Topic Eight

Lecture- This lecture was titled “Is Videogames a waste of time.” Instead of debating about whether it was a waste of time, we analysed the whole prospect of the videogames.
Important Note- Narratology is the study of videogames from the perspective of being stories or literary works. The Narratology view explains that videogames are a more advanced form of story telling in which you can choose the actions or some of the details of the story.
Ludology is concerned with the game play elements, and that the story elements are secondary or not important.
The Ludology aspect may be true, but if all videogame designers were to stick to the ludology view so that all storyline in games were secondary, I believe that this would limit the potential of future technology and games.
Tutorial task- We were given several exercises for Microsoft Word and Excel. Then we had to answer these questions:

“Were there any problems? What were your solutions? Did you find it too simple, or was it confusing? Can you see how this software might be useful to you?”

Microsoft Excel. I know little about it. I struggled to do the first two exercises, but I wasn’t able to successfully complete the graphs exercise. I went to the “Help” option, but it was a little difficult to explain sometimes.
I found the tasks I couldn’t do confusing. Even in Word, in some of the tasks I successfully completed, I found the instructions for the exercise different to what I would have done.
I managed to do the exercises, including mail merge, in Word. The things I didn’t know that I learnt excited me because I use Word a lot.
Microsoft Excel was the opposite reaction because I’ve barely used it and I require basic lessons before I can move onto advanced exercises. However, Excel would be useful or even fun if I put in data that interested me, like the public reactions for well known movies.

Reading- The reading was Chapter Three from Trigger Happy.
Once I forced myself to read it, I found it interesting.
Although games can be considered “Realistic”, they usually aren’t. Sometimes, situations in real life are less exciting, so that they won’t make a good game and so they are enhanced or exaggerated. This is evidence in space war games. A laser should travel at the speed of light, and so if you can see a laser coming at you, even from a long distance away, you are basically dead. There would be no time to react. Another aspect is that a laser could simply be deflected by a mirror. Why aren’t these technologically advanced space aliens placed mirrors on their hulls to reflect laser beams?
Also, games have boundaries. You can only do things or consequences for actions can only be done if the designer of the game has programmed it into the game. You can’t use a rocket launcher to blow up an annoying wooden door to get past it, when the same rocket launcher might disintegrate countless enemies in amour. Most items in games can only be used once or in a certain area, even though they could be used in other places in real life. The author of Trigger Happy used Resident Evil and Tomb Raider as the main examples.