggests that the course of early british history could have been decided on the board.
All in all I found the first episode of Games Britannia quite interesting and I am looking forward to watching the next episode.

La decima vittima (The 10th Victim)

Recently in Eddie's lecture we watched the 1965 Italian/French internation co-production science fiction film La Decima Vittima, directed by Elio Petri.
The Plot
In the near future, big wars are avoided by giving individuals with violent tendencies a chance to kill in the Big Hunt. The Hunt is the most popular form of entertainment in the world and also attracts participants who are looking for fame and fortune. It includes ten rounds for each competitor, five as the hunter and five as the victim. The survivor of ten rounds becomes extremely wealthy and retires. Scenes switch between the pursuit, romance between the hunter and the victim, and a narrator explaining the rules and justification of the Hunt.
Caroline Meredith (Ursula Andress) is the huntress armed with a high caliber Bosch shotgun looking for her tenth victim. Marcello Poletti (Marcello Mastroianni) is the victim. He is reluctant to kill Meredith as he is not sure whether she is his hunter, but then later because they become romantically involved. To maximize financial gain, Meredith wants to get a perfect kill in front of the cameras as she has negotiated a major sponser from the Ming Tea Company. [wikipedia]
My thoughts on the film are quite positive. Even though La Decima Vittima is quite dated film and is subtitled it felt like watching a very old prequel to austin powers with the same kind of comedy mixed in. although I probobly would not watch the film again, for that one time it was enjoyable and i recommend it to anyone looking for what in my oppinion was quite an odd film.

Bibliography

Bibliography

Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek [MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research p.2]

Irving Finkel [2005]

Marc LeBlanc [Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics]

K. Salen and E. Zimmerman [The Game Design Reader: A rules on play anthology]

Jennifer T. Westerfeld (2001) [https://oi.uchicago.edu/order/suq/products/urgamerules.html]

Richard A. Bartle [Players who suit MUD's]

Noah Falstein [Natural Funativity]

James Newman [What is a Video game? Rules, Puzzles and Simulations]

Jesse Schell [The Art of Game Design, A Book of Lenses, In the Beginning, There is the Designer]

Gamasutra [Features-Formal Abstract Design Tools]

William Green [Subject: Irving Finkel]

PopCap Case Study [Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design]

http://www.wikipedia.com/

This is the bibliography of all my sources that i used in my essay.

Insight: Joylon Myers, Video Game Designer

I recently read an article in The Independent newspaper that sparked my interest. the article was about a games designer called Joylon Myers who was one of the key programmers of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. in the article, he talked about the levels he worked on which included London and Paris and the kind of things they had to do in order to make a good level.
he first job that his team had to do was to choose the path of the journey which would dictate the gameplay, directing where detail would be needed and what would be seen from a distance. He then went on to talk about using mapping software to plot a path and using satellite imagery as a template for the scale.
"from this I would block out the buildings and roads in a very simple form. We'd use the basic building blocks to start adding movement and gameplayat that point and see if it working. when we were happy, I would add more detail."
Joylon Myers had previously worked on building paris on a grand scale in a game call The Sabateur and mentions that building paris on the scale that was needed for MW3 didn't seem as daunting as it would to someone else. Myers then goes on to say "It's the detail in surface textures, the layout of props and the lighting that takes a fair bit of time." Myers also says that every prop should have some kind of history and story as to why it is there and every surface needs to convey why it looks the way it does.
Myers then goes on to say:
"Exploring the worlds i've designed and tweaking them to make them even more interesting is a wonderful part of the job. It's even more amazing when you are building an area that you love, as you are constantly reliving memories from the past, both during and after its creation."
INTERVIEW BY DONALD MACINNES, THURSDAY 5 JANUARY 2012, THE INDEPENDENT