Your First Session

Thursday 19 February 2009 at 15:06
Guys,

Have a look at this - this is your first foray into the world of gaming. To complete this you will need:


This short webcast has been designed for you to press pause regularly and think about your answers. To be honest you should all get this stuff right as it is more of a discussion based webcast than a question-based task. Enjoy it! I'll be dropping in to check your answers over the next month or so. Good luck!




The Rise of the Video Game Part 1



6 comments

  1. Ben Johns - Confetti Webcast Answers

    Question 1.
    Cultures, of a war time era, influenced the computer gaming in the early years of the technology, and also space was a huge influence further on.

    Question 2.
    I believe that early board games did have a huge impact and helping hand with computing gaming, and the separate genres of gaming, however i think that gaming has a base of board games for influence but is improved and inspired by past gaming and still the cultures around us, such as the call of duty series, or even racing genres of gran turismo and need for speed.

    Question 3.
    The Term console is a word used to refer to a video gaming system, it is something separate from a computer, you can have it wherever you like and play it wherever you like. I think that the differences between PC and console gaming isn’t very different apart from the way you control it. With a PC you control the gaming, if without accessories, the keyboard but on a console u have a gaming pad or controller. The graphics nowadays are very similar, with hardly any difference between them, All depending on what console or PC you own.

  2. Vero Says:

    Good stuff Ben!

  3. Ren Says:
    This comment has been removed by the author.
  4. Ren Says:

    Q1
    The game ‘Spacewar’ (created In 1962) is credited as the first influential computer game, created on the DEC PDP-1 by Steve Russel and some others, all from MIT. This game was traded on to other computer users and become fastly popular. But there were a few things that happened before in terms of games development and origins.

    Records indicate Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr.(a professor of Physics, recently died in March 09) created the first ever video game in 1947 using a cathode ray tube called ‘cathode ray tube amusement device’. Graphics could not be drawn electronically at this time and therefore overlays (pictures) were used instead to resemble targets for the missles to hit. Next there was Christopher Strachey who created a draughts program for the NPL Pilot ACE in 1951, a graphical version of tic-tac-toe was created by A S Douglas in 1952.

    Tennis for Two was a big stepping stone for Games which was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham (Americian Physicist) on an oscilloscope. You would view the tennis court from the side and control the ball with one of two controllers which had a button to hit and a dial to alternate the trajectory of the ball. This was the first game to use a gravity controlled ball.

    (main source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games)

    Q2
    I've spent so long pondering over this - 'What do you think today's games are influenced by?' A couple of things I tried to decide on is
    - Todays games seem to influenced by the gaming society's need for a 'backbone' - a storyline. You can't just destory/kill some thing/one It's like Gamers almost require motivation in order to shoot that bad guy (he killed your family, etc) Even in GTA the storyline characters are there to help you justify that a bad guy in a really really bad world isn't really that much of a bad guy. If it's not there, people tend to loose interest.
    - Games have become more interactive, especially on the Wii console and this allows for people to play together, things like this are essentially the next stage from playing trivial pursuit or drinking games at home
    - People enjoy the visual experience games give them, they are faster and graphically more intense than ever in a bid to try and engage thier audience as best they can.

    I don't really feel like I've answered the question properly, but perhaps you could give me some pointers...?

    Q3
    I believe technology in gaming has become a huge part of society, and that it will be used for many different things in the future as well as the gaming experience. I remember watching a film called Star Killer (i think) about a kid that was awesome on a game and was then recruited to fight an outerspace galactic war, so essentially the game was a platform for training people to become soldiers. I'm sure that there my well be people who might believe that new war games coming out are a mechanism to allow gamers to step in the virtual shoes of a soldier and be either motivated to join or to mitigate the fear that a person may have if a war was to break out here. I heard somewhere that Doom was actually a program designed to help American soldiers fight better, not sure if this is just fiction though.

    I read an artical the other day in the Metro and this kind of ties in with the links put on this blog about DS's being a must in some schools in Japan. The artical explained about a two year survey that looked into the effects of video games (and mobile phones) on children and discovered that rather than 'rotting your brain' as the rents like to affectionately remind us it actually helps the brain function better and faster when dealing with logic and strategy based situations in school and real life and helps provoke a different way of learning. Our education system is based on memory where as Games help the brain learn in a picture/frame based way and could lead to a new level of intelligence!

    The definition for a console I found is that its a computer purely designed for the sole purpose of playing games. I thought about this for a while and realised that this is no longer strictly true as consoles have become more and more versatile. My xbox 360 for example can not just play games but I can play games with other people whilst talking to them and I can downloads music and films on to the harddrive of my xbox 360 aswell as games and extra content for current games and use the internet on it. The line between consoles and Personal Computers seems to be blurring, it's no longer black and white. Games Technology is influenced by want and not need, consoles are becoming more versatile because people want them to be plus you could argue that Hardware developers are trying to become the 'tesco extra' of the gaming world and offer you as much as possible from one place.

    Cheers :-)

  5. Vero Says:

    Good answers Ren! Just be careful of relying upon Wikipedia as a reliable source. They can sometimes throw you some red herrings. My questions should have got your investigative juices flowing - so keep your eyes glued! I'm doing another one for you this month :)

  6. Ren Says:

    Cheers Kelly, I look forward to the next one!

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