Understand how media audiences respond to media products

The positive and negatives of Violence in video games and the media.

A lot can be said about violence in video games and the way the media like to portray it in there own light, adding there own spin or reflection on the matter.

Positives and negative to do with Gaming:

There are many good and bad sides of the gaming world, different things need to be taken into account and a different perspective is needed to look at some aspects of gaming. today i am going to be talking about the impact of computer games and there roll that they have on society as a whole.

Negatives:

Excess playing
First of all i will be talking about the concerns of excess game time and the impact it can have on your life. there are a lot of downsides to excess play time on computer games and some of these go hand in hand with some other things i will be presenting on this list, one example is that from playing too long you could loose sleep from playing a game all day and all night, this can be a multitude of reasons as to why but i think many people can become addicted to the game they are playing, a quote from here says this "International studies have shown that between seven and 11 per cent of gamers show some symptoms associated with addiction." this shows us that quite a few kids are addicted to some type of video game, and a lack of sleep can lead to a lot of problems such as: fatigue, lack of rational thought, hard to make clear decisions and feeling depressed.

social isolation
Next is social isolation, this is quite common among video game addicts as they lack social skills that most non game addicted children/teenagers have, this can be caused by playing too much computer games and not socialising with friends/family outside of the games. Yes you can socialize with other people around the world in a video game but it can only go so far, as most of the time the players are talking about the game and trying to team up to complete the objective. another reason why kids can be become isolated from society is that the kids become attached to the game because they have a companionship with the game as it fills the roll of friends. a great example of this is World Of Warcraft, this game is meant to be played for a very long period of time and most people can find themselves becoming addicted to it.

cost
thirdly is the cost of video games, not necessarily the overall cost of the physical game itself but also the toll it takes on your life. on example of this is a subscription based game like Runescape, costing around 7 pounds a month, now this may not seem like a lot at the time but this can add up, especially if you have been playing Runescape for a very long time. another example is the cost of sleep that the gamer will experience, as i previously mentioned in excess playing which i think i summed up enough.

Separation from reality
Lots of games set your player in a fantasy world,a world quite different from our own, this is fundamental for some games roles, but it does h

elp kids get addicted to video games making them want to live there lives in this world instead of their own, as they may be bullied in real life or have a terrible home life and so to substitute for this they play online games. doing this is quite dangerous and the child could later on find it hard to distinguish themselves from the fantasy world and there real lives. one example of this is joshua J nimm who was a boy who shot himself while reenacting a scene from his favorite game halo. the full story can be found

Now moving onto the Positives of gaming which include:

Hand eye coordination/Brain training
Now we are moving on to some of the benefits of games starting off with hand eye coordination and brain training in games. Some games offer to help brain training with actual games like Brain Training on the Nintendo DS. but most games offer some type of brain training exercise and or hand eye coordination exercise. for example puzzle games offer a lot of help with problem solving and offer a good learning curve for young children and teens, most games like first person shooter offer hand eye coordination for example if you where using a sniper you would have to be very accurate with it and develope a lot in this sector.

Thinking and strategy skills
Next is thinking and strategy skills, these can be seen in top down real time strategy games like for example Starcraft or Warcraft, in these games you normal take control of a unit to destroy/take over an enemies territory to win the objective. these games require an immense amount of thinking and strategy skills to out wit and flank the enemy team, especially if you are playing online against someone who is playing the game more than you are and therefore has more experience than you do. research done by the queen mary university of london have done an experiment in which participants either play one of two games, the sims or starcraft. here is a direct quote from the findings which can be found here, "Findings showed that subjects who played "StarCraft" were quicker and more accurate in performing cognitive flexibility tasks than those who played "The Sims.".

Future impact
But what is to come for gaming of the future and the impacts it may bring? who knows, but we can hazard a good guess. with games becoming more philosophical and more in depth i believe that they will be accepted more as an art for by the newer generation than just a silly console or past time by the older generation. games may even be used to help surgeons for training on very hard to do operations. one example of this can be found here. the website shows a study in which surgeons where recorded before and after playing video games while performing laparoscopic surgerys. "Overall the 33 participants scored 33% better on a skill test called Top Gun. Participants that played more than 3 hours a week scored 42% better.".

(all of the points above can be found on my blog here)

Hypodermic needle theory.

I think the hypodermic needle theory in terms of games like manhunt are completely skewed by the media in terms of the long lasting effects that video games have on society, specifically violent video games. in this video here a scientist regulated areas of the brain active when participating in playing a violent video game compared to watching acts of violence in real life. whats interesting is that he found that two areas of the brain both lit up during the experiments, these parts of the brain being emotions towards the people in the video/video game. but surprisingly when it came to the person playing the video game there was a separate part of the brain that was also active. this part of the brain was actively blocking the receptors that where showing remorse for the person, indicating that the brain knew that the violence on screen wasn't real providing very strong evidence that video games in fact do not have have negative connotations when it comes to the mind.

Object Oriented design for computer games

Concepts and principles: simplified understanding; re-usability; maintenance; efficiency; real-world modelling; collaboration and sharing; communication; quality assurance


Simplified understanding: This basically means the simplified version of things created in your game, for example when making a blueprint adding notes onto them to show what each step does or at least tries to do with it.


Re-usability: Re-usability in games design tends to mean reusable game assets. for example tree's and plants are reused a lot when making a game, or even characters in the game are reused a lot as well. obviously every tree in a game cannot be unique because that would take so much time, so instead the game developers simply create a handful of tree designs and sprinkle them throughout the level giving the illusion of a forest with each tree being unique.


Maintenance: When it comes to maintenance, it's more to do with the upkeep of someones work than actual effort put into the work. for example when you're making a level within a game, you would have to make sure to go back and check that everything is working as well as it could be. without doing this you would have a poor quality game overall and when you hand it over to the people in charge of quality assurance.


Efficiency: Efficiency and work ethic kind of go hand in hand in terms of creating something within a group of people, you will always be given a certain time frame for creating something, obviously not the whole project but a certain specific aspect of it, for example texturing a model for someone. that person can't wait forever for the person to texture it because then they would get no where. which links into what i will be mentioning soon.


Real-world modelling: Talking about


Collaboration, sharing & Communication: When working in a group for a big project you need to constantly be working with each other to get the overall vision of the final product. this can be done by talking to everyone and collaborating together on something like modelling a character or getting the layout of a certain level within the game. relaying these visuals to the people working on this and sharing with them the design helps them go on and layer more things onto the product helping everyone in the chain keep the project running smoothly.


Quality Assurance: Like i said in maintenance, quality assurance is the task of making sure that your game is up to scratch with the objective given. and also that any immediate/damaging bugs haven been weeded out before the final product is shipped out to sell.

Game objects

Sprites: Game sprites are more to do with 2D games design, these includes basically everything visual on the screen. These could be anything from the characters themselves to the background of the level.

Characters: Characters within the game are the people you will see within the game, for example like an enemy that you have to fight or an ally helping you within combat, or your actual character that you are playing within the game.


Weapons: The weapons and characters in the game kind of go well together as in these two things interact very well with eachother, for example an enemy in a game could use a gun to try and shoot your player and then your character that you play as could use a sword for example to defend himself against his attacker.


Rooms/Walls/Scenery: A level or a "room" in a game is an area usually designed for the player to interact in with other characters/objects. normally all the rooms in a game make up the whole thing, leading from to another typically with loading screens in between each room to load the next one seamlessly. within these rooms you could have some walls and scenery within theme, definitely scenery but walls are optional as it could be a level outside in the open where you would just have scenery and a sky box.

Instances: Instances are essentially game objects given specific rules within a game, these can be copies of another object, copied, and placed anywhere within the game creating things like walls and scenery with there own variables that can be changed at any time

Rewards: Rewards are pretty self explanatory in itself, these are rewards for the player for defeating a tough enemy, doing a crazy task, or just simply progressing through the game. for example an achievement system giving you some kind of title to show to your friends to show off.

Object Properties:

Most of the things within the whole realm of Object Properties are pretty self explanatory again, so i will be summing them all up within one section to keep it short and simple but still explaining them.

All Object properties essentially are are how objects/players/AI, behave/look within the game itself. for example the first one being colours within the game. first of obviously scenes within the game have colour like walls and such differentiating them from the floor or another object within the room itself. but can also have different and more subtle connotations, for example in most games where you have a HUD you will see your life bar/health somewhere. this is normally coloured green, this is pretty significant within most games like this. and when you are damaged this life bar with change colour to maybe amber/yellow when you are or near half health and red when you are quite low on life. maybe even red/blood splatters on your screen like within any call of duty game ever.

 next is size and speed which i think kind of go hand in hand together. first of the size of an object is normally trying to make all the things in the game to scale of real life, this is pretty normal within most games. but this can also go for things like characters within games. for example World of Warcraft or most MMO's/RPG's you will find that most boss' you will encounter within those games will be larger than your character normally. this could be a final boss or any boss for that matter in the game. these bosses also have a different speed normally to your character, for example like in dark souls when you encounter a big boss there speed of there attacks/movement is normally rather slow telegraphing there attacks for quite a long time. obviously, movement is included in there with both speed and size, but more prominently within stealth games, as your movement as the character within those games are rewarding to be slow with your movement. like for example in most Metal Gear Solid games.

As a separate paragraph to colour/health topic is lives within a game. lives can actually tell you quite a bit about a game. usually within modern 3D games lives isn't really a thing anymore because it has pretty much become redundant. dying in a modern 3D game normally places you at the last checkpoint you where previously at. but with 2D retro/new games you will have (normally) 3 lives to begin when you start the game. increasing when you collect them within levels and decreasing until you die. and losing all your lives reset the game to the beginning, this is very prevalent within obviously Super Mario Bros.

Actions and Events:

the first thing to do with events is mouse and keyboard events, these are pretty simple to understand. when you move your mouse within a FPS game? of course you move your aim/vision around. this is classed as an event, the event tells the game that when the mouse is moved in a certain direction the players view needs to move with it. Another example is in a game like space invaders using the arrow keys/buttons this will move the direction of the ship in the corresponding direction. another example is in World of Warcraft again pressing any of the number buttons will make your character perform an action/attack. and thats essentially it. Next is the create event, like the previous space invader example, pressing the fire button/key will create an instance of a bullet that will fire towards the enemy ship and in World of Warcraft pressing the buttons will create an attack/spell.

Collision occurs whenever a player interects with a solid object keeping the player from passing through and beyond the object. this is most commonly used within wall objects in a level keep the player from falling out the level.

Timer events within a game are triggers throughout a level triggering whenever a certain action or time is reached, for example within a game when you beat a stage a door will open after a certain criteria/time is met.

Scoring is another self explanatory one, this is simply a score within a game normally followed with a leaderboard sharing your score with others allowing you to show your friends or compete for the top score.

Inheritance

Parent in terms of inheritance is the base or the core of the whole system of inheritance itself.

Child is the object or class that takes on the properties of the parent, kind of like an eco system feeding it down the chain. the child will be the one with the properties that can be changed into different actions, allowing new objects to do different types of things within a game. this can also be coupled with Overriding events which overrides the childs behaviour and modifies it slightly to do different tasks within the game.