With “Protector,” we set out to create a game that captures the essence of Solution and brings back the nostalgic feel of early 2010s Adobe Flash player games. The visual and gameplay style, reminiscent of those beloved games, will evoke a sense of familiarity and comfort in our gamers. Solution’s common recurring themes of collaboration and morality were our shared inspiration.
As the player, you hold the crucial role of the sniper and defender of the reeducation center. Your mission is to protect the center and its king from waves of enemy liberators determined to release its patients. The troops of armed enemies, including foot soldiers with pistols and heavily armored tanks, pose a significant threat. As you progress throughout the game, the waves of enemies become more overwhelming, putting your defense skills to the test and making you feel the weight of your responsibility.
Once overrun, you learn that the institution you have been ordered to protect is a center of repression and indoctrination, forcing innocent individuals out of their beliefs through inhumane methods.
The screen all players encounter when their base becomes overrun (Photo courtesy of Sketch)
For those unfamiliar with the history of reeducation camps, reeducation camps are facilities where individuals are sent for political, religious, or ideological reasons to undergo forced indoctrination or “reeducation.” These camps are usually associated with authoritarian regimes and are used to control dissent, suppress opposition, and enforce conformity to the government’s beliefs or policies. The conditions within such camps vary, but most usually involve harsh treatment, forced labor, psychological manipulation, and limited freedoms.
The Design Process (Challenges/Solutions/Failures):
Because Alex and I are studying the humanities, we quickly identified that our coding skills wouldn’t be able to match the level of our STEM classmates, forcing us to look for more kid-based coding programs. Another significant drawback Alex and I encountered was the compatibility issues between Windows and Mac OS. In terms of performance, both Mac OS and Windows 11 can handle most tasks quickly, but Macs often require fewer system resources.
Behind-the-scenes photos of our team’s game code. (Photo courtesy of Alex Mayo)
One of the applications we couldn’t cross-collaborate on was MS Paint. Initially released in November 1985, MS Paint is a simple raster graphics editor that allows artists to save image files in Windows, bitmap, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. While the characters designed could be exported, they couldn’t be made transparent through MS Paint. However, using the capabilities of Mac OS, we successfully made the characters transparent. The characters in the game have different profiles; for tanks, when you shoot them with your sniper twice, they go from this blue moving figure to a blue standstill figure with fire coming out of its cabin. As for ground-based enemies, shooting them in the body does not work, and they will keep progressing toward the center. But shooting them in the head once will result in a moving figure to a figure with blood spewing out of its head. The coding techniques for the tank and shooting physics were pretty easy to create.
Here’s how it looks when you shoot a tank til it explodes. (Photo courtesy of Sketch)Here’s what it looks like when you shoot an enemy liberator in the head. (Photo courtesy of Sketch)
Bringing Back Retro (Game Successes):
The history of protect-and-defend games is a journey that takes us back to the grainy days of arcade video gaming. It’s a story of evolution from simple concepts to intricate and immersive experiences. Games with a protect-and-defend objective usually defend a specific location, base, or character from waves of enemy threats. One of the most prominent and early examples is the classic 1978 arcade game Space Invaders. In Space Invaders, players are tasked with controlling a spaceship whose sole mission is to defend Earth from descending alien invaders. However, as the years of gaming have progressed and diversified, with titles like “Tower Defense” games becoming popular in the late 2000s, these games challenge players’ tactical skills and resource management, providing hours of engaging gameplay and a sense of accomplishment when successfully protecting what’s under their care.
However, as gaming has evolved, many newer games have veered from maintaining a nostalgic theme. Retrobowl, Sonic Mania, Mega Man, and Axiom Verge are modern games designed with retro intent. So, “Protector” resonates with gamers of almost all ages through its mechanics and aesthetics.
Our novice coding experience saved us a lot of time and made our jobs as developers a bit simpler. It allowed us to tap into the charm of older titles while mixing them with modern technology and design principles.
As we discussed in our presentation, the revival of retro-themed games is becoming essential to the gaming industry as older adults move away from games. To increase the likelihood of their company’s survival, many game companies have to start creating games that resonate with not just newer age gamers but also gamers who have stopped playing because of “no connection.”
The Learning Aspect:
After completing our game, Alex and I pondered how “Protector” offers players a thought-provoking narrative on moral complexity and the dangers of blind allegiances. We also learned that when developing games, there has to be an overarching theme that stems from the game’s storyline. In “Protector,” the theme explored how following orders blindly can compromise one’s moral stances and that challenging authority is sometimes plausible.
If you were rebellious enough, you had the option to kill the King, allowing the center to be overrun (Photo courtesy of Sketch)
As a team of aspiring writers, we knew that we wanted our game to envelope the creativity that every player has. The inspiration for our game came from a mix of the “EmilyBlaster ” game described in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and the poetic dialogue of Samwise Gamgee throughout The Lord of the Rings books. Early on, the idea of the game was one where words spoken by Sam in the novels would fall down in front of a backdrop of the several scenes, such as Hobbiton, and the player must click the verbiage and connect Sam’s poems correctly. After talking to Dr. Clayton, we realized that this did not encompass what we wanted our game to accomplish. We discussed the idea of assorting the words so that instead of following the exact formation of the poems, hymns, and songs in the books, the player could create their own formation of words to get a new poem at the end of the level.
Without an idea in our minds, the next phase was picking the gaming software best suited to translate our visions. We started off extremely optimistic to say the least. First, we installed Unity without realizing we would also have to be proficient in Blender. After a single unsuccessful trial run, we tried Stencyl. With its user-friendly UI and tutorials, and several videos readily available to help us along our path of creation, we thought it would be the perfect software for us.
Levels
One of the most important aspects of any game is the levels and terrain the game will be set in. We wanted our player to travel to multiple different areas, particularly from The Fellowship of the Ring, as that was a book we had analyzed in class. Moreover, we wanted these levels to reflect the stages of Samwise’s journey throughout the first book to show both progression in the journey as well as the player. So, we used the internet to search for royalty-free backgrounds of different areas of The Lord of the Rings to use as our backdrops. In our search, we found three in particular.
One was for Hobbiton, which would be perfect as the start of our game; Samwise, a hobbit of humble and bright beginnings, before stretching his destiny beyond his borders to the grander world.
Next, we chose the Prancing Pony. This was another place that marked the beginning of Sam’s danger. It is here where the Hobbits begin to feel the importance, the danger, and the possible death that they will face in their quest. We labeled this level as a call-to-action, with some elements of suspense for their future. For our final level, we wanted something that provoked a powerful sense of danger. Looking back into The Fellowship of the Ring, both novel and movie, we believed that the tunnels of Moria had that ambience perfectly. This level expresses the massive perils Sam and the Fellowship will have to face, with darkness, orcs, and the towering and fiery Balrog. As our third and final level, it will allow the player to create a poem that could match the setting, filled with death, destruction, and harrowing escape.
Screenshot
Sprites
After getting Stencyl,, we quickly realized we needed a way to create and edit characters or sprites in the game. We were able to find a Sprite editing tool called Sprite Pencil/Sprite Catalog that allows you to take royalty free premade sprites or edit your own. We obviously knew we wanted to incorporate Samwise, but we didn’t want just one character who stays the same with every level. After all, that is not how Samwise is in the books; he goes through development, gains courage, and even kills. We wanted Samwise sprite to undergo the same journey. We perused the internet, but did not find consistent characters for our 32-bit style game. Instead, we chose to take the more difficult path and created our own sprites.
For Samwise, we started him off in casual clothing and smoking a pipe for Hobbiton, his home. He looks relaxed, smiling, and surrounded by his lovely home filled with green, flowers, and bright skies. Next in the Prancing Pony, he has a more grim look on his face to express his worry. Since this is where the action particularly starts to kick off, the Fellowship’s danger becomes more real, we wanted Samwise to embody the call-to-action of his future journey. He wears a red cape to show that, though he might not feel ready for the action, he has no choice but to brandish the courage to look the part. Lastly, Samwise faces the eerie ambiance of the tunnels of Moria. At the final level of the game, and recognizing the perils of the environment, Samwise now has a sword to face the dangers ahead.
After we created the three different versions of Samwise, we went on to the other designs that we wanted to incorporate into our game. We found a 32-bit Balrog for the last level, but it did not look quite as menacing as it did in the movie. So, we used Sprite Pencil/Sprite Catalog to edit the Balrog into being the fiery demon that he is, and placed him to face Samwise in the dark tunnels of Moria. Lastly, we created the spirit that would be our player. Our player is “The One Ring”, and when planning the game, we decided that the player would shoot the words appearing on the screen with blasts from the ring to create their unique poem.
Words Words Words
An important aspect of our game creations was choosing what words to incorporate for the player to make their poems. At first, we debated if we should have a word bank of words that we chose and made up completely on our own. After some thought, we decided that it would take away from the game’s roots in The Lord of the Rings, especially Samwise’s characters as a wordsmith throughout the journey. Instead, we used resources on the internet, including the Lord of the Rings Reddit page and the trilogy’s Wiki page. From these sources, we found some poems that the grander, loving community of this fantasy world found enjoyable, and took words from those poems to incorporate into our game. Some of these fan favorites include “Riddle of Strider”, “The Stone Troll”, and the “Galadriel’s Song of Eldamar.” This game would allow the player to take words and phrases from these masterful poems and make something completely new for themselves, working their creative minds in the process. The words we chose are in the picture below:
Struggles and Successes
The coding process of making the mechanics for our game was by far the most difficult, which was to be expected. It was harder than we imagined to incorporate the sprites and backdrops into the game, as they were always too small. However, with some time on Stencyl, we were able to overcome this challenge. Another challenge was the mechanics of the words. At First, we wanted the words to fall from the top of the screen. However, this would require making all of our words in our word bank to be a sprite, and we did not have the expertise or coding experience to do that. Instead, we decided to make the words appear in various places on the backdrop, and the player could click the ones they wanted to incorporate in their poem. This was much easier for us and still proved effective for the goal of our game. Another aspect of the coding was the transitions between backdrops. As other groups had discussed in their games, getting the player to move between levels and settings once they had been completed was not automatic. It took us some time incorporating a system for which the player transitioned to the next level. We chose to make a timing system, where the player has a few minutes to create their poem, or if they wanted to just make a shorter poem like a haiku, they could wait until the timer was up to move onto the next level.
Our biggest challenge by far was the process of moving our character, “The One Ring” from left to right on the screen. In our process, the ring would only move on one level, or refuse to move at all, even when incorporating the proper coding. After some time, we realized that Sam the sprite was blocking our coding with his own, and after severing their codes so that the ring would show priority, the player was able to move the ring, and Sam still had his code operate properly. With these struggles out of the way, we found success and enjoyment of our game. We are very happy with our game mechanics, our 3 complete levels that we set out to make, and even a small yet crucial victory: a fully functioning start button!
What We Learned
Truly, if this game-making process has taught us anything, it is just how hard it is to make a game. The level of coding, the talent in design, the patience, and creativity to solve problems as they come, all of it comes into the game you both love to make and hate to struggle with. As gamers, we often take for granted the time it takes to make a good, quality game. We hound the developers, get mad when they push release dates, and some people even threaten them. This journey has made us reflect on the gaming community on both sides. We had absolutely zero experience in coding and game design when we started, and in just a few weeks, we were able to make characters, settings, motion, and fun. We are truly proud of ourselves with what we created, even in the pitfalls and improvements it needs. We put blood, sweat, and literal tears in this game (yes there were times where we cried, but this game is like our baby.) Through all the hardships, all the messed-up coding and the faulty transitions, we continued to work to make something beautiful. We are grateful for this experience, and are glad that we could collaborate creatively to make something beautiful.
Journey on a quest to discover the dark tower, and unravel the mysteries surrounding your expedition to this fabled landmark. What really happened to your dear friend Cuthbert? What strange world are you in? Will you make it to the Dark Tower? Find out in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came: The Game!
Why Remediate Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came?
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came lends itself to exploration, simply due to its nature as a poem and the qualities that come with it; chief among them is interpretation. There are dozens of ways to see how a story is told and understand its meaning, especially when considering a medium such as poetry. Our main goal was to remediate this poem that resonated so much with us, in a way that would be able to visualize and nail down OUR interpretation of the story presented.
With this goal in mind, we were left with a lot of creative freedom in how to adapt this story. We began thinking, open interpretation lends itself to creative mediums quite often, especially in the sense of world building and exploration. Due to this, our group decided that the best medium to showcase Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came as a playable video game would be Minecraft.
Why Minecraft? Simply put, Minecraft offers unlimited amounts of creative expression to help build our interpretation of Roland’s journey. For being put out over a decade ago, Minecraft has received numerous updates expanding the game’s catalog of blocks to build with and infinitely increasing the creative possibilities both in building AND in storytelling that are available to the player. In addition, the game is by far one of the most easily accessible platforms to create with, as most of us grew up playing Minecraft or watching videos of people playing Minecraft.
Development Process
After deciding on our platform for remediation, the first piece of the puzzle was to figure out how all three of us were to work collectively on one world in the game. Playing with other players isn’t quite so easy in Minecraft, as one can’t locally host a server to play with other players. The easiest solution came in the form of Minecraft Realms, a subscription-based service for hosting multiplayer worlds for you and your friends. We signed up for the free trial and began our work.
Next, we had to decide where would be the best place to build both the path that Roland journey’s on to the Dark Tower, as well as the Dark Tower itself. After some debate, we decided it would be best to build the path to the Dark Tower inside of the Nether, which is the game’s version of Hell. We hoped that this decision would help to properly showcase Roland’s unstable psyche through his journey and account for many of the hallucinations he has along his journey. Hence, the overgrown and warped forest biome we decided to build in, showing a warped view of a forest landscape that you would see in the real world, as well as adding lava waterfalls and rivers to additionally showcase a warped view of reality from inside of Roland’s mind.
Along the path to the Dark Tower, we decided to add obstacles to cause frustration and challenge to the player, encapsulating the wavering sanity of Roland. These obstacles included mobs such as Spiders and Zombie Pigmen, as well as physical obstacles such as lava, cobwebs, and gargantuan towers to climb. This helps to foreshadow the Dark Tower Roland has his eye on as the ends to the means of journeying along this horrid path.
Further, we had to make a decision on the structure of the Dark Tower and how we decided to interpret it. Spencer is a fan of the Stephen King series that is based off of the poem. Armed with this knowledge, Spencer set off to conquer the task of the creation of the Dark Tower, taking inspiration from Stephen King’s interpretation: roses, golden road, and all. The end, like the end of the poem, we decided, would be ambiguous on its true nature. The end of the game allows you to find the portal to travel back to the beginning of the journey, but it does not allow you in the Dark Tower, symbolizing a perpetual journey of life and life of journey, also hinting at our interpretation of Roland’s fate (to forever live in this poem in perpetua, rather than reach his final destination successfully).
The actual building of the structures happened rather quickly, our Dark Tower was completed in about two days worth of work, and all the structures in the Nether were completed in just over three days worth of work. We successfully created a walking journey (or really, a “walking simulator”) of Roland’s journey to the Dark Tower.
Challenges(Failures and Successes)
In the realm of challenges, the biggest one was being able to adapt to Minecraft’s unique world layouts and ESPECIALLY its blocky terrain. With everything being made out of blocks, it was somewhat difficult to build certain shapes and structures (ex: curves in staircases or proper pathways) while building. The terrain of every world in the game is randomly generated, so instead of us being able to start from scratch and build from the ground up, we were forced to instead take extra time to landscape the existing terrain, and really roll with the punches based on what we were given.
Another challenge of adapting this archaic, Old English poem into the modern, user-friendly medium of Minecraft is balancing the scale between high-brow and low-brow storytelling. The low-brow storytelling was simply using the medium of Minecraft to tell a psychologically harrowing, complex, and (incredibly) ambiguous story. With the culture of “Minecraft parodies” of popular songs and “Minecraft Youtubers” being marketed towards children ages 13 and younger, the medium of Minecraft is inherently low-brow. To adapt a Browning poem, especially staying true to the source material, was a certainly ambitious task. What we were able to do was to use the signs in Minecraft to mark landmarks in the journey, labeled by stanzas/lines from the poem. Quotes from the poem were mainly chosen on the basis of what the Minecraft landscape could actualize and remediate. For example, the “hoary cripple” at the beginning of poem (line 2) can easily be represented as a Villager, the base NPC for Minecraft’s world. However, there was no object in Minecraft that could actualize the internal monologue and tortured psyche of our protagonist Roland, so quotes like “Thus, I had so long suff’rd in this quest” (line 37) were simply scattered on the path, letting the view of the “hellscape” the player is surrounded by connotate how Roland feels in this part in the journey. To emphasize the tragedy/stakes of the journey, the graves of Cuthbert, Giles, and Frank are scattered throughout the road to the Dark Tower, illustrating other characters/players who have made this same journey, unsuccessfully, motivating both Roland and the Player to keep moving forward.
In terms of successes, we have a lot to celebrate. We successfully were able to learn quite a bit about world design and biome generation of Minecraft to be able to pick suitable locations to build our journey to the Dark Tower. In the general vibe of the build, there is a sense of uneasiness that exists inside (especially in the Nether section) that permeates, which is exactly what we were trying to go for to showcase Roland’s unstable psyche at the time. In addition, in the construction of the Dark Tower, we were able to utilize some building techniques to make building the massive structure much easier. Namely, we were able to construct the massive tower by using lava and water to create massive cobblestone pillars, rather than building them by hand. This takes off possibly hours of work building the structure from the ground up, as well as factoring in the landscaping we already had to do to put the tower in a good location.
Conclusions (What we learned)
To conclude, we learned a lot in the creation of this project. Especially in the realm of world generation and learning how Minecraft works internally to be able to manipulate the game’s world generation to better our own situation while building and constructing our project. In addition, our appreciation for professional builders in the game has grown tremendously, as we created a project of a relatively small size in comparison to some who have recreated all of Rivendell or built gigantic castles within the game. Overall, (and most importantly) we were able to reconnect with our childhoods to create this project, as this is a game many of us grew up on, and for many, began their love of gaming. We were thankful for this opportunity to create and use our imagination to remediate one of our favorite works we got to read during the semester.
Embark on a strategic escapade as Sadie Green in Omission, navigating from the game room to the nurse’s desk. Your mission: log community service hours without being caught by Sam. With each passing second, your logged hours diminish, along with the prospects of earning the community service award. Most too fast, and you may alert Sam, ending the service project.
Why Remediate Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow?
Although there are several games woven into the narrative of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that we could have remediated, we wanted to create a new game based on the central relationship in the novel. The book follows thirty years of conflicts between gamemakers Sam and Sadie, beginning when they met as children in a hospital game room. It was during these formative years, through shared gameplay and blossoming friendship, that Sadie covertly logged her time with hospitalized Sam as community service hours–a fact she kept from him.
The months of lying by omission lead to their first major conflict, shaping the beginning chapters of the novel and hinting toward the future of their relationship. We chose to use the community service conflict as the foundation for our game, believing that it reflects the pivotal moments that will define and drive their relationship forward, both personally and professionally.
Game Design Process
Revisiting Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Our initial step in the game design process involved re-reading the beginning chapters of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It was essential to re-familiarize ourselves with the characters Sam and Sadie during their time in the hospital. The game adopts young Sam’s perspective on the community service conflict yet paradoxically casts the player as Sadie. Essentially, we wanted to make the game as if Sam was the creator trying to understand Sadie’s actions in her lying by omission ‘game.’
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Upon discovering that Sadie had been logging their time together as community service hours, Sam’s initial response was to shut her out, feeling reduced to a mere means to an end rather than a true friend. Although he grew out of this mindset, we used his initial perspective to make our game competitive. We integrated a countdown mechanic into the game, where the longer Sadie takes to beat the level, the more community service hours she loses. The countdown begins at 609 hours – the number of hours Sadie records in the novel. This mirrors Sam’s perception of Sadie’s priorities––questioning whether her intentions stemmed from genuine friendship or a mere tally of hours. Understanding the nuances of their relationship and their personalities at our early design stages was crucial for accurately translating their dynamic into our game’s narrative and elements.
To translate our vision into a playable game, we planned every aspect of the gameplay with detailed road maps. These plans outlined the journey from the welcome screen to the various end-game scenarios, with clear instructions for programming Sadie’s and Sam’s interactions and specific conditions for winning or restarting the game.
Game RoadmapGame Mechanics Outline
Program Selection – After evaluating various options, we carefully selected GameMaker Studio 2 to develop our game. This decision was driven by the specific needs of our project, particularly the demand for a program that excels in 2D game development with comprehensive features such as sprite and animation management, and a drag-and-drop interface that simplifies complex game development tasks.
Sprite and Background Design– Our first real step in the game design process was designing the sprites. After discussions on the visual style we wanted to achieve, Henry meticulously crafted detailed sprites for Sam and Sadie, and a nurse. Sam and Sadies’ sprites included profiles for multiple directions (front, back, right, left) to support a more fluid gameplay experience. Henry utilized GameMaker’s sprite editor to layer colors and add depth, ensuring the characters stood out against the background.
Sadie, Sam, & Nurse Sprites
Background design followed, with specific attention to interactive elements like doorways, which are vital to the game’s aesthetics and mechanics. In designing the background, we aimed to mirror the ambiance of a hospital by incorporating elements such as checkered floors and numerous doorways while also integrating a bright wall color to create a more engaging atmosphere for the game.
Background Design
Character Movement – For character movement, we programmed Sadie with basic directional controls (right, left, up, down), while Sam’s NPC movement (right, left) included pathfinding and collision interactions with walls. We also programmed character interactions, such as collisions between Sadie and Sam.
Sadie Basic Movement (Up, Down, Left, Right)Sam NPC Basic Movement (Right, Left)
Challenges
GameMaker Studio 2 & Collaboration – One significant challenge we faced was GameMaker’s limited support for real-time collaboration across separate computers. This limitation posed difficulties in our early development process, as it restricted the ability to simultaneously edit our design game elements as a group. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, we tried to integrate Git to share game files between different computers. We successfully created a repository and separately downloaded the programs; however, integrating Git with GameMaker proved more difficult than anticipated, and we had to look at other options. Instead, we used Henry’s computer to install GameMaker Studio 2 and scheduled in-person meetings to collaborate on programming the game.
Complexity of Wall Collisions– Handling collisions, especially with walls, introduced a new layer of difficulty for our group. Initially, our characters would react unpredictably upon hitting a wall – sometimes getting stuck, other times passing through as if the barrier didn’t exist. We initially suspected it was a boundaries issue, but our many attempts to edit didn’t yield the results we were looking for.
We had to program walls not only to stop character movement but also to influence it depending on the game’s physics. For example, when Sam (the NPC) hit a wall, he needed to turn around and bounce back.
Score/Countdown Timer Error– The most challenging aspect we faced – and one that caused errors even after game creation – was implementing the countdown timer that updated Sadie’s logged hours. The finished game was meant to work as follows: a countdown timer starting at 609 seconds would begin at the start of the game; when Sadie reached the nurse’s desk, the timer would stop, adding the remaining seconds from the timer to the player’s score. The player’s score was meant to be cumulative, meaning that if they did not get the necessary score of 609 from their first playthrough, they would need to play again. For example, if Sadie finished the level with 598 seconds left on the timer (which translated to hours on the score sheet), this would be her starting score for the next level. When the next level starts, the points will be cumulative, but the timer will restart at 609 seconds. Additionally, Sam’s speed would increase, making the game more difficult at each level.
The root of our problems came from updating the score based on the amount left on the countdown timer. Due to GameMaker’s limited drag-and-drop ability, we were unable to update the persistent (cumulative) score variable with the temporary (resets each level) timervariable. Our limited knowledge of how to stop the game’s clock and, therefore, stop the timer prevented us from storing the remaining timer value in the score variable, as GameMaker could not update the score variable with a constantly changing integer. We tried storing the timer’s value at the exact moment Sadie reached the nurse’s desk using an intermediary variable, but this, too, failed to resolve the issue. If we had an expert in GameMaker on our team, we certainly could have fixed this error; however, over several days and many YouTube tutorials watched, the error persisted. Ultimately, we had to accept this unresolved challenge, deferring its solution to the future.
Successes
Sprite Design – One of our major successes was our work on sprite design. Our sprite designer, Henry, decided to craft each sprite from scratch instead of relying on premade options available in GameMaker. This decision allowed for complete creative freedom to personalize Sam and Sadie. The detailed and unique sprites Henry created added a distinct visual appeal to our game, enhancing the overall player experience.
Sprite Design – Sadie
Movement Mechanics – Another satisfying achievement was mastering the basic movement mechanics. This fundamental aspect of our gameplay had to be smooth and responsive to ensure a satisfying gameplay experience. After a series of interactions and adjustments (and with a lot of help from Lizzie), we managed to program movements for Sadie that were not just functional, but simple and fluid.
Collaboration – These successes were not just about getting certain aspects of the game right; they were milestones that reflected our growth as game developers. Each sprite and every movement that worked were testaments to our evolving skills and deepening understanding of game design. We celebrated every small achievement. These successes propelled us forward, encouraging us to tackle more complex interactions within our game.
In addition to technical achievements, another area of success was our ability to work as a cohesive team despite the initial challenges with collaboration tools. We found ways to streamline our communication and workflow, ensuring that everyone was on the same page and could contribute effectively to the project. This collaborative spirit was crucial to overcoming the obstacles we faced.
Final Takeaways
The limitations of the free version of GameMaker Studio 2 initially slowed down our progress. In any future projects, we plan to invest in the paid version of the software, which offers enhanced features for real-time team collaboration.
The varied skills within our team played a pivotal role in our project’s development. For example, Lizzie’s programming expertise and Henry’s talent for design provided a balanced approach to tackling technical challenges. Sterling’s documentation was crucial in articulating our process in the game design document, while Alex’s creativity shone through in creating a compelling game trailer that captured the essence of the game’s story.
One of the key lessons we learned from this project is the importance of persistence and continuous learning. Game development is a field that is constantly evolving, and being adaptable and eager to learn new skills is crucial. Sometimes, it was difficult to find a tutorial to aid our programming difficulties, so it was essential for us not to give up and try different approaches on our own.
For our project, we decided to remediate the prison break scene from the 1994 film, Shawshank Redemption. Our game is fairly simple overall, but it took some time to obtain our final product. We knew we wanted to stick to the prison break scene, but we were unsure as to how we could portray our vision in a fun way while sticking to the same tone as the movie. Given our wanting to accurately match the seriousness of the scene, we began our quest with the vision of creating an escape room like game that would be playable in virtual reality. Our vision was bold; however, we felt it could be done. After researching how to make a VR game, we realized that our vision may have been too bold to accomplish in such a short duration. We shifted our focus to create a more simplistic remediation as our second goal was to have a completed game that we were passionate about rather than pieces of a much more complicated game that would leave us unfulfilled and struggling to explain its meaning. After watching the trailer for a game based off of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, we decided to shift our focus to a platform game developed in Game Maker Studio. To address our concerns regarding matching the tone of the film, we decided that it was best to develop our new game, and then determine how to remediate the serious nature of the film after we had a better understanding of what our final product would look like.
(The beginning stages of building our level)
Gameplay
For those who have never watched Shawshank, the main character Andy Dufresne escapes Shawshank prison by digging a hole in the side of his cell, climbing through the inside of the prison, and crawling through sewage pipes to a small river a few hundred yards away from the prison. In our remediation, our hand drawn sprite representing Dufresne jumps from platform to platform in order to reach the end of the level; however, unlike the movie, the objective is to avoid the sewage that is spread across the level. If a player were to fall in, they are guided back to the start of the level and given another attempt to successfully escape Shawshank.
Why Remediate Shawshank?
Our choice to remediate Shawshank Redemption stems from a few different factors. Firstly, the film is one of our favorites, thus the opportunity to remediate the film was a project that both of us welcomed and were engaged with from the start. Additionally, we felt that the film offered us a unique challenge: creating a game from a film that offered minimal opportunity for remediation. In other words, the film’s serious tone and ambiance was an obstacle we recognized could be difficult to overcome in an elementary game.
Combatting Issues of Tone in Remediation
To combat issues of remediating the overall serious nature of the film, we decided to go the complete opposite direction of our original goals of matching tones and instead opted to create a game that focused on the humorous aspects of the scene. Inspiration came mostly from Axel’s remembering of a Shawshank remediation from Family Guy which focuses on the humor associated with the scene such as the fact that Dufresne appears in the river on the other side of the prison walls “clean” despite crawling through hundreds of yards of human waste. Upon rewatching the scene from the original movie, we found humor in the fact that this was not entirely untrue as Dufresne’s character does appear from the pipe in a relatively clean state when considering the journey he had just endured. To replicate this mistake in our game, we offer players unlimited chances to complete the level; the sewage is merely an obstacle and players will not die if they accidentally fall in; however, they will experience a much more difficult journey as they will certainly find themselves continuing to encounter the sewage until they reach their destination. This realization in our process led to a much sillier game mechanic; however, our result adequately portrays that the sewage is merely an obstacle rather than a barricade for our player similar to how Dufresne experienced the sewage. In other words, we did not create a game that was meant to be too easy; however, we also felt that if our game was too difficult, players would get frustrated and lose sight of the end message of perseverance.
Visuals
Axel was the main designer for the visual aspects of the game. The only sprite in the game was designed by hand in Game Maker Studio. All other visual aspects of the game were taken from the public domain. The visuals for this project became exceedingly important as we moved further into the development process. Because we decided to create a satirizing game for a serious film, it was very important that our visuals sufficiently matched the seriousness of the film. For our trailer we chose to continue with our satirical view of the scene as we incorporated serious scenes from the movie and matched them alongside our goofy gameplay. To add to the satirical nature of our game, Axel included fake quotes and other allusions to the comedy within our game which helped close out our satirical goals.
Challenges and What Did We Learn
While it would be easy to spend this section talking about the difficulty of learning to code since neither of us are coders, we faced many other challenges throughout our development process. For us, the most difficult part of this project was getting our views aligned with each other as to what we wanted our final result to look like. In the beginning we had trouble settling on an idea as many of our initial ideas did not interest us, were not unique, or were too difficult to complete with such limited time and game development skills. We realized early on that creating a world from scratch was very difficult as is, but the added difficulty of remediating a classic film brought an entirely new set of challenges along with it. This aspect made the brainstorming process the most difficult process of our development as once we settled on a concrete idea and learned the skills to execute, our vision began to come together very quickly.
Conclusion
While this project was a daunting challenge at the beginning, we had a great time creating a game that both of us can be proud of. Given more time, we would have loved to add more levels as well as a scoring system; however, we are happy with the result and are now equipped with new skills regarding game creation. We have also developed an extreme appreciation for game developers and are impressed with the creativity that goes into creating even the most minute details of a game. While our players should not expect our game to be topping the charts as game of the year, we hope to provide our players with an experience that challenges their ideas of the classic film and pushes them past obstacles they perceive as impossible barriers just as Andy Dufresne did when escaping Shawshank.
The Cover of Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Introduction
For our game design project, we were particularly inspired by Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, a book about game-making, friendships, and lives lived together & in conflict. We were particularly inspired by the passion, creativity, and care that Sadie and Mazer put into each game they created over the course of the novel, even as they struggled with their relationships with one another. In creating our game, we wanted to remediate the novel by pulling together aspects of two different games that Sam & Sadie made: EmilyBlaster and The Master of Revels, in order to touch on the importance of the name of the book & explore more deeply the scenes within it. This led us to create our game, MarxBlaster.
What Our Game Is
MarxBlaster is a remediation of two games, EmilyBlaster and Master of Revels, from Zevin’s novel. EmilyBlaster is a first-person shooter game, one of Sadie’s early games described in the book, where the player shoots down phrases from Emily Dickinson’s famous poems in order to assemble the finished works. In Master of Revels, the game is set in Shakespearean London, where the gamer has to discover who killed the playwright Christopher Marlowe. Our game remediates, in part, a section of the game Sadie created an actor styled after her deceased partner Marx, who gives the “Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow” speech from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the same speech that the novel is titled after. We combined the two games by borrowing the scene and the speech from the Master of Revels scene while placing additional emphasis on phrases like Sadie did in EmilyBlaster. In our game, the player is tasked with navigating the Globe Theater in order to find her friend Marx, who is preparing to deliver the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. Over the course of several levels, you must collect speech bubbles containing the lines from Marx’s speech while moving through various rooms of the theater, including the light room, a makeup room, on the side of the stage, and at the end, meeting Marx on the main stage. The speech bubbles constantly change speed to increase difficulty as the game progresses. Upon collecting all the speech bubbles, the player completes the game by reaching Marx, who then performs his speech before the audience (and the player).
At the end of the game, a voice (voiced by our group member, Sarah Beth) reads the speech aloud. The screen switches to the lines of the speech displayed and read together for the first time in front of an image of Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known as The Great Wave, by Katsushika Hokusai – the same image referenced on the cover of the book alluding to the iconography in Ichigo – Sadie & Sam’s first game.
The end scene from MarxBlaster where the speech is read aloud and shown as a whole work
Game Design & Our Process
In designing this game, we tried to balance what scenes we thought would be interesting to remediate with our group’s game-making inexperience. Originally, we were deciding between our final project idea, inspired by our love of Marx, or trying to recreate one of Sam’s mazes in LA, with several dead-ends referencing core plot points of the novel. In learning more about game-making, we decided a platformer game would be within our skill level while still having the capacity to remediate the work how we wanted to. In placing Marx’s character directly in our game, we remediated the novel by both featuring games & scenes in the work, but we also remediated Sadie’s love letter to Marx by placing him in our game, just as she placed him in hers.
Once we decided on MarxBlaster, we tackled the design of the obstacles to reaching Marx. This is where we took inspiration from the mechanics of Sadie’s game EmilyBlaster. We used the concept of shooting phrases to create the obstacles to getting individual lines of the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech but implemented it within the platformer rather than as a shooter game. We decided to use the platform Scratch, as none of us had any coding experience. Because our concept was more complex, we tried to balance it with the simpler system in order to add in all the details we wanted to, such as moving from scene to scene through the Globe Theater and with our moving text boxes.
One of the scenes from the game, which is also an interior shot of the Globe Theater
Visually, we decided to use photos from the inside of the Globe Theater in order to give the player the feeling of walking through the game. We made text boxes that simulated text we associate with classic video games and tried to reference the font used on the cover of the novel in the process, especially considering the phrases the game’s main character collects to reference the speech.
Our character design was based in part on convenience and in part on the type of remediation & game we wanted to create. There are only two characters in the game: Marx & the main character. Marx’s character was chosen mainly because the sprite was dressed appropriately for an actor in Macbeth. The main character was chosen for some of the same reasons: she was an existing sprite that had good costumes available, especially to animate her while she walked. However, part of our motivation was also because, as we’ve talked about in class, there is a lack of diverse representation in video games, and we wanted to challenge some of those notions in our protagonist selections, especially because race & representation are hugely important themes in Zevin’s novel.
A screenshot of our game where the character jumps to hit a moving textbox
Our entire group collaborated on the design of the game. Mariah did the majority of the coding, especially around creating the stages, coding each sprite’s movement, creating the beginning & end sequences, and figuring out how the text boxes would move. Brynn did most of the graphic design work, especially in the end scene & with the text boxes, and coded the movement between scenes, the point value system, & switched the text between levels. Sarah Beth helped with finding the scene pictures and created our trailer.
Successes & Challenges
In terms of concept, our game was very successful. Our finished product does what we set out to do: we have multiple levels the protagonist goes through, the text bubbles move with varying speeds and difficulty, the introduction & end of the game align in terms of our messaging of the game, and we were able to create text bubbles that disappear when touched and add points at the top left of the screen. Our game was also successful in that we learned a lot about game-making and just how much goes into it – although Scratch is certainly a simpler tool, we were able to use it to learn more about game mechanics and foundational lessons around game-making. Marxblaster is certainly not without bugs, and because of time and experience constraints, it is not as difficult or complex as we may have wanted it to be, it is cohesive in terms of the story we wanted to tell through game-making and the way in which we wanted to remediate core aspects of the novel.
Along the way we did have a lot of difficulties. Learning to code with zero experience between the three of us led to a huge learning curve. We had a lot of difficulty even getting our game to save our progress in Scratch because too many of us were signed in, leading Mariah to have to recreate more complex sequences of code multiple times. Although the simplicity of Scratch was why we chose the program, at times, it also was too simple for us, and we had to come up with workarounds to the software in order to get our game to do what we wanted it to do. Additionally, we had a lot of issues with our text boxes and changes between our six total scenes. We had to come up with a bit of a convoluted workaround that led to some of the boxes running across the screen upside down, and difficulty in keeping them on screen in order for players to be able to collect points. For a while, we struggled to get the player to progress through the game and had to switch around our mechanics; first, when the player touched every text box they would switch screens, and then we moved to a model where when Avery touches an x-value on the right end of the screen, the backdrop switches and a new level begins.
What We Learned
We learned a lot about how difficult game making is, but also how unique a tool it is for remediation & storytelling. As we discussed in class, game type has a lot of impact on the feeling someone has playing a game; in LOTRO, the ability of players to never have to beat Sauron while enjoying the world of Middle Earth creates a far different atmosphere from that of the book & movie, which draw on the imagery of fated heroes on impossible journeys. In our game, we tried to use the platform game type and the remediation of text as a backdrop to MarxBlaster, creating a game that anyone could play but that a reader of Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow would get a lot more out of. Games allow for multiple levels of remediation: we were able to combine aspects of two different games described in the novel, several major plot points in it, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth into one project. Although it’s far from polished or complex, we hope the nuance within our concept and the variety of scenes you experience offers an interesting game to play!
As human beings, we have the pleasure and curse of occupying a relatively short amount of time within the existing timeline as we know it; from the moment we are born, we can make the fair assumption that we will live anywhere from 0-122 years old based on all prior recorded human lifespans. We can live comfortably knowing that no matter what we do, eventually our time on this Earth will end. We can leave remnants of our existence behind in the form of art, history books, nuclear waste, and to be more abstract our loved ones’ memories, but as far as we know there is no way to immortalize our existence. Art erodes, history books burn, nuclear waste decays, and families forget. No matter how much time we individually occupy, which I’ll define as any period of time that is touched by any result of one’s own existence so I don’t unnecessarily limit the impact a human life can have, a single human cannot have existed within our timeline from the beginning of time to the end of it. Some may argue that religious human figures such as Adam and Eve break this logic if they existed and are still known of today, but to that, I would argue that even before those first humans, time marched backward–for at least five days according to the original source text (The Bible). For those who are of a different belief, or are not religious, I would emphasize that there has always been a time before humans: whether it be a time of dinosaurs or a time of cosmic energy. Given all of the logic above, it is safe to say that we, as individual humans, occupy a subsect of time. If you give me three minutes of your short subsect of time, I’d love to tell you a bit about why I believe that just as we are allotted time to exist on the ultimate timeline, online games are allotted time to exist on the internet. Then, after that, if you give me one more precious minute, I’ll tell you a bit about how the impermanent nature of these video games should teach more about how we view our own lives and impact.
Part One: A Brief History of My Own Experience With Retired Online Games
Poptropica is an online role-playing game that was first released in 2007. It operated using Adobe Flash Player until 2020, when it was briefly retired before being reprogrammed to run with Haxe. In the transition, many of the original gameplay aspects were lost, but players could still access them using a Flashpoint work around or the Steam download of the game (with a few server issues). However, in 2024, with CoolMathGames’s acquisition of Poptropica, the Steam download has been rendered largely inoperable, and many of the old aspects of the gameplay have been lost outside of Flashpoint.
Two weeks ago, I was feeling a bit nostalgic for my childhood back in the late 2000’s (do you feel old yet because I do), and I wanted to visit my childhood gaming website: Poptropica. As I remembered it, the site was a beautiful Oasis in my elementary school computer lab where my after school care friends and I would congregate to solve puzzles located on in-game islands in order to unlock different achievements and mini-games. My favorite island, and one I can still remember every step to solving to this day, was Reality TV Island, where you could follow a sequence of steps as your character to effectively apply, get accepted to, and compete in a Reality TV show. Obviously, still on that nostalgia kick, I immediately went to look for that island after logging into my old account. What did I find? Nothing. A big empty space where the island was supposed to be located on the map. My hopes and dreams for reliving my childhood were crushed. Needless to say, I was more than a little upset, but this got me thinking: how many games has something like this happened to? I knew of Club Penguin, which was another of my childhood games that was recently retired, but I didn’t know of the over sixty online games that had gained a cult following online before being shut down. This list includes, but is not limited to, Marvel Heroes 2016-a free MMO released in 2013 and shut down in 2017, Firefall-another MMO released in 2014 and shut down in 2017, and Spark City World-an MMO geared towards girls released in 2008 and shut down in 2017.
An interesting pattern you may have noticed was that all three of the games I listed shut down in 2017. This is not the result of me manipulating data and only showing you games that shut down in 2017 on purpose, as the games I selected were entirely random. A better explanation, however, is that Adobe Flash Player was deprecated in 2017, rendering many online games that relied on the software as good as dead, as there was no chance for players to emulate them on their own machines. In a matter of months, due to a corporate decision, the lifecycles of these games within the timeline of the internet were officially ended. To make this concept a bit easier to understand, I’ll employ an analogy that helped me wrap my own head around the idea of relative time: humans are to the ultimate timeline as a game is to the section of the ultimate timeline that the internet takes up. Therefore, when an online game hasn’t existed for the entirety of the time the internet has existed, that game mirrors the temporary nature within the timeline of the internet that humans have within the ultimate timeline. If you’re a keen reader, which I know you are, you may take my examples of retired games and argue, “If you could find information about them on the internet, then their lifespan hasn’t ended yet.” To that I say, first of all you have a great point, but second of all you’ve got to think a little bigger. Think back to before the game existed-the game’s lifespan certainly doesn’t extend to the first ever instance of the internet, as the internet was originally created to house and parse raw data. Then, think to the future. If these games could be deleted because the software they relied on for the backend was given up on, the same can be said for every website that houses an article written about those games, as well as every website that houses a video, and every website that houses any information about it whatsoever. These games, therefore, are not immortal within the timeline of the internet, just as we humans are not immortal and all-existing within our own, ultimate timeline.
Part Two: Why We Should Care That Online Games Are As Temporary As Human Life
A representation of a wormhole, which Forbes uses to link to the possibility of time travel. For our purposes, it’s best to think of humans as at the very least occupying contiguous time. With our current scientific knowledge, for something to happen in the future, it must have happened in the past. For our theory, this means that the human who caused something in the future would occupy all of the time from when they started the future event to when the future event happens, as it happens as a result of their existence.
The fact that these games are not permanent will effectively allow us as humans to experience the games within the time of the internet as if we were the ultimate timeline experiencing humans. In the same way that we view these games as just a glimpse of an event within our lives, we are a glimpse of an event within the ultimate timeline. Nevertheless, just as the games were well-loved, fostered connections, and were entertained within their brief time allotted within the time of the internet, us humans are well-loved, connected, and entertaining within the time of the ultimate timeline. It is in this comparison that the main reason we should care as humans is revealed: no matter how short our allotment of time within the ultimate timeline, we can still make an impact on those who have the pleasure of perceiving the time we occupy. Just as we are impacted by perceiving the limited lifespan of the games, the ultimate timeline is impacted by perceiving the limited lifespan of humans. What we do may seem insignificant or small relative to such a large amount of continuous time, but if online games can make an impact within the timeline of the internet despite occupying such a small amount of it, us humans can do the same with the ultimate timeline. By recognizing that these games have limited time, we can hopefully become more comfortable ourselves with our own limited time, knowing that it can have an impact. I can only hope that through the lens of ultimate time I am as loved, cherished, and important as Poptropica is to me and the internet.
In the realm of video games, the art of character design and customization is fundamental to shaping player experiences. From the specifically crafted protagonists of games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Assassin’s Creed Mirage to the diverse characters in Lord of the Rings Online, character design is more than mere aesthetics; it influences game immersion, emotional engagement, and player agency.
Characterization in video games serves as a channel for players to interact with virtual worlds; it is a tool that allows players to shape their virtual identities. One example is in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, where players assume the role of Eivor, a fierce Viking warrior navigating the landscapes of 9th-century England. Eivor’s gender, hairstyles, and tattoos can all be customized, allowing players to tailor their experience to align with their preferences and identities. Additionally, players can acquire various weapons, armor sets, and skills to suit individual play style. The ability to customize Eivor’s settlement further enhances player agency as you invest resources to construct buildings and unlock new services. This level of customization offers players a sense of agency over their character’s journey and the world around them.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
In contrast, Assassin’s Creed Mirage lacks certain aspects of character design and customization. When Assassin’s Creed Mirage was released in 2023, I was excited to play the next installment of the series. While researching the game, I noticed that it lacked many customization features seen in previous Assassin’s Creed games. The most notable is that you cannot choose to play as a female character; there is only one male protagonist, Basim. Additionally, the game focuses more on gameplay customization, such as upgrading skill sets, than appearance. In my opinion, removing these customization aspects takes away from the player’s ability to fully engage with the character’s storyline. Players may feel less invested in Basim’s journey, as their ability to project themselves into the character is limited to predetermined traits and appearances. As a result, the game experience may feel more similar to passively observing a story unfold rather than actively participating in the world as the character.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage
Unlike the Assassin’s Creed games, Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) offers a comprehensive and immersive customization experience that extends beyond appearance. Players are granted complete control over their characters’ visual appearance and other aspects of gameplay, enriching immersion and emotional engagement. Players even have the opportunity to design their characters from a wide selection of races, like Hobbits, Elves, and Dwarves, each with their own unique traits and visual aesthetics. Players can further customize their avatars by adjusting any aspect of their appearance, from facial features to body proportions. This level of customization allows players to create avatars that can resonate with various aspects of their personality; players can even design a character to look similar to themselves. Another notable aspect of LOTRO’s customization is the housing system. Players can purchase and decorate their homes in various locations throughout the map. This feature gives players a creative outlet for self-expression and fosters a greater sense of belonging and attachment to their virtual world and community.
Lord of the Rings Online
The depth of customization in LOTRO contributes to the emotional impact on players; it fosters a sense of ownership and investment in the game world, helping players make personal connections and memories that continue outside the game. Compared to the Assassin’s Creed series, LOTRO’s emphasis on extensive customization sets it apart, offering players unparalleled opportunities for self-expression and immersion. While both franchises excel in creating immersive gaming experiences, LOTRO stands out through its player-driven customization and community-building mechanics, fostering deep emotional engagement and lasting connections.
From the 6th-12th grade, I had the opportunity to be on my school’s wrestling team. My time as a wrestler was interesting, and I can probably even say that it was life-changing. Beginning my athletic career with a rusty start, I wrestled within the 175-weight class. My high school coach, Daniel Jinks, who, in fact, is a WRESTLING beast, left us at the last minute for a school in Sacramento, CA. He probably got fed up with having a sucky team on his hands and wanted to boost his credibility as another school’s coach. Coach Jinks was a man with patience and empathy, sometimes too much patience and empathy. He would sometimes let us take unnecessary breaks during practice when we got tired, rarely pushed us to our limits, and refrained from screaming at his athletes. In that moment, I was happy that our coach wasn’t being harsh. However, I would finally come to realize that having this experience with Coach Jinks made adjusting to high school wrestling extremely difficult.
A team photo of me during a match against Red Bank High School in East Ridge, TN (Photo Courtesy of TSAAA Wrestling)
Fast forward a couple of years, and I arrived in high school. Before starting a new educational milestone, I was warned by my parents about the competitiveness of high school wrestling and how wrestling in middle school would never amount to the same level of difficulty as high school wrestling. I walked into the after-school wrestling room, which at the time, was a non-ventilated, hot, mat-covered room with blood on the walls. As I laced up my Adidas wrestling shoes and people started to flood into the practice room, a very stern, hostile, raspy voice was heard in the distance.
After a few minutes passed by, an old grey-bearded man walked in with a stopwatch and ordered us to run in a huge circle until he told us to stop. Since I was previously labeled as an in-shape individual, I had no problems undergoing the cardio part of the tryouts. I was exhausted and had to leave the room to catch my breath. I came back and that’s when he then told us to run live matches, which is when you must wrestle another practice mate as if you’re in a real match. Lying on the ground, this raspy-voiced individual finally introduced himself to us. His name is Wayne Turner, the school’s decades-old football coach, and an All-American Baseball, Football, and Wrestling athlete. Legend has it that when Coach Turner was in his prime, he was expected to play in the NFL.
Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / Tyner head coach Wayne Turner works with the Rams before the game. The Howard Hustlin Tigers visited the Tyner Rams in a TSSAA rivalry game on September 11, 2020.
However, due to a freakish accident where he killed his practice teammate, he took a step back from sports and got into sports coaching. At the time, Coach Turner was practically a Chattanooga celebrity. He was Tyner High School’s head coach for so long that many individuals far older than my parents were coached by him.
As the season progressed, I got to know Coach Turner’s coaching style a little bit more, noticing that his coaching style was far more abrasive than that of Coach Jinks. On the sidelines of Tyner’s popular high school football games, Coach Turner would be seen yelling and berating the players. When I then asked him why he prefers to do this to his students, he said that he does this because he cares for their successes.
Passion coaching is something that many experts despise and is when a coach uses an almost totalitarian leadership style to manage their team. As I watched Coach Turner and Coach’s similar, I started to think, can you really be that passionate about a team of players that much? Well, I got to put my proposed theory to the test by playing Retro Bowl. a ‘vintage’ inspired football game.
When I first loaded the game, I was skeptical if I was going to like what I was about to play, mainly because I rarely liked watching football. However, in an instance of boredom, I selected South Carolina, a very uninteresting team from a state that I had never visited. I was matched with an interesting group of guys who had the tendency to throw interceptions, incomplete passes, and ultimately run away from the ball.
A screenshot showing how at one point, my team was so bad that out of 1M fans, only 1% (10,000) supported South Carolina’s athletes. (Photo Courtesy of Jaylan SimsA screenshot showing how with unstrict discipline, our players costed our team money. These are simple foolish mistakes that can be corrected almost instantly. After criticizing the player, we lost fans and I never got a gesture violation for anyone on the team again (Photo courtesy of Jaylan Sims)
As I started to become detached from the game, thinking that I couldn’t possibly write a blog post on this garbage, I gave it another chance, playing multiple teams throughout the season. As we progressed, my team started to get increasingly better, and I began to develop a level of attachment to the players, wanting them to overly succeed and bring the state of South Carolina its first RB Championship.
After devastatingly losing the RB playoffs after the first round to Atlanta, our longstanding rival, South Carolina’s Running Back Oliver Izzo and Tight End, Timmy Atkins took the time during our off-season to train hard, leading our team to the winning streak that I so eagerly dreaded for. We started catching longer passes, running faster, and securing more touchdowns. I was content with my team’s performance and became increasingly happy when I saw that we had a chance at successfully winning an RB Championship.
The momentum that was constantly felt while playing the game ended up turning into little bursts of rage when the team made a mistake. I, as a coach, started to inhabit the thinking of Coach Turner, which is how every mistake deducts from the chances of winning the ultimate prize, a championship trophy.
As I was playing the game throughout the weeks of having it, I would consistently scream swear words at the top of my lungs. Not sure if my neighbors could hear me, but my iPad was able to pick up a lot of the shouting noises, further showing the level of intensity that I had for the players.
If you look at the top of this screenshot, you can see the shouting notification that my Ipad tends to send out everytime I scream.
Despite my screaming, our team kept working harder until we were able to successfully beat Atlanta, winning us an RB Championship. But I wasn’t satisfied with just one. On the leaderboard, some individuals played this game and were able to get over 3 championships.
A screenshot of an end of the season fan poll, highlighting the performance of my team for the season (Photo courtesy of Jaylan Sims)A screenshot showing how once we were able to get our act together as a team, we were able to beat Atlanta and have over 1M fans rooting for us in the championship. (Photo courtesy of Jaylan Sims)
Distraught by this leaderboard ranking, I fired all my coaching staff, and hired new staff from star football programs, ultimately leaving the SC team with their new coaches, and accepting a more promising job with the Texas program. During my tenure, I was content with the outcome, I left my fans with a great stadium, huge salary cap, state of the art training facilities, and state of the art rehad facilitates.
A screenshot showing how the team improved during my tenure, and the coaches that I hired and left the team with (Photo courtesy of Jaylan Sims).A screenshot showing how at the end of my tenure, I admitted Oliver Izzo and Timmy Atkins into the RB Hall of Fame (Photo courtesy of Jaylan Sims).
As you read this blog post, you may be thinking, why in the world were you so uptight about the team’s winnings, is it just a game, and did it really take screaming at the players, rather than your coaches? Well, I did things the way I did because it’s not that I hated the players, it’s because I genuinely cared about them and cited the origins of my quick coaching style because I wanted them to win and succeed in life, reaping all the benefits and royalties that come with success on and off the field.
As I came to this conclusion, I had read many studies that said that passion coaching didn’t work, and after playing Retro Bowl and understanding Coach Turner’s coaching style, I started to see the studies about screaming/showing tough love towards players, as completely inaccurate. From personal experience, Turner’s screaming and tough love only pushed us to try harder in our matches. And as I end my last blog post for the semester, I want to end by asking you another question. If ‘passion coaching’ is so bad, why do coaches who have this style of coaching, secure multiple state sport wins and state tournament appearances? Is it the players who are dramatizing the coaches’ actions, or the psychologists, who have probably never played sports a day in their lives?
When I was 8 years old, my favorite toy in the world was LEGOs, and my favorite franchise was Star Wars. I still have dozens of LEGO sets in my childhood bedroom, and I carry distinct memories of watching the Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series at my mom’s office while she worked. Aside from playing with LEGOs, my favorite pastime was playing videogames on the family Nintendo Wii, so imagine my excitement when I found out there was a LEGO Star Wars video game!
A promotional banner for the most recent LEGO Star Wars game
As a child, I loved the LEGO games, and even though they’re definitely aimed towards children, I still love them as an adult. The defining features of these modern LEGO video games are cartoony violence with explosions of LEGO studs, a ballooning character roster, and bastardized versions of scenes from the source material using LEGO humor. During gameplay, each of these elements are at the forefront of the player’s experience, emphasizing the fact that you’re playing a LEGO game. This is a great example of Bolter and Grusin’s hypermediacy, which describes media that is self-aware of its own medium and presents itself as such. The fact that the LEGO games are “LEGO games” is an integral part of the personality of the media, and an integral part of the player’s experience.
Obi-Wan cutting off Darth Maul’s legs in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Obi-Wan cutting off Darth Maul’s legs in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
As an example, let’s look at the moment in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace when a young Obi-Wan angrily halves Darth Maul in retaliation for the death of his master, Qui-Gon Jinn. In the original film, this is an incredibly tense and emotional moment, with all hope seemingly being lost just moments before Obi-Wan’s epic maneuver. However, in the LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga video game, this moment is played comedically, as are most other scenes in the LEGO Star Wars games. An already-chopped-in-half Maul stabs Qui-Gon while Obi-Wan freaks out about Maul’s amputated legs which are running around in a comedic way. Another aspect that adds to the hypermediacy is the fact that the legs have the same stubs that LEGO legs have, which wouldn’t make sense for realism, but make perfect sense for a LEGO game.
The LEGO games rely heavily on the player’s prior knowledge of a story or characters to apply the comedic LEGO remediation on top of this prior experience. The early LEGO games didn’t even have voice acting, probably due to financial limitations. Instead, the characters expressed dialogue through grunts and yells, and the story was largely based on the player’s prior knowledge of the source material. I really like the style of the LEGO video games, and I like seeing how they remediate beloved stories into fun, family-friendly experiences. They are some of the best examples of good remediation and hypermediacy.
Aging in video games always seemed like a weird concept to me. Why would you include something so grounded in real life within your digital world that many use partly as an escapist fantasy. So many of us have experienced or observed the heavy toll that getting older has whether it’s just lower energy or a more serious decline in health. My thoughts after our brief conversation about aging in games has led me to rethink some of my thoughts around aging as well as its potential as an in-game mechanic.
A variety of games feature mechanics that suggest the passage of time. Simulation games such as the sims have been aging characters for a while now and while it isn’t exactly aging in real time the time jumps to different life points such as children becoming teens and teens adults offer a sense of immersion that many crave. Fortunately, for those looking for escapism, the aging mechanic can be turned off.
Other non-simulation games feature mechanics that allude to aging without full committing to the effects of it. Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 both feature in game barber shops where the player can choose new hair and beard styles as well as a quick trim. To provide and extra feeling of immersion, the devs for both games implemented mechanics where the players head and facial hair grow overtime. This level of time passage only effects gameplay on an aesthetic level and just adds more customization features for your characters without effecting players looking for a less realistic time mechanic.
Recently I’ve begun playing Sifu, an indie game released in 2022 by Sloclap studios. The game puts you in the role of a young Kung Fu master seeking revenge for the murder of your father. This requires you to clear rooms full of henchmen with complex chains of attacks. What really makes the game unique is its really interesting use of aging within the game. The enemies in Sifu are challenging so it’s expected that you die a fair amount, fortunately your character has a magical pendent that resurrects them. The catch is that each of these deaths causes you character to grow older with the amount you age growing with each consecutive death. Dying to the same opponent repeatedly sees you character go from 22 to 23 to 25 to 28 etc… The aging Is more than just visual flair. As you grow older your character unlocks new powerful techniques due to the wisdom of aging which allows you to do more damage to your opponents. To balance the benefits of experience, your body becomes frailer, and you have a smaller health pool when fighting your enemies. The real kicker is that when your character ages into his 70s and 80s there is a chance he will die permanently, and the level will restart from the age you first began it at. It’s really cool having a permanent death mechanic that is actually reflective of how real aging works.
I find this a fascinating mechanic as it suggests a life outside of what we see in our gameplay. As our character ages they experience numerous trials and train to become stronger, but these experiences are all implied. I also love the lens through which they portray aging, having it be something positive for the player where they learn and grow but also keeping the harsher realities of getting older. Perhaps this proves that even the mundane and often sad parts of being human can inspire innovative and entertaining gameplay mechanics.
I would love to see someone take the concept even further with maybe a time sensitive aging mechanic that encourages you to beat levels as fast as possible while experiencing a variety of aging consequences in real time. Maybe could explore and do puzzles on other planets and have different rates of aging due to how time passes on other planets.
With an ever technologizing world, new forms of communication have been created. Calling on cell phones, emailing, and now texting or direct messaging have swept through the world as a basis for human interaction. Within such novel communications comes an intriguing way of relaying emotions and information: GamePigeon.
GamePigeon is a game platform within Apple’s iMessage system that allows users who text with Apple products to play quick mini games with each other. These games include a range of activities, from pool to darts, as well as more creative games, like 20 questions and Tanks, where one must shoot a tank shell over great distances accurately to hit their opponent, and friend, on the other side. These mini games are a great way to grow friendships even at a distance. For example, when my friends return home during vacations and have to sit through long car rides, they often send my GamePigeon requests for pool and cup pong to help them pass the time.
Mini Games, Big Competition
Don’t discount these games to be just casual, happy-fun-time distractions from reality. These games queue up, and you are immersed in the competition. When a friend sends you pool, darts, cup pong, knockout, or any other mini game, the engines of competition rev their engines; it is a declaration of war. Lose, and your friends will hold over their victory for hours to come. These games are not friendly, where you line up and shake hands at the end. Words are said, threats are given, and trash talk (even over text) is key to psych your opponent out. These games are taken seriously. Tournaments have been constructed around GamePigeon. During COVID, gaming conventions like E3 would host pool and cup pong tournaments. Even in small settings, get-togethers, and parties, “social-distancing cup pong” became a trend to keep company alive.
One of the most interesting facets are the tricks people use to elevate the gameplay. One strategy is known as the napkin shot. During GamePigeon pool, players will take a napkin, and line it up with the cue ball and its projected direction. The edge of the napkin allows you to play the angles of the game more easily, allowing you to get each ball in more precisely and go on a streak. With cup pong and darts, players have been able to ding the perfect speed and finger placement to send the ball into the middle cup, and the dart into the center of the board. In these games, it is much easier to perfect your movements; no need for strenuous muscle memory and years of practice and training. It is tricks like these which almost make these mini games seem like a sport.
Another trend that occurred in this past decade was the use of GamePigeon games during long, emotional texts. When breakups occur over text, where the dumper would send long paragraphs to the dumpee. The dumpee, in response, would simply send a game instead of a legitimate response. This type of text was supposed to anger the other person, showing them that they did not care enough to read the whole text, which was then translated to the entire relationship. This trend was seen on Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat and grew nationwide laughs. It grew from breakups to arguments, where someone would send a huge, angry spew and would only get a GamePigeon mini game in response.
It is little trends like this that help games like this grow beyond the scope of their intended purpose. What was once a friendly game turned into a bargaining chip in the greater game of relationships. It is always wonderful to see how games change and evolve. Who knows how GamePigeon will be used next. Mini games have always been used to pit your friends against each other, like in Super Mario Party. Sure, there are shapes, colors, and cutesy characters. but underneath, there is a burning competition that rages in the heart.
Doom. Halo. BioShock. Call of Duty. First-person shooter games are some of the most popular on the market, placing the gamer in a “first-person” perspective, as the name would suggest, seeing the world from the protagonist’s point of view and allowing the gamer to see the game through the scope of a gun. Some games, like Big Buck Hunter, are found in arcades, allowing you to pick up a plastic gun and shoot it as the controller, blurring the lines between reality and your furry victims. As entertaining and popular as these games are, first-person shooters exemplify an opacity in games we tend to overlook but should pay more attention to: Video games aren’t made in a vacuum devoid of corporate interests. In the case of first-person shooters (FPS), domestic arms dealers use these games to glorify and sell high-powered firearms to young men, regardless of their consequences.
When people talk about the connection between video games and violence (as SB did in her blog last week), we often think about how games influence gamers. But, we should also think about how corporations influence games themselves and how corporations trade on the popularity of games to sell products, whether through the addictive models of gambling games, persistent ads, or, in the case of the gun industry, through gun glorification to sell high-powered firearms to very young adults. I started to learn about this a year ago when I was researching some of the firearm industry’s marketing tactics that ran afoul of the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines regarding misleading marketing tactics and unfairly targeting minors. From there, I learned about an entire branch of the gun market dedicated to getting younger and younger kids access to bigger guns by using misleading statistics, bright-colored firearms, and intentionally marketing guns to attract young men who played FPS.
Firearm Manufacturers Allude to Games in Their Marketing
One way firearm manufacturers do this is by alluding to popular games in their marketing. For example, the pictures below show two Instagram posts by a gun manufacturer, Anderson Manufacturing, where pink palm trees are painted on guns and displayed on their Instagram. Next to them are two promotional images from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a popular FPS (which depicts illegal gun use, among… many other crimes), which also feature the same palm trees and color scheme.
Images 1 & 2 show Anderson Manufacturing’s Ads, and images 3 & 4 showpromotional images from GTA Vice City which use the same colors & palm trees
Another example is from a 2018 gun show, where four men with guns fight off a “mob,” with the slogan “Not Today Antifa” plastered above it. There are a lot of concerning aspects of this ad, but for this discussion, note the style in which these people are depicted. It’s not realism or cartoon; it looks like the type of animation we associate with first-person shooter games, linking real-life ownership and use of high-powered weapons with people’s actions in violent games.
The “Not Today Antifa” ad from 2018 used at a national gun show demonstrates how the gun industry has turned towards militaristic messaging which also alludes to gaming
Game Makers and Firearm Manufacturers Work Together
Perhaps even more troubling, proof of deals between the gaming companies and the gun industry has been unearthed. Remington, the firearm company that made Bushmaster an AR-15, went bankrupt after a settlement with families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. As part of this settlement, emails and documents were recently released that show undisclosed details of a deal that took place between the company and Call of Duty to put their guns in the game, expressly hoping to appeal to a new generation of potential customers. According to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, one of Remington’s rifles, known as an “ACR,” was put into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009. Remington wanted to sell a civilian semi-automatic version of the ACR, and Activision Blizzard, the company that published the game, wanted a more “realistic” feel for players. It was mutually beneficial. The game sold over 22 million copies, and the civilian version of the ACR developed a cult following. This deal, which is far from the only one out there, shows that a) video games can be used as marketing tools, and b) it demonstrates the desire of the firearm industry to use games to reach a new, younger audience. Another report by Intercept discussed how the firearm industry is moving from an older consumer base that primarily used guns for hunting to a younger market, where the industry advertises how high-powered weapons can be used for “self-defense.”
Ryan Busse, a former executive at a gun manufacturer-turned policy adviser at the gun-safety group Giffords, describes how the industry shifted from hunting-focused advertisements in the 90s to marketing which now focuses on high-powered weapons, military imagery, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, young men, and games. The impact of this is palpable: for the last three years, guns have been the number one killer of children, teens, and young adults in America. Mass shooters in Uvalde, Texas; Aurora, Colorado; Sandy Hook, Connecticut; Highland Park, Illinois; Parkland, Florida; Buffalo, New York; and doubtless countless others used firearms from video games that they had played. In Busse’s words, “The gun industry’s modern marketing effort did not just arm these shooters; in a very real sense, it created them.”
To be fully transparent, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with first-person shooter games. I think they can be really fun (even though I’m pretty terrible at them), and there is no proof of causation between playing these games and engaging in real-world violence. However, pretending as though these games are created or played in a world removed from the weapons they depict is dangerous. The gaming industry needs to take accountability for the deals they’ve made with firearm manufacturers to place real guns in their games. We should all be more aware of the consequences of the gun industry purposefully linking their guns to popular games: they intentionally use militaristic imagery to get (mostly) young men who play FPS, which often show firearm use in active combat, against zombies, or for illegal purposes, to buy real semi-automatic firearms for “self-defense” against other civilians. But beyond the gun industry itself, games are a powerful marketing tool for companies willing to use them, and we should view any product placement, even if it’s seemingly innocuous, with some vigilance. Because although we play games, sometimes they play us too.
There always comes a time when I’m playing a game and feeling a bit labored, so I put down my gamepad and just watch the game screen for a brief rest. However, one game happened to hit me out of nowhere at that exact moment. When I first stopped in NieR: Automata, I felt a powerful soundstage surround me, not just for its excellent soundtrack but as a combined experience of the different layers of sound in the game. In this blog, I’m not going to talk about Studio Platinum’s excellent action and fight design or the philosophical ideas that Taro Yokoo wanted to discuss. However, instead, I’m just going to talk about its soundtrack and sound effects, how it affects the potential for interactivity in the medium of video games as game development technology continues to evolve, and what considerations are made for sound effects design.
NieR: Automata is an ARPG video game released in 2017, developed by Platinum Studios and published by Square Enix, whose story revolves around a proxy war between robots created by aliens and robots created by humans. The music in Nier was arranged by Keiichi Okabe and his team at Monaca, and Platinum Studios used real-time processing of the audio in the game to achieve unprecedented effects. The following technical discussion comes from Platinum Studios member Shuji Kohata’s technical presentation at the Game Developers Conference 2018, please check out the presentation, which includes a number of compelling live demos.
Spatial-based real-time sound effects
For large-scale games like NieR: Automata, which include open-world elements, players exploring different areas within the game is undoubtedly one of the key gameplay elements. And the Platinum Studios team realized powerful spatial audio effects through two technologies: spatial audio technology independent of the output device (simple 3D) and interactive reverb technology (K-verb).
Among these, simple 3D is a spatial audio processing technique that does not depend on the sound output hardware and is designed to enable the player to be aware of objects behind them using only stereo sound. Audio differentiation is accomplished by adjusting the sound source’s volume based on its position, increasing or decreasing its high and low frequency components, and responding to objects behind it with bandpass filters. Interestingly, Shuji Kohata and his colleagues manually adjusted this set of techniques by comparing the audio of a stereo in front of Kohata and one behind Kohata. K-verb refers to a real-time reverb technique (named by Shuji Kohata himself) based on the position of the game character and the size of the surrounding space. By shooting ranging rays in multiple directions from the character’s position and calculating the size of the space around them, the duration of the audio reverb is controlled, resulting in a spatial audio effect that is dominated by the character rather than the player’s point of view.
K-verb: rays shooted on surrounded areas as balls
Real-time sound effects based on game mechanics
Hacking into enemy robots is an essential part of the gameplay. This is where the player enters a shooting mini-game to simulate the process of hacking into other machines. And based on this gameplay, the Platinum Studios team developed a unique audio filter that doesn’t rely on the 8-bit version of a specific track but instead 8-bitizes the current audio through software to achieve smooth overdubs and adjustability of the 8-bit effect. Secondly, like many games where scarlet begins to color around the screen when the protagonist is injured, NieR: Automata produces a unique lo-fi sound effect when the player is injured, mimicking the state of old-school machinery when it’s damaged without making the noise too jarring to add to the immersion of the game.
demonstration of 8-bit sound filter where the “8-bit” level is adjustable
In addition to the above two types of audio technology, Shuji Kohata also mentioned other fun designs used in games, such as odd voice effects if the player adjusts the volume of a character’s voice too high or too low, as well as Doppler effect processing of audio produced by rapidly traveling units, and other sound effects designed to complement the game’s graphics. It’s worth noting that all of the above audio effects must be lightweight and not cause the game to lag by acting out the audio. For example, the lo-fi effect reduces the sample rate of the game’s audio before processing it and subsequently resampling it, while the 8-bit sound effect simply uses mono audio.
Whether it’s a K-verb or 8-bit effect, these techniques demonstrated by Shuji Kohata make in-game audio relevant to the player’s actions, with exact feedback when the player presses a button. This is fundamentally different from playing footsteps when the player starts moving and switching to a “battle” soundtrack when they enter a battle. The sound design in NieR: Automata is integrated into the gameplay. There are few video games I’ve seen that focus on the player’s auditory experience as much as NieR: Automata, which seems to be an aspect many creators don’t pay enough attention to. However, gamers who have played the NieR series know that sometimes games can impress you with their sound alone (please try it here).
There was a time in the past decade or so when some people believed that playing violent video games, particularly shooters, could lead to later becoming a killer. While, at this point, that theory has been falsified, it is interesting to look into how playing these games is affecting the behavior and development of children, as it is extremely clear through hundreds of studies and experiments that media does have a psychological impact on people of all ages, but especially children. As someone who has a little brother who I have watched grow and change over the years, I think this conversation is extremely relevant concerning this new generation of kids who has always had exposure to specifically handheld media such as iPads, tablets, and mobile phones.
When my brother was about five years old, he started asking to play Fortnite, an online shooter game that gained popularity after being released in 2017. He no doubt heard about it from YouTube videos he watched online and from his friends whose parents had allowed them to play the game, but my mother insisted that he could not play until he was at least 8 years old. On his 8th birthday, he downloaded Fortnite on his playstation. Since then, he has devoted several hundreds of hours to playing the game, eventually getting a Nintendo Switch and being able to play it on the go. It is easy to become desensitized to what one does in the game, particularly due to the lack of blood and guts displayed, making it easier for someone to take the violent acts in stride. The most obvious changes to him came in how he acted when he played the game, growing angry to the point of yelling and hysterics upon losing, being moved to tears and frustration when our family refused to play alongside him in Duo mode, and fighting with my parents about when he could play, for how long, and when he needed to turn it off.
Promotional Image from Fortnite
I also began to notice his desensitization to violence, both while playing the game and in every day interactions. He became much more sinister, often making exclamations while killing other players in the game or as he was hunting them down. He also began to adopt more violent language. For example, I told him one afternoon to get his stuff off the counter because our mother liked for it to be clear when she got home and he replied “yeah, she’d see that and kill herself.” I spent 10 minutes having a conversation with him about why saying something like that was not okay, and the next day he made a comment about killing me because I laughed at him. While things like this might not seem like the biggest deal, it has been a very noticeable change in his behavior before and after adopting this game, as I wasn’t even aware my brother had considered what suicide was until he made that statement. I also think my generation has become particularly desensitized to violent language, with many of us often throwing around “kill myself” on any given day, and while that is particularly problematic, there is something extra concerning about hearing it come out of the mouth of a nine year old.
Beyond just my personal conjecture, there is research to backup the change I have noticed in my brother. According to one 2017 study, “the effects of screen violence on increased aggressive behavior have been reviewed and affirmed by numerous major scientific organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the US Surgeon General, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the International Society for Research on Aggression” (Anderson et al 2017). The study went on to discuss what causes aggression and aggressive behavior and how exposure to violent media can increase those triggers, such as “aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, physiologic arousal, hostile appraisals, and aggressive behavior” while decreasing “prosocial behavior (eg, helping others) and empathy” (Anderson et al 2017). Playing video games is an easy trigger for many of these things, as I’ve watched my brother grow incredibly angry and hostile while playing games both toward other players and myself and my family members.
Figure 1 from “Screen Violence and Youth Behavior” Depicting Changes during Video Game Play
Obviously, though, the change in my brother and other children cannot all be attributed to video games, as the study cites violent media, including film and television. In this same time period, my parents have allowed my brother to be exposed to more mature and violent media like Marvel movies, Dune, etc., and these could be having a similar or worse impact on him than the games he plays. Regardless, there has been a change for the worse in the way my brother views death and violence and it is very clear from watching him play a round of Fortnite that it is not helping the situation.
So this leaves the question of what can be done to fix this issue? Expose kids to violent media at an older age? Sit them down and talk to them about the serious implications of the silly games they play? Ultimately, I don’t have the answer and scientists don’t fully either, as keeping children sheltered from all ideas of both real and fictional violence can also be harmful in providing them a false sense of the world. It also is possible to place this pressure on these games, as Fortnite does have a teen rating, but my brother who is not a teen regularly plays the game and it is a known thing that many children are playing the game at all hours of the day. I believe as a society we are growing more and more desensitized to violence, but now it is starting at younger and younger ages due to the prevalence of personal media devices owned by children and it ultimately takes greater awareness for the problem to be addressed and, eventually, solved.
-Sarah Beth
Sources:
Anderson, Craig A et al. “Screen Violence and Youth Behavior.” Pediatrics vol. 140,Suppl 2
(2017): S142-S147. doi:10.1542/peds.2016-1758T
2. Brockmyer, Jeanne Funk. “Desensitization and Violent Video Games: Mechanisms and
Evidence.” Child and adolescent psychiatric clinics of North America vol. 31,1 (2022):
121-132. doi:10.1016/j.chc.2021.06.005
3. Damour, Lisa. “Parenting the Fortnite Addict.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30
When you see the word ‘gamer’ what do you think of? Who do you think of? What do they look like? Enjoy doing? What do they do for work? Are they successful? Well, if you ask anyone this question, the images they might come up with likely rely on stereotypical images from the media of a typical gamer. But what you really should think of is…most people! It turns out that being a gamer doesn’t require someone to dedicate years of their lives to one game’s storyline and quest, even if that is an honorable and impressive feat. All it takes is an electronic device and somewhat of a habit of picking up that device (in whatever form) and engaging with a game. According to Mirriam-Webster, a video game is “an electronic game in which players control images on a video screen.” The dictionary also defines gamers as “a person who plays games. Especially a person who regularly plays computer or video games.”
These definitions immediately brought the mass obsession with phone games such as Episode, Clash of Clans, Candy Crush, 2048, and – most prominently – the recent worldwide love of NYT Games. I doubt that most people on the street, namely the 50+ crowd who diligently solve the Wordle every morning, would call themselves gamers, but, it seems they are. That brings up the question – do they deserve the title of gamer? Is the definition of a gamer accurate to the massive demographic that the definition covers – which is currently most people who have a cell phone? I wonder if so-called ‘hard-core’ gamers who have completed the most sophisticated, well-crafted and designed games would accept this reality or if they are proprietary of the title. More than anything else, however, I have been enjoying pondering the motivations for gaming amongst broader populations.
Some scientists have identified that many people are hooked to the ‘bite-sized fun’ and small amounts of serotonin that come from completing the Daily Mini or Connections (CNBC), but I feel as if it might go beyond that. It’s almost as if people’s competitiveness about these small games has turned into a fight for intelligence. I know people who have gotten so competitive about the NYT Games, that they will claim higher intelligence over a friend who has a lower score than them that day, or who took a few more minutes to solve the crossword. It’s a bit troubling, but I also find it totally fascinating as a dynamic. It is a genius game design and a perfect way to get people addicted to competing in games. It seems that the motivations and players of both mini games and massive online video games are not so different after all.
At the end of the day, completing a game – whether it be a level of LOTRO or the Wordle-spinoff Globle (https://globle-game.com/) – allows for a sense of accomplishment and gratification that the modern workforce and society can rarely provide everyone. It is about feeling like you can, everyday, step up to a challenge and complete it, however small, and come away with a sense of having at least attempted at really getting something right that day.
I think it is quite wonderful that there are so many different populations, ages, and identities that turn to gaming, of any kind, for an outlet. It is no wonder that it has become one of the most lucrative businesses and popular pastimes of people around the world. After all, it seems we are all wired to seek out accomplishment and gratification, and likely to become hooked to that feeling, whether it be in the real world or a virtual one. I wonder how much crossover exists between the mini New York Times gamers and those who play in vast virtual universes, and what we can learn about each other once we start looking.
Ever since I was a young child, I’ve always dreamed of becoming a journalist. Whether through my work for audio, television, or print, I would consistently make it my mission to achieve this goal. Infatuated by my newly found career aspiration, I would aggressively consume all types of news media (NPR, AP, BBC, ABC/NBC), and would mimic the working style of some of our country’s greatest journalists (Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, and Lester Holt). However, it wasn’t until I started dipping my hands into the gaming genre of tycoons, that I became exposed to the different management roles in the journalism industry and how gaming tycoons can educate me on these roles.
Initially, I idiotically believed that once you became a correspondent for a major network, like ABC or CNN, then that was it; you’ve made it! However, one of my high school journalism instructors quickly shot down my weak notion, exposing me to the high-paying field of news management, which included news editors, executive producers, managing editors, and company presidents. It wasn’t until high school that I received my first job in journalism. Working as a sound technician/master control operator at CBS affiliate WDEF-TV in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I was naïve and young. Serving as an intern before being hired at the same station, I overshadowed many people within the television station. But I will forever remember my time shadowing the station’s news director. Seeing him gracefully manage an award-winning news team that could excel for centuries, made news management look extremely easy. And so, with that thought, I ran with it, containing another mistake within itself. This was mainly because I thought local and national news stations were ran similarly.
A reel of WDEF’s web show,’ News 12 Now On Demand’, anchored by Jaylan Sims on July 1st, 2021.
Still aspiring to be a journalist, mostly forgetting about my conversation with my former boss, I came across a newly released tycoon game titled News Tower (Feb. 14th, 2024). Impulsively, I watched over two hours of gameplay before buying the game.
The Gameplay 🕹️
Based in the 1940s, players are tasked with opening a local newspaper in New York City that covered national topics, like The Washington Post. As the player progresses throughout the game, they must hire reporters, copy editors, and other publication staff. Players are also tasked with taking ‘backdoor’ money from the Mayor, Wall Street economists, and the Mafia, which heavily influence the player’s paper. They must do this to reach the weekly publishing deadline of Sunday at 24:00.
Official game cover for ‘News Tower.’ (Photo courtesy of Steam)
As I turned on my iMac to start the game, my face lit up with excitement, not only because I finally had a good reason to procrastinate, but because this game catered to my career interests and could be enjoyable. So, with the game fully loaded, I cleverly decided to name my paper, ‘The Brooklyn Times.’ The name ‘The Brooklyn Times’ was inspired by the 1834-1937 New York newspaper, ‘The Brooklyn Times-Union.’ I started by hiring 3 reporters, 3 copy editors, and worked on upgrading my printing press. Everything was going perfectly fine until the Mafia started to get upset with the content that my paper was printing. They ended up sending 14 of their members into the newsroom, and both beat my staff and destroyed all our printing equipment, preventing my small team of reporters from getting their work published. After two days of business, I was forced to take out a $20,000 mafia-controlled loan to cover the damages. I started thinking to myself… “Okay, a minor inconvenience, this can still work out.”
Recovering from the Mafia’s blow, I forced the paper to skip its second publication deadline, and mistakenly hired more reporters to make up for lost time. For weeks after, the newsroom was bustling with the constant flow of sports, crime, comedy, and economic coverage. All reporters produced stellar content, resulting in paper sales exceeding the thousands and many advertisement offers. I chuckled slightly, reminiscing about my thoughts about my old boss’ job looking easy. However, not so shortly after doing so, my publication reported on sexual assault allegations faced by the mayor, and just two days later, the mayor filed 8 major lawsuits that needed to be settled by the paper in 3 days. In real life, most medium-low marker television stations just refrain from covering controversial topics that they believe can bring about lawsuits, mostly because lawyers are pricey.
Picture of ‘The Brooklyn Times’ newsroom during its early stages (Photo courtesy of Jaylan Sims)
Due to the absence of a company lawyer, we lost the lawsuit and were ordered to pay the mayor $70,000, which we didn’t have. Quickly, things started going downhill, as the debt forced me to decrease the salaries of my star reporters and ultimately lay off 60% of my staff, an action common among many reputable news organizations. After only a few more weeks, and 113,000 loyal readers later, my staff couldn’t take the pay cuts and went on strike, with some ultimately walking out. We were already in debt, and the mass walkout at The Times resulted in the paper missing yet another deadline and dipping far into unrecoverable debt. Because of this, I was forced to close the paper, ending both the game and my tenure as general manager of The Brooklyn Times.
The Learning Aspect🎒
Exhausted by my failed news organization, I quietly soaked back in my seat for 30 minutes, recollecting whether I was a terrible journalist, manager, or both! However, I soon realized that this tycoon taught me that at the foundation of every successful news company is a leader who possesses a clear strategy, understands their limits, and has empathy for their employees. Understanding these learning tools through gameplay can be vital to educating students who are possibly interested in media management. This learning method is fun and immerses the student in its objective, presenting real-world problems that require real-world solutions.
Growing up, I was a huge Minecraft fan. I spent weeks worth of time building huge towns with my brother and friends, making online friends on servers like Lifeboat, Hypixel, and Mineplex, and just mining for days on end in my personal survival worlds. I even waited in line at a Barnes and Noble for 4.5 hours just to get into a Dan TDM meet and greet, who was one of my favorite Minecraft YouTubers. What I didn’t realize at the time though, was everything that I was learning through playing the game. Now as an Earth Sciences major, I have really realized the extent to which Minecraft can be a useful learning tool.
This past weekend I found myself out at sea off the gulf shore of Alabama on a research vessel, accompanied by a woman who worked in the education department of the costal research lab on Dauphin Island. She told me about how she hosts elementary school class trips to the lab to teach kids about the local swamps, marine life, and geology. Minecraft came up in the conversation when she mentioned how it was not until the last few years when she had students coming in who were actually able to answer questions about what types of trees, plants, and rocks you would find in swamps and coastal beaches. She attributed this knowledge to the popularity of Minecraft, where a lot of the information in the game is actually pretty scientifically accurate.
A photo from the trip I mentioned and a display of my excitement about rocks.
I honestly was not surprised at all by her attribution of kid’s scientific knowledge to Minecraft. I’ve noticed it myself when taking my first geology course. I immediately recognized a lot of rock names from the game and had an idea of how hard they were to mine, what biomes they’d be in, and how deep you’d need to dig to find them. Of course, the application of this in the game is not completely accurate to real-life, but it provided me with a decent amount of familiarity that I would not have had otherwise.
In pursuit of diamonds, kids (and any other Minecraft players) can actually learn a lot about caves and minerals. Newer updates to the game have truly upped the number of features there are in the mines, including things like stalactites and stalagmites. These are mineral deposits that form icicle-looking formations in caves from dripping water. Stalagmites form in the game when you are in a cave that has water somewhere above it. These Minecraft stalagmites and stalactites, called ‘pointed dripstone’ in the game, will grow larger the closer a water source is to the rock that the dripstone is growing out of. I could definitely see kids ‘accidentally’ learning about these cool geologic formations when looking to learn more about Minecraft. If they wanted to find larger dripstones, they would then have to learn that they are found closer to water, then making this link between the mineral formation and their formation via dripping water.
Stalagmites in a cave
Minecraft dripstone
The pointed dripstone example is one of the more niche, but there are many really clear examples of how Minecraft can teach geologic principles within typical gameplay activities like farming and smelting. One of the first things that players must learn to be able to grow food is that the closer the dirt block is to a water source, the faster the crops are going to grow. This inadvertently teaches young players about groundwater flow and infiltration of water. If players want to make windows for their houses, they have to put sand through the metamorphic process by heating it in the furnace to make glass.
Using coal to burn sand in a furnace to make glass.
Geologic concepts and environmental dynamics are subtly introduced through Minecraft’s unique and popular open-ended gameplay. With newer, more niche and specific additions to the game, there is a lot of potential for it to be used as a more formal learning tool for Earth Science specific classes. For general elementary science, though, I think it would be really engaging for students to learn through the game if teachers used it for scientific modeling. Geologic formations like mountains, caves, and ravines already exist within the game. However, things like volcanoes and tectonic plate boundaries could be easily built with existing game materials to be able to teach kids about these as well. The existing river valleys and cliffs within the game could be tied into a lesson about erosion and weathering, and how these formations come to be in real life.
Minecraft can be more than just a game, it can be an immersive learning environment. By integrating Minecraft into earth sciences education, teachers could use it as a tool that many kids will likely find more engaging than typical textbook diagrams. Particularly with the extreme popularity of the game, I’d imagine that most kids would have a familiarity with it which could aid them in learning topics that are new by tying it to something they know.
As we as a society become more technologically savvy and in turn more attuned to the joy of games, there is room for an all too often overlooked development. Over the years games have become more and more impressive, not just in their creation but in their approach and mechanics. I believe that this could be an opportunity to learn from ourselves and create games that are more accessible by utilizing alternative game mechanics.
In the game “Before Your Eyes,” you play as a boy relaying the memories of his life to the Ferryman. It is a stylistically simplistic storytelling game with a unique spin: the game progresses every time you blink. The implications of this game mechanic story-wise are quite interesting. At first, you go through the slow story of this young boy’s life, blinking in a usual rhythm because everything seems normal at first. That is until the Ferryman sees the boy’s lies and the player discovers the twist of the game. The scenes suddenly become shorter and quicker and your life passes you by with every blink. The story’s most emotional moments are in the most important scenes which most players don’t get to fully experience because they just can’t keep their eyes open long enough.
Cover of “Before Your Eyes” on Steam
“Before Your Eyes” was not only a piece of art, but a marking and reminder of what we are capable of. Gaming mechanics typically involve a keyboard or buttons and a joystick or mouse, but “Before Your Eyes” is not the only game to incorporate an alternative mechanic. There is the simplistically designed Flappy-Bird-esque mobile game “Scream Go Hero” where the player must make noise to move the character, most of the time having to scream to save their avatar from falling. There are games we may not think about immediately, such as kinetic games like “Just Dance.” There are alternative game mechanics within regularly played games, such as the “Don’t Move” mechanic in “Until Dawn” where the controller requires the player to be extremely still while their character is hiding. While many of us might see these games as impressive pieces of art, media, or technology, I believe this could be an opportunity to become more accessible.
Top 10 video games for the visually-impaired according to Lenstore
Just as games have become more diverse, accessibility creates many different images in people’s minds. There are visual and mobility impairments, that can even inhibit someone’s ability to sit in a chair for an extended period of time. With this in mind, a factor important in the accessibility of games is not just the ability to play the game, but the options of games that are playable. I believe this has become even more significant as technology makes its way more and more into settings such as the classroom, the workplace, and the social scene. Alternative mechanics that don’t require the use of fine motor skills such as the one in “Before Your Eyes” could potentially be integrated in ways that would assist those who struggle with such mobility issues even outside of gaming.
When I was younger, when a game was released, the only payment a player would be responsible for was buying the disc. However, as I began to play more mature games like Call of Duty, I noticed that a few times per year there would be DLC (Downloadable Content) releases in which new maps would be released. While purchasing these releases was not mandatory, those that did not purchase the DLC maps would not be able to play with those who did purchase them, essentially splitting the player base in half. I always did purchase the DLC maps as they weren’t too expensive and I looked forward to new in-game content. While the Call of Duty franchise was not the first game to include in-game purchases, my experience with Downloadable Content first came while playing COD and games released by EA Sports such as NHL and FIFA.
Although the splitting up of the player base in Call of Duty was irritating, a player’s in-game performance was never directly influenced by anything that was available for purchase. That is, until they decided to release “supply drops” in 2014’s Advanced Warfare. Supply drops were initially earned in game; these drops included variants of weapons that provided players with a distinct advantage, as many variants included increased damage and range or significant improvements in mobility speed. While the release of supply drops received a bit more backlash than Activision (developers of Call of Duty) expected, because supply drops were originally not available to be purchased, the backlash was limited. However, Activision ultimately decided to release advanced supply drops which were available for purchase and provided significantly higher odds of obtaining the best weapons in the game.
(Call of Duty Advanced Warfare unfair weapon variant and Advanced Supply Drops in the Marketplace)
Unlike the original supply drops, this move by Activision caused extreme damage to the game, as many players felt that the integrity of the game had been lost. Now, the skill gap was smaller, and the game became “pay to win.” Although I think the community overreacted to these supply drops since the weapons weren’t that much better than the originals, Call of Duty’s player base began to decline at a rapid rate. Call of Duty seemed as though it would be a dead game so long as supply drops and microtransactions were a part of the game. To combat this issue, Activision made supply drops that include strictly cosmetic items that did not impact game performance. Although this change was positive, Call of Duty has never been the same game as it was when microtransactions were limited to DLC maps.
While Call of Duty may have ruined the game by way of microtransactions, one game that enhanced the player experience through the use of microtransactions is CS:GO. CS:GO also allows players to purchase skins for real money; however, these skins hold monetary value and can even be resold on the marketplace. Through microtransactions, CS:GO has not only preserved the longevity of their game, but also created an entire community of players who are obsessed with collecting and trading. While no game that includes microtransactions will ever be perfect in my opinion, I think CS:GO does an amazing job of integrating microtransactions as an optional enhancement to game enjoyment. Some of these skins have even gone on to sell for tens of thousands of dollars, even hitting prices well over $100,000.
(This CS:GO knife skin is valued at over $1 million, and its owner has turned down offers over this price tag)
While my complaints regarding microtransactions seem to be very minor as they only affected my enjoyment of the game, there are more tangible reasons as to why microtransactions are more harmful than good. One thing I have noticed in microtransactions is that there are two specific types, both of which ruin the experience: microtransactions that provide an advantage or those that look to exploit children.
In my experience of playing games, since Call of Duty, I have mostly seen the first type of microtransactions in sports games, specifically FIFA. For example, when I was in high school, I watched one of my good friends become addicted to opening FIFA Ultimate Team packs just to gain an advantage against other players. When it was all said and done, he had spent around $2,000 in under 6 months, causing a long discussion with his parents. Again, microtransactions of this type may be annoying to those that do not wish to spend money, yet they can also be extremely problematic to individuals, especially when the perceived in-game advantage they provide is extremely large as is the case with FIFA.
For the second type of microtransactions I have come across, the first game I point to is Fortnite. Although the items offered in the Fortnite marketplace do not affect gameplay, the inclusion of pop culture icons and characters in game “skins” is directed at mainly children, especially when considering Fortnite’s player base. While this may be profitable for the developers of Fortnite, it begs the question: are microtransactions truly ethical? When purchasing from the Fortnite marketplace, it takes about 15 seconds for an individual to add money to their account and purchase a new skin. And with each skin costing roughly $15-$20, purchasing skins quickly becomes a very expensive hobby that young kids are most likely unable to stop themselves from participating in. Considering that the revenue from microtransactions is nearly $100 billion per year, I would argue microtransactions in this context are absolutely not ethical; however, there is no chance that microtransactions are going anywhere, as they’re just too profitable.
(Fortnite marketplace featuring Star Wars skins for purchase)
As mentioned previously, microtransactions can be positive for a game; however, they also cause a lot of problems when overused and when they’re meant to exploit young kids. In the days of early Call of Duty and CS:GO, I thought microtransactions could help enhance games; yet, when a game revolves around its microtransactions, I learned how microtransactions could become exploitative and lead games to lose their integrity. While I’m not exactly sure how to fix this issue, I do think we need to investigate solutions, as it is typically more of a problem than a game enhancement.
New Media: Storytelling in Literature, Films, and Games – A blog and a course at Vanderbilt University (English 3726)
I started piano lessons when I was five years old at my local Fine Arts Center. A couple years into my musical journey, I upgraded to an advanced piano class, where the teacher, on top of making everyone learn and perform songs from the Suzuki Piano books and academic track, allowed students to choose their own songs to learn. I was a bit of an ambitious 8-year-old, bringing in works from the likes of the entire Piano-Conductor score of Les Misérables to classic songs by the Beatles, but I remember throughout the years of learning the Suzuki method, I consistently brought in music from the Final Fantasy series, specifically Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, both games I owned on my XBOX 360 and was obsessed with at the time.
For sake of context, Final Fantasy is a role-playing video game series known for its incredible world-building, deep character development, and rich combat systems, all of which change for every single game in the main franchise (for example, if you play through Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VII Remake, you’ll quickly realize that the two are not the same in terms of combat and even plot). The Final Fantasy series is also known for its rich and sprawling musical catalog in the repertoire of video gaming. The music is one of the main contributing factors to how the player delves into whatever world they are given, whether it’s Spira from FFX, Valisthea from FFXVI, or Gran Pulse and Cocoon from FFXIII (two worlds 8-year old me was VERY familiar with).
The style of music Final Fantasy involves can mostly be attributed to composer Nobeo Uematsu, a self-taught piano player who composed the scores to Final Fantasy games I-X. Uematsu listened to quite a bit of conceptual and progressive rock music, such as the Beatles, Elton John, Pink Floyd, and King Crimson, citing all those names as his biggest influences for the Final Fantasy series. On a first listen, it may be initially confusing on how these bands and musicians could have influenced these scores so much, but luckily there’s a connection: the leitmotif. A leitmotif is any recurring musical theme, usually representing a symbol or character(think of the Imperial March playing EVERYTIME Darth Vader shows up in Star Wars – just the existence of that piece adds so much to Vader’s characterization as a terrifying and dark figure). These leitmotivs appear individually in albums such as Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Dark Side of the Moon, and In the Court of the Crimson King, usually representing symbols of emotional value, changed by the context in which they are found.
These leitmotivs are more than prevalent in Uematsu’s work. If you listen to Kefka’s Theme from FFVI (the theme for main villain from the game which plays every time he appears, a la Imperial March), you hear a clown-like (yet simple) theme, mockingly played out through chiptune. Later, when he (spoiler alert) comes back as the final boss after becoming the ruling deity of the game’s universe, the final boss theme, a prog-rock epic called Dancing Mad, recites this same melody surrounded by shifting basslines and sporadic time signatures. The progression of the musical theme allows the player to identify with this character and also the progression of their arc throughout the game. Originally, this melody is played through an accordion-esque instrument, perfectly fit for a clown. When this melody comes back in Dancing Mad, it’s played with a church organ patch, an instrument used typically in a religious context, musically illustrating the “GOD” status Kefka has reached at this point in the game(for reference, look at the sheet music snippets below, specifically Kefka’s Theme and the top line of Dancing Mad — same melody, different contexts). These kind of leitmotivs are used throughout every single Final Fantasy game, even games Uematsu didn’t compose, showing both his influence and Final Fantasy’s roots in music that tells a story.
Nowadays, Final Fantasy music is popular, well-known, and revered by most people. “One Winged Angel” (Sephiroth’s theme from Final Fantasy VII) is known as one of the most recognizable songs from gaming due to both the popularity of FFVII and its Remake, as well as the features of Cloud and Sephiroth in Super Smash Bros. Square Enix has released three separate Theatrhythm rhythm games, which feature Final Fantasy characters fending off against monsters while the player presses buttons in time (think Guitar Hero but an RPG). Distant Worlds is a touring orchestra that specifically plays orchestral arrangements of Final Fantasy music, and they were just at the Nashville Schermerhorn Symphony Center last year. Clearly, Final Fantasy music has resonated with countless other fans besides me. In my free time, I still pull up a FFXIII Piano Collections sheet music book now and then to work out the melodies I grew up with and track my own personal musical journey, and it’s a really special constant in my creative life. It makes me glad to know that music I feel so fondly about has affected so many others.
-Spencer 🙂
Sources:
MuseScore – musescore.com (transcriptions by Torby Brand(Kefka’s Theme) and Umbral Goat(Dancing Mad))
Thanks to the growth of video game culture, game development has become a very profitable endeavor to take on. But has this chance to make a lot of money driven a lot of studios to focus more on ways of making money in a game rather than providing gamers with a good game?
It seems like it’s now the old times in which developers made videogames as passion projects where they wanted to tell a great story or provide a space for people to have fun with a few examples being The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which I actually got to play as a kid and was one of my very first games that got me completely hooked on videogames as a hobby. You can tell the developers poured their heart and soul into creating a world that was intriguing with earth-shattering scores, enticing storylines, and gameplay that would make you lose track of time. Nowadays I feel like this aspect of games is missing.
Recently, every game you see has some form of micro-transaction or hides most of their game behind paywalls. A blatant example of this is a fairly popular game called Destiny 2. This game is marketed as being free but once you load into the game you can really only play about 1/4 of it without playing. If you want access to the rest of the game you have to shell out about $570. I get free games have to make money somehow but there are plenty of free games like Team Fortress 2 and War Thunder that give players access to the entire game with microtransactions being mostly cosmetical.
It feels like a lot of these games have constant bundles and other things that come out all the time. I think the biggest example of a blatant money-grab is the NBA 2K franchise. This is a sports game series that releases a new game every year. The thing is between these years there are barely any changes! There might be a slight graphics bump, updated rosters, and a new park to go play the same game you’ve been playing for the past 10 years. This franchise emphasizes people buying cosmetics and spending money to upgrade their character but the currency prices are outrageous and the in-game prices are even more outrageous which leads people to have to shell out hundreds of dollars before they can even begin to enjoy the game (ON TOP OF BUYING THE GAME!!).
Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of great games that have been released recently like Helldivers 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. All of these games give me hope that there are still developers and studios out there that want to make a game they can be proud to publish and doesn’t come off as a shameless cash grab. I’ve had the chance to play all of these games and enjoyed them greatly, in the case of Helldivers 2 the action is non-stop and it keeps you hooked with its booming sound effects and stunning visuals while Baldur’s Gate 3 was one of the most complete games at release in recent memory, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 told a great story combined with intriguing gameplay. Games like these are the ones that I grew up playing and I hope that we see more of a shift towards this type of games in the future.
As a word of caution, this post will contain spoilers for several of Persona 3 Reload’s Social Links. I highly recommend you put off reading this until you have had a chance to play and finish the game for yourself if you are at all interested. An additional trigger warning is that this blog will discuss topics surrounding death and suicide.
Three years ago this past weekend, I finished Persona 5 Royal for the very first time. After 106 hours and 34 minutes of playtime, I completed a game almost a year after I started playing. My journey with the Persona series began in March 2020, during the pandemic. We all had been sent home, not knowing what the future held for us. I had been so busy through high school that I had lost time for gaming, but during the lockdowns I had so much time on my hands that I could make time again to play games. On March 31, 2020, Persona 5 Royal was released worldwide, after a Japanese release in October of the previous year. After some pestering from a friend, I bit the bullet and purchased it on release day.
What is Persona? What’s with the suffixes?
Persona is a spinoff of the Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) series Shin Megami Tensei, with the first Persona game releasing in the West as “Revelations: Persona” on September 20, 1996 for the Playstation. Each game follows a similar structure: a group of teenagers are able to harness their Persona, a physical manifestation of their consciousness, to defeat shadows and save humanity for one reason or another. Up until the last several years, the Persona series had been relatively underground. It had its fans, but never really took off for Western audiences until the release of the original Persona 5 in 2016. Which leads into the next question, why so many suffixes? Usually, each main game (with the exception of Persona and Persona 2, which actually has two versions but that’s a totally different story) will get an enhanced re-release a few years later with bonus content and polished game mechanics. Examples include Persona 3 FES, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 5 Royal.
A Re-Release
However, this year marked something new for the series. This is the first time a game had been completely remade from the ground-up for modern systems. Earlier this month, after massive fan outcry and several years of begging, Persona 3 Reload was released worldwide for PS5, Xbox, and PC. Many fans hold Persona 3 as their personal favorite in the series, and for good reason. It was the beginning of the “modern” Persona formula. In addition to the JRPG combat system and dungeon exploring, it added the Social Links (called Confidants in Persona 5), and other Life-Sim attributes. During the day, your player character (Makoto Yuki) would be able to hang out with friends after school, ranking up their Social Links and unlocking new combat tactics and the ability to wield stronger personas.
Social Links
For most players, including myself, the Social Links are the highlights of playing a Persona game. They offer additional stories outside of that of the main plot, and often lead to great rewards, and are the perfect compliments to the main theme of the game. In the case of Persona 3, that main theme is death and loss. Every character in the game is touched by the loss of someone important or close to them. These stories start simple, but end up breaking your heart by the end. The first one to really hit me enough to move me was Maiko’s Social Link. Maiko is a grade schooler the player meets at a shrine. While she doesn’t experience death in a traditional sense, the player quickly finds out that her parents will be getting a divorce. Obviously, as a grade schooler, she has a hard time being able to properly handle this and her emotions surrounding this situation. So, she decides to run away, leaving her parents devastated at the loss of her daughter. The end of Maiko’s story does have a happy ending, with her parents reuniting to find her after she runs away. With this being the tip of the iceberg, let’s move on to a Social Link that isn’t quite as heartwarming.
At about the halfway point of the game, the plot starts to take a turn for the darker. You then can unlock what might be my favorite Social Link in the game, Akinari. You meet Akinari in the park, while naturally progressing through Maiko’s link. Only later are you able to unlock him as a Social Link. His story is that he is diagnosed with an incurable disease, and feels hopeless to the world. He doesn’t have friends, as he feels that he shouldn’t be close to anyone because his time is dwindling. It’s a moving story that I won’t spoil further. I encourage you to check it out sometime.
To reflect on the main party of the game that you adventure with, all of them have experienced loss and death as well. For instance, Yukari and Mitsuru both lost their fathers, Mitsuru even during the course of the game, and we see it happen with our own eyes. Junpei loses his first love, Chidori, after she sacrifices her life to save his. Akihiko lost his whole family, then his sister in a fire at the orphanage they grew up in. Ken has no family left. And the player character makes the ultimate sacrifice at the end of the game.
In Summary
But what fun is it if I spoil everything? I heavily encourage you to play Persona 3 Reload, or even any version of Persona 3 you can. Actually, why not just play any game in the series at all? Persona 3, 4, AND 5 are very easily accessible on most consoles! If you are at all interested, start with Persona 5 Royal, then Persona 3 Reload, then Persona 4 Golden. The stories are all self-contained, so you could completely disregard my recommendations if you like too! Happy playing!
I have played video games for the majority of my life in varying quantities depending on how busy I am with other pursuits. Upon entering college several years ago, I found it harder to keep up with the year’s releases just due to the level of academic and extracurricular obligations that I prioritized. Despite having less time to game overall, our month-long breaks from class are where I do a lot of catching up on some of the year’s more prominent releases. I typically focus on indie games just because I find the gameplay styles a little more varied and the completion times are low enough where I don’t have to worry about not finishing. Oddly enough two of my favorites of the year ended up being fairly similar in terms of gameplay. Dave the Diver and Dredge are two fishing indie games released in the year 2023.
Dave the Diver (2023) and Dredge (2023)
While somewhat similar on the surface, I feel the two games offer a really interesting case study on how art direction and tone influence a game’s final product. Both revolve around fishing mechanics, both operate on a quest-based structure, both have risk v. reward elements for fishing at night, and both have a “catch them all” completion mechanic. Their execution of these elements is what separates the two. Dave the Diver is a beautifully pixel-art animated vibrant and comedic experience where you spend a large amount of time helping and forming bonds with the eccentric locals. In contrast, Dredge is a Lovecraftian influenced 3D cell shaded game with slightly more focus on exploration. Unlike Dave the Diver, Dredge’s NPCs are cold and anti-social characters who frequently lock themselves away from the player in service of the isolating madness the game instills in the user.
A comparison of the meter based real in mechanics used for catching fish. Dave the Diver (left) and Dredge (right)
This difference in tone is particularly apparent in the night expeditions available in both releases. In Dave the Diver the player has the option of venturing into the sea at night in order to obtain exclusive fish or to complete specific missions. This differs from the daytime gameplay in that the fish become much more aggressive and the player further risks their health and valuable time. While there are more threats during the nighttime, the actual tone of gameplay does not shift very much. Dredge has a far more dramatic shift during the night. In Dredge the player is incentivized to journey out at night with the chance of catching rare fish or completing special quests, much like Dave the Diver. The key difference is the drastic tonal shift of Dredge. At night, Dredge becomes a survival game as the player must navigate the rocky landscape while being actively hunted by giant menacing sea creatures. Much like the Lovecraftian fiction that it takes influence from, the fisherman in Dredge begins to go mad after the sun sets which leads to untrustworthy environments where rocks and other hazards spontaneously appear in front of the player, hidden within the thick fog that surrounds us.
A comparison of night time gameplay between the two games. Dave the Diver (left) and Dredge (right)
While there are obvious differences throughout, these nighttime journeys are what really separate the two games with one still being a mostly relaxing good times romp and the other drifting towards unsettling and genuinely scary moments. These two releases demonstrate how gameplay similarities are really not that important when trying to create a unique game. The more important aspect is how the tone and art direction of the game’s carve out a unique environment for this gameplay loop. While there are near infinite possibilities for new mechanics in video games, as developers cover more ground, I expect the tone and art style of games to be far more important for developing new experiences.
Adolescents cannot be diagnosed as psychopaths, and ten quick minutes in the chat room of any multiplayer game will tell you why–all children are psychopaths. That is, all children are either psychopaths or sociopaths until they learn empathy. Empathy, defined as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another” person by Merriam-Webster, is learned through life experiences. It can develop rapidly or at a very early age for some people, or over time, but still before the age of 18 for others. A select few never develop empathy at all, becoming the psychopaths or sociopaths of the world (which is completely okay and a genuine medical condition). Although I can’t pinpoint exactly when I developed empathy, I believe that a big part of my ability to put myself in the shoes of others comes from watching others play video games in sixth grade.
After a bad friend group break-up at the tail end of my first year of middle school coupled with an announcement that my father was moving to another state for work, I turned to the internet for a bit of company. At the time, Let’s Plays were the big trend on YouTube. At the risk of exposing myself as a huge nerd in middle school, I’m going to let you guys delve into the psyche of 11-year-old me through my then most-watched YouTube creators. Dan and Phil would have been the top two, followed swiftly by PewDiePie, JackSepticEye, and Markiplier. Somehow I missed the Zoella train, but not to worry, Jenna Marbles was always a staple. I first got into Let’s Plays by watching Dan and Phil’s gaming series where they played the Sims. The videos were entertaining since I remembered playing a free, mobile version of the same game on my phone back in the good old days (elementary school). From there, the recommended bar pushed me into the world of the big three gaming YouTubers I mentioned earlier, but more specifically, it pushed me into the world of Until Dawn.
If you don’t know, or weren’t a victim of the YouTube algorithm in 2016, Until Dawn is a cinematic, modern, choose-your-own-adventure style horror game in which the Butterfly Effect plays an integral role in what ending a player gets. At its core, the goal of the game is to keep 8 college-aged people alive through the night in the snowy mountains surrounding their friend’s cabin. However, throughout the game there exist totems, physical parts of a totem pole that allow the player to see choices they may be presented with in the future in hopes that the snippet of information the totem gives them will be able to help the player make the right choice down the line. There are certain choices in the game that cannot be made if a totem revealing the proper choice isn’t found earlier in the game. Additionally, Until Dawn makes its connection to the Butterfly Effect very direct by announcing that a “Butterfly Effect” has been discovered when a player views a totem. All of the butterfly effects are also tracked in a virtual notebook so the player can see when they have had an effect on their personal gameplay. I’ve attached a picture of a totem, as well as the butterfly effect journal, below.
The final death totem in Until Dawn. When a player encounters a totem, they can pick it up and the game will flash a cutscene of a future decision to be made in the game as well as the immediate outcome of that decision.
The Butterfly Effect notebook within Until Dawn. When a player picks up a totem, the left side of a butterfly is filled in with the causal event. When an event occurs later in the game as a direct result of the earlier action (or inaction), the right side of the butterfly is revealed.
Watching others, most likely Jacksepticeye and Markiplier, play until Dawn in its entirety forced me to sit idly by while they made decisions that were the opposite of the ones I would have made. However, even though they were doing something that I didn’t want them to do, I still had fun watching. It also seemed like they had fun playing. Heck, sometimes they even stumbled into better outcomes by making those different decisions. Through this process of watching, but not having control, I learned that sometimes others lived experience led them to make decisions that would be better in the long run. I found that while watching them play the game, if they made a decision that I wouldn’t have made, and it led to a good outcome, I would switch what my decision was going to be to match theirs. If they made a decision that led to something horrible, and I would have made another, it still didn’t change how the course of their game went because the video of their gameplay had already been shot and recorded. These experiences, combined, taught me patience with others decisions and how to deal with my own emotions when the consequences of their decisions impacted my own experience. Watching them play the game taught me empathy, as well as respect for others independent decision-making.
Not only did watching others play the game teach me about empathy, but Until Dawn itself taught me how to put myself into others’ shoes. If it were only watching others play a game that taught me empathy, I would have learned the complex topic much earlier, while watching my sister play Nintendogs on our shared pink DS. Maybe I learned a little empathy during those sessions (for the poor dogs that had to deal with her agility training), but I certainly didn’t learn as much as I did while watching people play Until Dawn. Due to the structure of the game, the player is forced to play as all of the characters in the game at least once (with the exception of the non-human characters or any characters whose trustworthiness is meant to be unclear to the main group of 8). This procedure of having the player physically be in every character’s shoes forces the player to, at least for a little bit, make decisions from that character’s perspective. This means taking into account how their decisions when playing as that character will affect the other characters, knowing that they will have to play as the other characters later. As a programmer now, looking back, I have no idea how the game creators thought of these mechanics and didn’t immediately say “no way, that is going to be absolute insanity to code,” but I’m so glad they didn’t. In fact, they doubled down. The programmers said, “actually, we’re not going to make the players guess how their actions as a specific character affect that character’s relationship with the others, we’re going to directly tell them.” Which was a revelation to 11-year-old me who had absolutely no clue, or didn’t care to have a clue about, how my actions affected those around me. I’ve included a picture of that feature of the game below as well. You’ll notice that the character’s relationship with every other character is measured, as well as the strength of their own character traits. Of course, every decision the player makes affects that character’s traits as well as that character’s interpersonal relationships–because programming the game wasn’t already hard enough.
Mike’s character information screen. On the left, it lists his character traits, and on the right, it lists his relationship status with the other seven people at the cabin. The levels of these traits all change depending on decisions made in-game.
I’m not saying Until Dawn singlehandedly prevented me from becoming a sociopath, but I can confidently say that it sped up the process of my own learning about empathy. The cut-and-dry way of seeing how actions have consequences not only for oneself but for others in a very direct way that forces the player to have empathy for every character they play as was very easy for 11-year-old me to pick up on. If it could happen in the game, then certainly it also happened in real life, which meant that I needed to stop acting like my own actions didn’t have consequences. Overall, I’m glad a game like Until Dawn came out when it did, and although I would never want to program something as complex as it on my own, I hope that someday something I program can have the same impact on its users. I hear from the grapevine that a movie for Until Dawn is in the works, and I can’t wait to see how these elements translate to that form of media.
In a world dominated by rapidly evolving technology, gaming has become more than just a form of entertainment. It’s a dynamic space where imagination and interaction converge, offering experiences that extend beyond the boundaries of traditional media. One facet of gaming that has gained attention, particularly in recent years, is its potential in education. As we continue to navigate the digital realm, educational gaming emerges as a novel and promising approach to learning.
Breaking the Mold – Video Games as Learning Tools
Jesper Juul’s concept of video games having “real rules in fictional worlds” takes on a new dimension when applied to educational gaming. While traditional education often involves strict memorization and passive learning, video games immerse individuals in an interactive environment where they actively engage with subject matter. It’s not just about absorbing information; it’s about applying knowledge to a dynamic setting.
Consider the impact of games like Minecraft in the educational landscape. Beyond its reputation as a sandbox game, Minecraft has the potential to find a place in classrooms as an educational tool. Teachers can leverage such games to teach subjects ranging from math to history. In the virtual realm of Minecraft, students don’t just read about historical architecture; they build it. The game transforms the learning experience into a hands-on, collaborative adventure.
Unlocking History – A Personal Experience with Assassin’s Creed
Amidst the vast array of video games, one that has left a lasting mark on my gaming journey is Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Transported to ancient Greece, I found myself not only immersed in the captivating storyline but also on a historical journey that transcended the confines of traditional learning. My virtual footsteps echoed in the Acropolis, my eyes beheld the beauty of Athens, and I navigated the tumultuous waters of the Aegean Sea. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was not just a game; it was a portal to a lost era.
As I delved into the game’s rich narrative, I realized that I was inadvertently absorbing historical knowledge. The meticulous attention to detail in creating ancient Greece transformed the game into an interactive history lesson. From political intrigues to cultural nuances, each facet of the virtual world reflected the research that went into its creation.
In encounters with notable figures like Socrates and Hippocrates, I wasn’t just a passive observer; I engaged in philosophical debates. Without realizing it, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey became a catalyst for self-directed learning, bridging the gap between entertainment and education.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Confronting Skepticism
However, not everyone shares the belief that video games can be powerful tools for learning. My dad, a persistent critic of video games, often questions their real-world value. He raises his eyebrows at the hours spent exploring virtual worlds, wondering if there’s any tangible benefit. It’s a sentiment echoed by many who view gaming as a frivolous pastime.
Yet, what many fail to see is the educational potential embedded in the very games they criticize. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, for instance, goes beyond mere entertainment. It cultivates critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and a deep appreciation for history. The game prompts players to make moral choices that impact the narrative, fostering ethical decision-making and empathy.
Educational games, when designed thoughtfully, have the capacity to engage players in a way that traditional learning often fails to achieve. The interactivity, the sense of agency, and the immersive experiences contribute to a unique form of learning that caters to diverse learning styles.
A Dual Reality – Merging Entertainment and Education
In the clash between skepticism and belief in the educational value of video games, I’ve come to understand that they can represent a dual reality. They can be a source of entertainment, providing a much-needed escape into fantastical realms, but they can also be powerful educational tools, fostering curiosity and knowledge.
Video games are not a diversion from learning; they are a parallel universe where learning takes on a new, interactive form.
My freshman year of high school I was determined to follow in my brother’s footsteps by running cross country. And just like him…I quickly developed shin splints and had to cut my first season short due to a stress injury. This is what pushed me to join an activity that would shape my life and development as a person. I decided to join my high school’s rowing team purely because I heard it was good exercise and a low impact activity, meaning I could do it while my injury recovered. I had no intentions of actually rowing when racing season came around. Little did I know that I’d stick with it not only through winter season, but past the covid lockdown that came that spring. Since then, I’ve gone on to win two Scholastic National Championships, State Championships, set school records, receive several Division 1 offers, and ultimately choose to continue rowing for a club team in college because I truly love it so much. However, it definitely wasn’t love from the start. Joining in winter season meant getting on the indoor rowing machine everyday rather than being on the water. The rowing machine (which we call an erg) is hard, and I hated it with a passion. Greater than my hate for the erg, however, was my competitive spirit. If I’m being honest, what kept me going was my individualistic mindset of just wanting to beat everyone else, especially at their own sport. What I found through this though, was the extremely strong sense of community within rowing, which re-geared my sense of competition from wanting to just be the best, to wanting my boat and boatmates to be our best.
(Photos from some of my last high school races, I am on the right in the first photo)
Now 5 years into rowing, I’ve immersed myself pretty well into the global rowing community. As you would expect, a lot of the content I am suggested on social media is rowing related. The other day, I saw an advertisement that sparked my interest. It was an Instagram ad for a rowing machine with a built-in gaming system, called AVIRON, which read, “You don’t need to be a rower. To be a rower.” Interested, I decided to search up the company’s website. The tagline was “AVIRON makes rowing addictive”, ok, well, I find it pretty addictive as is, but I understand that most people don’t. I continued to the “Why AVIRON?” statement, which read, “We’ve injected the addictive elements of gaming into your rowing workouts to curb boredom and drive motivation,” and further comparing to video games, stated that AVIRON was “taking all the best parts -the visuals, the supportive community, the sense of achievement- and plugging them into rowing. Ultimately, transforming a tedious chore-like workout into an adventure.” Hmm. This did not sit right with me. Although those are qualities that are somewhat unique to gaming and make video games enjoyable, they are also qualities that already exist in rowing. This statement, along with the many “rowing is boring and hard” ads, takes a bit of a stab at rowing. For the visuals point, I understand, we get incredible scenery rowing on lakes and rivers, but that is missing on the indoor rowers and is not something that the regular gym-goer would get out of rowing. However, for supportive community and sense of achievement, I do not think that those require “plugging” as they are extremely prominent aspects of rowing, even if you’re not racing a boat.
(Screenshot of AVIRON Instagram ad)
In looking up the founder of the company, Andy Hoang, I came across an interview with Fitt Insider where he said, “Everyone knows rowing. It’s not new. What we found was the rowing machines out there haven’t changed in a long time … and really caters to a very niche group. We wanted to bring rowing to the general public, and make it more accessible for more people.” I really appreciated the sentiment of wanting to widen the rowing community, as rowing is pretty niche. But if this is actually a goal of the company, they aren’t doing a great job at achieving it. They continuously advertise rowing as a boring, hard, tedious, plain, and just not a fun activity. I do not doubt the benefits of this platform for those aiming to get a workout out of it. However, their marketing suggests their platform to be an upgrade to rowing, and an extension of the rowing community. AVIRON has set up tents at regattas (rowing races) to let competitive rowers test the machine. But as they said themselves, they redesigned the rowing machine to be more accessible for a general gym-goer rather than a rowing athlete, so it doesn’t really cater to the rowing community. I think a machine like this has a place in the general fitness and gaming community, but not in the sports-specific space.
That being said, I definitely think that sports and video games can work together. The same day that I saw that AVIRON ad, HOCR posted that they were doing a collaboration with a company called EXR gaming. The Head of the Charles Regatta (HOCR), hosted on the Charles River in Boston, is the largest 3-day rowing competition in the world and is extremely well-known within the rowing community. I am extremely grateful to have been able to compete in it the last three years, but even for those not racing it is a major highlight of the year for the rowing community. It is pretty much the biggest get together we have as a global sports community. It is special in that there are a ton of divisions/categories/age groups, so unlike the technically bigger competitions like the Olympics or World Championships, you can participate without being on a country’s national team. EXR gaming collaborated with HOCR to create a virtual rowing community. It is an app that connects to a standard rower and allows you to join 3D worlds with others to explore different rowing spots like famous race courses, or scenic bodies of water. There are also virtual competitions as well. Where the competition here differs from that of AVIRON is in the use of a standardized rowing machine and competition based off of rowing metrics/data that we actually use in the sport. What I mean by this is that in AVIRON you may be using the rower to race a virtual car against others and you go faster by “going harder” or moving back and forth faster (which doesn’t actually equate to rowing faster in a real boat), while in EXR you’re rowing on a virtual course and your boat speed is dependent on your time split per 500m, which is a metric we use to measure actual boat speed. EXR translates gaming into a more realistic sports experience.
(Screenshots of EXR’s HOCR course simulator from their Instagram ad, alongside photos from racing HOCR this past fall)
As the gaming, fitness, and sports worlds continue to overlap and connect, I think it is important that the distinction is made between general fitness and sport. New gaming platforms looking to join these spaces should put a lot of consideration into what role they can play in these communities and understand that they are not one and the same.
Salty Lemon Entertainment. “The App That Makes Indoor Rowing Fun.” EXR Game, exrgame.com/.
Vennare, Joe. “Interview with Andy Hoang, Founder & CEO of Aviron.” Fitt Insider, Fitt Insider Podcast, 28 June 2022, insider.fitt.co/141-andy-hoang-founder-ceo-of-aviron/.
When I was little and had the special treat of visiting my best friend’s house, we would play Wii games late into the night, often foregoing the original narratives the game expected of us and instead attempting to reach the hidden corners of each page. I distinctly remember flying the plane into the Wii Summer Sports volcano and finding a small blurb of information left for us down near the lava. The thrill of discovering something that was left there secretly for a curious player was one I couldn’t get enough of. My friend and I would race off the road of Mario Kart tracks in attempts to find secret passageways and small shortcuts within the walls of whatever dungeon or ski resort we were driving through. Though I loved playing Wii as a child and discovering the worlds within the games I was playing, I haven’t been much of a gamer in the years since, preferring to watch films and read instead of playing games. However, with my recent interaction with class material and the incredible New York Times Op-Doc called Hardly Working, my curiosity in the worlds of video games has been reignited.
Hardly Working follows 4 nonplayer characters (NPCs) around the game Red Dead Redemption 2 for a few days, tracking their movement, narrative arc, and routines. While watching the documentary, I was continuously struck by the momentous effort and attention to detail that the creators dedicated to building the game. These 4 NPCs show a complex side narrative of life in the Wild West that has nothing to do with the linear plot of the game, but who serve to simply further bolster the richness of the experience and world. It reminded me of the in class discussions that we have had about the processes of creating a digital artifact and representation. Specifically, how there are coders who decide the rules of the world and of each character, but it’s the computer that actually turns their efforts into a viewable and playable representation. These players are coded to perform specific actions over and over again in a series of code with some if:then sequences – such as how their behavior changes when it begins to rain – that are supposed to run in the background of the game. These moments prove that each character’s code isn’t just a small amount of movement, they are actual narratives and stories with emotion, choices, consequences, and beyond just that idea, these stories reminded me that there can be multiple forms of rhetoric in any one form of media, and this game had many variations.
The stablehand walks around the farm aimlessly, hammering things, moving hay, making soup, drinking 3 sips of beer, and standing in fields.
Visually, the world is artistically rendered to look like the Wild West, its NPCs dressed as farm and town workers, carpenters, and citizens of the well flushed out and animated town. It’s a persuasive and immersive environment that further supports the characters’ side stories as they wander the hidden alleys at night, ‘build’ things on the dock (that never grow or get smaller), and stumble drunkenly from the bar to the stables. The repetitive audio bits that come from the bar combine with background music and bells to create another persuasive aspect of the immersive world. All of these elements make the NPCs’ storylines more fleshed out, but also highlight the monotony of the work and manage to make subtle comments about the repetitive aspect of working under capitalism. The characters hardly glitch, hardly break their routine, and hardly ever notice the player who is recording them – but in the few small instances they do, it’s as if a lightning rod hits the viewer, pulling them suddenly out of their role as a player and instead into the lives of these NPCs. In glitched moments, like when the carpenter looks directly into our eyes, these characters become rounded, human-esque beings in a display of narrative and storytelling.
This documentary was deeply intriguing as a study of both impressive video game storytelling design and as a representation of humanity. Each character’s story had some kind of arc or challenge that had nothing to do with the plot of the game, and it is assumed that the many other NPCs in the game all had their own storylines too. This is just one game that balances the very present, but background, animated film media with playable procedures in a game of progression through numerous predetermined storylines. I am really looking forward to continuing my exploration of side characters, places, quests, and the limits of a game when playing LOTRO. The more I learn about games, the more impressed and in awe I become with their complexity and the immensity of creating a playable, immersive world simply from 1s and 0s.
-Mariah
Sources:
in class discussions and NYT Op-Doc Hardly Working
I, like so many others of the Zoomer generation, grew up on Let’s Plays, whether that be Pewdiepie playing through some rage-inducing platformer or SkyDoesMinecraft and his friends playing through “parkour maps” on Minecraft(basically a backseat gaming sitcom I watched and adored).
The typical SkyDoesMinecraft thumbnail
It was about 9 years ago when I first saw a “Let’s Play” of Bioshock, the first game of a series I had heard about through online forums, comments, and friends with some more lenient parents than mine when it came to playing violent games. This “Let’s Play” was distinct and different to me – there were no rambunctious comedians playing rage-inducing or community-based games. In fact, there wasn’t even a voice at all, just the darkness and liminality of a game that came out 7 years before I watched this video. I only remember watching the first ten minutes and being absolutely enraptured (pun intended) by an intense plane crash and this mysterious lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. By the time the player went down the lighthouse’s elevator and was introduced to the failed underwater utopia of Rapture – cryptic, corrupted, and captivating – I immediately turned the Youtube video off, telling myself even at the young and naive age of 10: “I have to experience this myself.”
Descending into Rapture for the first time
Those ten minutes were the only exposure I had to the Bioshock series, but the introduction to the world of Rapture really stuck with me, and when I did my bi-monthly late-middle school Gamestop trip (a ritual I begged my mom to occur more often than every two months) , I , at the age of 13, bought Bioshock: The Collection for my PS4. Eager, I got home, played through it, and was honestly pretty frightened. Bioshock utilizes a lot of horror elements to world-build (or really, “world-deteriorate” since it shows the effects of time on an isolated dystopian society). In fact, it was scarier than most horror games I had played at the time because of all the societal implications of collectible audio logs and even torn propaganda posters on the tattered walls. I felt completely immersed with the new world around me, and like the playable protagonist Jack, spent hours discovering the buried secrets of Rapture. After I beat the game, I played it again immediately, which had never happened for any game before for me. After playing through the entire series, I spent weeks going online to forums, subreddits, Youtube videos, and analyses to further understand the worlds I so excitedly delved into. Needless to say, I was a little obsessed.
One of the many posters you can find in Rapture.
Jump to 2021. I’m a senior in high school in a bunch of APs, including AP Literature and Composition. Out of all the teachers I talked to after class, it was the humanities teachers who really took interest in discussing media with me (David Lynch, Stephen King, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, etc.), and while having an after-school analysis session with my Latin teacher Mr. Weganhart(we all called him Wego), he told me to look back at video games I’ve played and see how much classic literature has affected the themes of those games. While Wego’s side-quest he gave me focused on Roman influences on modern media, I immediately jumped back to Bioshock and decided to delve deeper into the non-Classical literary references. Instead of delving into Rapture with a PS4 controller, I delved into wikis about Objectivism(“the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”, quoted by philosopher/author Ayn Rand) and books written by Rand to further understand this game I loved so much when I was younger, and came to an incredible conclusion: I realized the game was actually satirizing the concept of Objectivism and the allusions to Ayn Rand were ample. Antagonist Andrew Ryan (of “Would you kindly…” fame) is a quasi-anagram of Rand’s name with the same initials. The entirety of Rapture, I found out, was based off of the Objectivist, hyper-capitalist society Rand outlines in her novel Atlas Shrugged, further emphasized with the final boss being a replicated statue of Rand’s book cover (see photo below). The game consistently blurs the line between emergence and progression game styles (as Juul outlines) with the moral system of killing or saving the Little Sisters, ultimately showing the futility of Objectivist ideals (no matter how much individuality or free will you may have, society can’t be perfect).
The cover of Atlas Shrugged and Atlas, the final boss of Bioshock
As I grew up and changed mindsets from a child seeking fantastical worlds to an adolescent seeking answers to a young adult seeking literary references and intertextuality, I realize how much this game has stuck around with me throughout my life. It’s pretty fantastic to say that a piece of media could take on so many different meanings to me throughout my life, on top of being a good nostalgia trip. If anyone has the chance, I would implore you to sink to Rapture in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 or fly to Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.
I want to tell you all a story, but to do that, I need to take you back in time to November 2016. I was in sixth grade at the time, going to a brand new school. I had no friends, except Liam. Liam and I had met simply by chance, our class schedule that year just happened to be exactly the same as each other. Through this mutual middle school class bonding, we began to talk more and more and I eventually got invited over his house to play a game that would shape who I’ve become today. That game was Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons.
A D&D playmat, complete with monster and character figurines.
I sat down at his dining room table, and opened the Player’s Handbook for the very first time. I was overwhelmed by this brand new world of monsters, spells and sorcerers. After skimming the available classes and races, I decided to make my first character, a High-Elf Bard, aptly named Elfis Presley. Which, as a sixth grader, was the funniest thing I had ever done up to that point. After making my character, we began my first ever session of D&D. Our party consisted of others I had known from school. An Elven Warlock (Ben), a Dragonborn Paladin (Aiden), a Human Rogue (Paige), and our Tiefling Cleric (Melinda). However, over the years we had picked up and lost several players, some additions being our Half-Elf Druid (Annie), our Gnome Wizard (Kay), and our Human Paladin (Keegan), after we lost Aiden, Paige, and Melinda.
Our journey opened in a local tavern, located on the Sword Coast, in a small town just outside of the city Baldur’s Gate. Essentially, our party was guns for hire for the local adventurer’s guild. We were hired to go on a quest to steal a gem from a dragon’s lair. However, this was no easy feat. This seemingly simple quest led us on a journey that took us over six years to complete. Trying to steal this gem led us on a journey where we infiltrated a cult, sailed the high seas in a controversial pirate-era of our campaign, and even killed the god of death. We had played from sixth grade, when I was twelve years old, up until my senior year of high school, at eighteen years old. We played until the very last second. Our final session occurred the night before our Dungeon Master, Liam, had to leave to move in for school. That night, we began our session at 5pm, and played all through the night until 6am the next day. Our party had finally made it to the dragon’s cave, and there he was, Arrakis (named after the planet from Dune) sitting atop his hoard of gold.
The gem was placed in full view, as if he knew of our arrival, and it definitely was NOT because my party had set off almost every trap as we entered his lair. The battle commenced, and it took us three real life hours of combat to defeat him. The reward in the end was bittersweet. Our campaign had finally ended, and our quest was complete. But since, we’ve all gone our separate ways. We all live in different parts of the country now, I’m in Nashville, Liam is in State College, PA, and Kay and Annie live in Kent, OH, and Keegan is still a senior in high school back home.
However, this is the beauty of D&D; the connections that we made along the journey. The storytelling that roped us all in together, with people I had hardly ever spoken to, some of which had gone on to be some of my very best friends to this day. We all had become engrossed in this story, in a mythical world, that united us together. To some, this is just some dumb game, with too many dice and rules to understand. But to me, it’s so much more. This game gave me friends when I was in a new school. It took me on adventures to escape the stresses of life. However, this is the beauty of D&D; the connections that we made along the journey. The storytelling that roped us all in together, with people I had hardly ever spoken to, some of which had gone on to be some of my very best friends to this day. We all had become engrossed in this story, in a mythical world, that united us together. To some, this is just some dumb game, with too many dice and rules to understand. But to me, it’s so much more. This game gave me friends when I was in a new school. It took me on adventures to escape the stresses of life. This game has meant everything to me. While this seems way too much, this game has meant everything to me. Thank you for listening.
-Ethan
New Media: Storytelling in Literature, Films, and Games – A blog and a course at Vanderbilt University (English 3726)
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