Remediation and Games

 Remediation is the representation of one medium in another, as described by Bolter and Grusin. They argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. 


"What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors."

-Bolter & Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)

So how does new media 'remediate' the older media? 

Immediacy

• Media that aspires to a condition of transparency.
• The aim is to make the viewer forget that they are watching a movie for example, and ensures that the viewer is drawn into the experience.
• Examples: Virtual Reality, Photo-Realistic Images etc.

Hypermediacy

• Artefacts that are aware of, and wish to display, their own constructed nature.
• They constantly call attention to their own constructed nature all the time.
• Examples: WWW., Video Game HUDs etc.

Remediation can refer to all sorts of conventions. For example we find Aesthetic conventions being constantly used between many different media.

Photorealism is an example of 'immediacy', because it is not designed to preserve the medium of 'photography'.

Similarly, 'Hypermediacy', is not the aesthetic preserve of the world wide web, its conventions have been picked up by things such as magazines and television rolling news.

The rules that govern the 3D perspective of shapes on a flat surface were first worked out during the Renaissance. It takes time for a new medium to develop unique forms of content, it really isn't surprising that 'successful' media ends up being traded between different types of media. The original 'goal' of computer games was to render the text-based narratives of early games into visual 3D.

Remediation in Films and Games

Bittani (2003) claims there is a convergence taking place in the history of video gaming in film, there are now many films that remediate, comment on, quote and adapt video games on the big screen. These films have become a genre in their own right, which Bittanti calls Technoludic Films, which is a combination of the words Technology and Ludus (latin for play).

Technoludic Film as Commentary

Bittanti says that the video game is subordinate to the film; film is used to critique video games. Films can project societies deepest anxieties about the medium of video game, especially in relation to escapism and the removal of mind from 'reality'. Some such films are eXistenZ(1999), The Matrix Trilogy (1999-2003) and The Lawnmower Ma(1991).

Technoludic Film as Quotation

In this category video games are used in films for illustrative purposes, they are not necessarily the central theme of the film, but form part of the fictional world the film is trying to present. Some of these films are Blade Runner (1982), Clockers(1997) a more modern example of this would be Inception (2010).

Technoludic Film as Remediation(1) Adaptation

Brittanti uses remediation to refer directly to the adaptation of computer games as a source text for a film, not simply a theme. These are often adaptations or tie-ins of successful games, however the films have often been critiqued for the low quality of the scripting and acting. Films such as this are Super Mario Brothers (1993), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider(2001), Dead or Alive(2006) and DOOM(2005).

Technoludic Film as Remediation (2)

There is clearly as broader conception of remediation which is about the incorporation of aesthetic and narrative codes from one form of media to another. There are many films that embody some of the conventions in video games into their narratives and / or style. Films such as this are Groundhog Day (1993), Toy Story (1995), Run Lola Run (1998).

Segregation in a Male-Dominated Industry, Julie Prescott and Jan Bogg

Women Working in the Computer Games Industry


Introduction


"Using data extracted from a large study of female game workers, this study adds to the scarcity of research into the area of women working in the computer games industry."

This article brings to our attention how occupational segregation still occurs in this male dominated industry. Gender role, identity and attitudes are important issues when discussing segregation within the industry. Implications of this on the future of the games industry are discussed.

"Occupations are social categories; people within an occupation share things such as preferences and experiences." (Weeden and Grusky, 2005)

"Therefore, occupational categories are an important part of a person's sense of self." (Taylor, 2010)

Background - Occupational Segregation:


In a study performed recently, Mumford and Smith (2007) found out that the earnings gap between men and women in Britain is due to a combination of many things: The different personal characteristics or traits between men and women, workplace segregation and occupational segregation. When certain jobs are designated to woman over men, those jobs usually pay less, have fewer opportunities for progression, less job autonomy and less authority within the organisation.

The woman involved in male dominated occupations have been found to receive much less support than men, but more support in mixed gender occupations; in comparison to men receiving high levels of support in female-dominated occupations. "Therefore, being in the minority is an advantage for men, but a disadvantage for women."

Segregation in SEY and ICT Industries


The WWW-ICT report suggests that ICT organisations have nothing but a flat structure with very little hierarchy. It can become particularly difficult for women to gain advancement due to the creation of an informal working environment as a direct result of the 'flat' organisation within the business.

James and Cardador (2007) stated that women's cognitions and beliefs about technology and science are more negative than mens, resulting in a distinct disinterest in the employment sector. One of the reasons for this disinterest in computer games as an occupation is the long hours that have become standard within the industry. For example Wajcman (2007) argued that women are requested to change aspects of their gender identity for a masculine version and forsake the 'International Journal of Gender', their femininity without this de-gendering process occurring for men. It is also proposed that women in ICT and SET industries must develop strategies (Newell, 2002). One strategy is for women to make their gender identity invisible (griffiths et.al, 2007) or become more masculine (Wajcman, 2007).

Technology does indeed have a masculine image, not only because the industry is dominated by men byt because sybols are incorperated, metaphors and values that have masculine connotations. (Wajcman, 2007, p.289).

Segregation in the Games Industry


There are a number of specialties within the games industry including development, production, design, audio design, art and testing. (Green, et.al, 2007) The percentage of women occupying creation or development roles within the UK games industry (which contains over 9000 employees) is around 6.9% (MCV, 2008). More figures produced in 2009 by Skillset found that women represent 4% of the game industry's workforce, a decrease from 12% in 2006! (Skillset, 2006).

Only 0.4% of femalte employees in the UK games industry are in lead, director or management positions, whilst 1.2% of male employees hold these jobs. Research by Haines (2004) found that nearly a quater (23%) of senior positions within the twenty UK games companies in her study were filled by women. However, Haines revealed that senior women were more often found in managerial and senior roles in the less technical areas of games development or in areas more associated with traditional female roles, such as marketing, rather than direct games development.

Discussion


These findings highlight the different attitudes of women working in the games industry. This paper has effectively shown the differences between women in each profession and grades in terms of gender role identity at work and their attitudes towards the career barriers to women's career progression and to a lesser extent their attitudes towards their own career progression. Just like the wider ICT and SET industries, women need more representation in all areas and roles within the industry. Occupational segregations definitely still persists in this new, male dominated industry.

"With regard to professional identity, the finding that executives having a significantly higher masculine gender role identity compared to artists/animators is interesting since it could suggest that women in a powerful executive position International Journal of Gender, either adopt of naturally have more masculine characteristics than those in other areas if of the games industry, especially those in the more creative artistic roles in game development."

"Feminine traits include warmth, kindness, selflessness and sympathy. Masculine traits include aggression, forcefulness, rationality, competitiveness, decisiveness, strength, self-confidence and independence. (Schein, 1973)." Quite a sexist remark said by Schein.



This particular reading does feel quite sexist, despite the statistical evidence used (which is useful to an extent). I feel as though the article gradually becomes more repetitive simply re-iterating the negative one-sided view of the industry, broadcasting factual evidence influenced by their own personal beliefs, opinions and experiences. Only the facts required to promote their personal views are acknowledged. The questions asked to female employees were also not asked to any male employees, providing a slightly biased amount of statistics.

"The games industry may be relatively new, but it is a large industry with a significant influence over today's media landscape." (Wallop, 2009)

La Decima Vittima

The concept of La Decima Vittima (The 10th Victim, 1965) was good, it showed a game of Assassins Guild where the stakes were high. The game became a way of life, and a strong form of entertainment (Exactly what video games strive to become for us!). It is based on Robert Sheckley's short story "Seventh Victim" (1953). I would really like to see an english remake so I could follow it a bit better, but I still enjoyed it. It's a great film for game designers to watch and important to pay attention to the game aspects.

//Edit//
 This is a good example of Remediation in films and games.

Puzzle Makers Survival Kit, Scott Kim

 There are two crucial aspects of a puzzle:

1. It's fun.
2. It's solvable.

Motivation

• Distractions from the every day.
• A mental challenge.
• This reading shows that the motivations to play puzzles are the same as those to play games.

Puzzle Divisions and a Brief Explanation:

Action -

Puzzles with a mental challenge also combined with a twitch skill, for example Tetris.

Error recovery is present.

Easy to learn.

Story -

Use the puzzle tell an interesting story - about the line between story and puzzle link you make.

Keep the story relevant to the style and mechanics.

Certain genres are easily adaptable to Story Puzzles.

Competitive -

Players use the same puzzle area and all attempt to complete the puzzle as quickly as possible, beating the opponent.

Quickness, as these puzzles are usually turn-based.

Should be simple, and very quick - like Peggle.

Construction -

Lego is a perfect example of a Construction Puzzle.

Modularity (Give the player choices, e.g Lego can be made into anything in any combination).

Must not restrict the players creativity when making a construction puzzle.

Not too little, or too much structure.

Intensity Ramping -

Different Mechanics => Accelerating Puzzles => Based on Twitch.

Increasing Difficulty Through each Stage/Level => Based on Twitch.

Increasing difficulty, then a new mechanic (e.g. an upgrade, then being at the same level and work up to the next upgrade) => Difficulty Range does not Greatly Increase.

Semi-Linear Ordering => Offer the player complete choice in levels with no set order => Difficulty range does not Greatly Increase.

Ordered => One task must be completed to move onto the next.

Meta Puzzle => Small puzzles give clues as to how to solve the larger puzzles, gives the player a strong sense of progression.

How Should You Start?

Enjoying the manipulation of the puzzle (Core Mechanics).

Start familiarly - Introduce the player to the objects that can be manipulated, but do not alter the puzzle state.

Specifying Rules

Make it clear what can be done and what cannot be done in the game.

Building up Puzzles

The ordering of difficulty must make sense. Do not give the player an incredibly difficult puzzle at the beginning, because they will not be able to do it and the game will quickly become boring.

Simplifying

One example of simplifying - Making a puzzle that is about cars in a car park and you have to simplify the puzzle into its core component, getting the car and getting it out of the park.

Editor

Means you can quickly build and tweak puzzles, testing the components.

LEVEL DESIGN

Start with a bang!

Teach techniques

Paint a picture

Develop a theme

"What is a Puzzle?" Scott Kim in T.Fullerton (2008)

 This weeks readings were an extract from Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, T. Fullerton (2008). Specifically pages 35 to 39.

Scott Kim has worked at a games design company called Shufflebrain since 1990. His influence can be seen in some of the most popular puzzles of all time - Bejeweled, Colapse and Tetris.

Kim also contributes to the well known magazine: Discover; in which he comes up with three puzzles of increasing difficulty for the magazine's readers. The subject of Discover is maths and science - Kim claims to base the puzzles around these correct subject areas and not other topics irrelevant to the magazine.

So What is a Puzzle?

A toy of contrivance that can be solved by ingenuity or patient effort? A simple task presented with a bad interface?

According to Kim, Stan Isaacs offers the best definitions of a puzzle:

1. A puzzle is FUN
2. A puzzle has a RIGHT ANSWER

Puzzles are a form of play, which means they can be classed as a form of games or toys. One of Kim's puzzles included in the article was a visual letter puzzle - An image of a letter from the English alphabet folded once. The only clues available were that the letter is NOT "L". However it does not state whether the answer is upper or lower case - there could be many different solutions.

(One answer at the bottom of this post)

 Have a go yourself, and see how many letters (upper and lower case) you can find!

So, if it Fun?

 One of the most important aspects of designing a puzzle is knowing whether it is fun, or not. Here there are three different types of fun mentioned:

 

•  Novel - Invites you to be playful by rotating familiar objects and giving them a twist.
• Not too easy, not too hard - These puzzles are very selective, a puzzle that is much too hard can discourage people from participating in the game (if they are easily discouraged). Whereas if the puzzle is made too easy, then the player can quickly become bored and lose interest.
• Tricky - These puzzles are about shifting the perception of the players with an image.

This, however, leads us into the fact that many people have different preferences when it comes to puzzles and games - as well as different motivations for completing them.

Subjective nature: For some people, something as simple as doing the washing up can be loads of fun! And for others, not so much. It is very hard to find the 'middle-range' where the puzzle is aimed at as many people as possible, and still a fun/hard task.

The largest difference between a game and a puzzle is that games don't appear to have a single correct answer, but revolve around the player making decisions, however puzzles have specific answers.

From this article I have taken a clear understanding in the differences between games and puzzles, and also that the aspects involved in a puzzle can greatly affect the 'group' trying to complete it.






(ɟ) ǝlzznd ǝɥʇ oʇ ɹǝʍsuɐ ǝuo

What Every Games Developer Needs to Know About Story: John Sutherland

 This weeks reading was a Gamasutra article that describes the basics of story to games designers - What does a story consist of?

Throughout the entire article there is one statement that shines through and is drummed into the reader's head: Story IS Conflict. As the capabilities of technology are constantly advanced, the quality of games are also following suit. The 'bar' that people set games is ever rising and increasing the amount of interaction gamers want to recieve from games. A story is one of the features within a game that are being influenced by the designer, story and storytelling are human experiences and are part of our ancestry - Noah Falstein talks about this in my previous post 'Natural Funativity'.

This particular article stresses hugely that GAMES ARE NOT MOVIES!

Movies have had time to refine and experiment with what they do best, storytelling in the medium of picture and sound. However games have their own tools and features that seperate them from movies - player interaction! This conflict in these stories previously had to be planned from the very beginning, many classic stories use a very basic layout which if followed can make your story passible, but not great. The general structure goes as follows:

1. First, a protagonist is introduced - the hero.
2. His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident.
3. A gap opens up between the hero and orginary life.
4. The hero tries the normal conservative action to overcome the gap - it fails.
5. The world pushes back too hard.
6. The hero then has to take a risk of some sort to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back.
7. Then there is a reversal - Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn't know before, and the world if out of whack again! A second gap has opened up.
8. The hero has to take an even larger risk to overcome the second gap.
9. After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal! Opening a third gap!
10. The hero has to take the greatest risk of all in order to overcome this third gap and reach taht object of desire, which is usually an ordinary life.

Characters and Characterisation

 Both of these are very important within a game - Character is not necessarily what the person looks like, but it is how the hero/villain acts towards situations and scenarios (Giving the character emotional depth). This character should be revolved around by the other characters involved in the storyline. This article suggests that the game world should always be antagonistic toward the character to increase the amount of struggle and hardship the player must endure.

Reversals

 Sutherland suggested the use of reversals are integral to creating conflict. Each act within the story are driven by reversals, these reversals can lead to three different types of conflict:

Internal Conflict (Typically novels) - Inside your head.
Interpersonal Conflict (Typically plays) - Between different people.
External Conflict (Typically movies/games) - Society in general/outside world.

Plays are 80% Audio 20% Visual
Movies are 80% Visual 20% Audio

Sutherland goes on to state that within games if you are able to make the player DO something that causes them to be exposed to the story - then that is the greatest priority, however SHOWING the player is second priority, and TELLING them is last.

Why We Play Games: Natural Funativity, Noah Falstein

 The word 'fun' is defined as a source from which we can receive enjoyment. It can be incredibly hard to describe fun, but everyone knows exactly when they have experienced it!

Paleolithic Pastimes:

 We all have a strong dependency on social interactions with one another; this leads to another dependency - An establishment in our family, and the ability to maintain that place in our family.

There is a theory that considers the way we behave towards things that invoke 'fun' to us, this is called Refined Sugar Syndrome (RSS). Throughout history humanity has strived to discover and collect various sweet-tasting things in the world. Sugar, being naturally present in fruit, was a coveted commodity to our ancient counterparts and after discovering the sugary fruits they treasured them greatly. More modern fruit sugar is generally created using a concentrated form of this substance. This process can be applied to the act of playing - we have taken this simple act and turned it into a concentrated source, Video Games. Our ancestors used games not only as a form of entertainment, but a way to keep their hunting and survival skills honed and constantly improving.

Physical Fun

 The survival instinct is one of our primary urges as human beings, anything that threatens our survival is automatically drawn into the centre of our attention and awareness. Modern games tend to play on this trait and cause players to feel more immersed in the game by doing so. As this 'urge' is completely involuntary and instinctive, players tend to find it hard to ignore it because it is built into everyone's mind set. Physical Fun relies on strong muscles and impressive coordination. A theory as to why sports are so popular is that these often focus on physical strength and cooperation with the team: these activities are what would have been required for our ancestors in order to hunt and survive.

Falstein mentions why many game aspects can be easily relevant in terms of our ancestral history:

Casinos - Berry Picking
Collectible Games - Gatherers
RTS, RPG, FPS - Travellers/Discovery
Weapons/Hand Tools - Stone Tools

Social Fun

 Games often bring people together, it creates a solid ground for us to build on our social interactions and increase our understanding of language and culture. It has also (indirectly) introduced a new way of learning and increasing the ability to hone our survival instincts. The existence of storytelling leads us to believe that our ancestors enjoyed or at least had the desire to socialise with eachother.

MMO's can create the basis of socialisation using many specific features in the game: Chat rooms tend to be opened where people can discuss their personal experiences within the game and recieve feedback from other players. The media is expanding constantly, creating even more social interaction! A reason why so many people play these games, and especially why so many game developers focus on this aspect of their games - Socialisation is, and always will be, something required by every human being in order to keep happy.

Mental Fun

 Games that challenge us in a mental way lure some players in purely with the promise of a challenge. We have developed as human beings to have an expansive brain that can hold so much information, giving us an advantage of learning to survive and adapt over time. The constant growth of our brains has given us quicker reactions, recognising patterns and important decisions.

Blended Fun

 The type of games that this 'fun' often use more than one of these natural funativity types in their games to lure in more than one type of gamer. Different gamers prefer different types of funativity, and so by tapping into more than one type of funativity they can attract and hold a much larger audience for their game.

After discussing this reading I have gained a large insight into how 'fun' is considered when creating a game. I did not think to look back in history and use the most basic of human instincts to see what 'fun' really is today - exactly what it used to be!