Author: Sinead

Perpetually curious, gamer, Science Communication graduate, healthcare admin, too pedantic for my own good.

Developer-Fan Interactions: What can go wrong?

30 April 2014 / Sinead

Something I’ve been thinking about this week is how game developers and fans can now interact so freely, and what this means for games and the gaming community.

There are some situations where this ability is unambiguously good, and some studios who balance their interactions really well. Most notably, Valve. For example, when fans loved Left 4 Dead, but were upset that its content had run over the expected release time, Valve responded by producing a completely revamped sequel a year later.

And when a group of college students began making a puzzle game in 2007 based on Valve’s Source engine , Valve responded not by suing them but by hiring them, providing the students with resources so they could continue making their game. Considering this puzzle game became Portal, Valve’s method was the epitome of win-win situations.

One company in the middle ground of this issue is BioWare, and I’m focusing here on their support for Mass Effect 3. In terms of multiplayer their system worked quite nicely: BioWare would keep an eye out for any weapons and abilities that went unused due to bad synergy or being ineffective, as well as for weapons and abilities which users found overpowered or part of unsporting play. Every week or fortnight, Bioware would then perform a balance update where they would improve weapons found to be noticeably weak, reduce particular combinations of weapons and abilities that worked together unintentionally well, and even modify game maps to undo camping strategies.

Remember Me

27 April 2014 / Sinead

In the last few months I’ve picked up a fair few games for myself, as well as being given some. I’ve only just started catching up on this backlog, and the first one I started with was Capcom’s Remember Me.

Remember Me is set in Neo-Paris, year 2084. In this timeline, memories can be stored digitally, medically traded and sold. This commodification led to the introduction of Memory Hunters, elite agents who can steal memories; Memorize, a corporation using memory hunters to create a 1984-style surveillance state; and Errorists, a rebel alliance formed to take down Memorize.

RM is described as an action-adventure game, though in play it turns out to be a bit of everything- there’s combat, puzzles, stealth, collectibles, hacking, acrobatics, and even more combat.

The combat makes it very easy to see its a Capcom game, and its more involving than a typical action-adventure game- combos are built from unlocked special abilities (Pressens), meaning you can choose how you build your combos, speccing for increased damage, the ability to cooldown special abilities more quickly, or to regenerate health. However, even though you choose what abilities the combos have, what buttons are used cannot be changed- and seeing as the two combos given for the majority of the game are X-X-X and Y-X-Y-X-Y, actually using them is still quite repetitive. A very nice touch during combat is the background music, which turns from ambient noise to techno-ish when enemies appear, and also is at least partly linked to your fighting performance, getting louder when you land the last hit of a combo.

Dissertation Update- April Pt. 2

24 April 2014 / Sinead

I’ve finished! 😛 8713 words, 46 pages, and a 16-hour session in the library last night/ this morning later, everything is submitted and complete.

I normally like writing essays, but by the end of yesterday I was so glad to be done- trying to judge exactly what I should keep in, what should be taken out, and what was needed for good marks was pretty difficult. The most difficult part was getting started with the press release, as including a press release was a new criteria for our year, so no-one was really clear exactly how to write it or what was needed. Once I’d actually managed to get it started, momentum took over which meant I got it finished in about an hour.

Now just to hope it was the right kind of style- as it was the first non-academic-styled piece of work we’ve been assigned, it was hard to tell whether I’d been appropriately non-academic, or gone too far the other and made it too simplistic. Having said that, it was quite fun apart from the uncertainty, and its the kind of skill I’ll definitely need for the Master’s course I want to do, so doing a few more of those would be very useful.

Finishing the dissertation means I have three exams left next month, then that’s it for being an undergraduate- that seems like it has gone by way too quickly. It almost feels like this was my first year instead of my third, and I know I’m going to miss the uni atmosphere that I only managed to really find this year. It’s a weird feeling which I don’t know quite how to put into words yet.

Dissertation Update- April

7 April 2014 / Sinead

The biggest news this month is that I’m almost finished ! After not really having any contact with my supervisor since December, I got an email a few weeks ago asking me to check in with her and say when my finished draft would be handed in… cue panic.

However, I got my first draft finished yesterday, and emailed it to my supervisor straight away…just as well, given that my laptop packed up and stopped working a few hours later.

In all the laptop-repairing drama, I almost missed getting my supervisors response.

But I’m glad to say that she liked it, and especially happy that she thought my writing was good. The only issues were in how the different parts of the introduction didn’t quite fit together (my last-minute rearranging of the introduction obviously didn’t go to plan), and that I mixed up some things like using a term in the paragraph before I defined the term. So hopefully the editing process to make it better won’t take too long. Also, she gave me the good news that some of my correlations were more significant than I thought, which means I got more interesting findings… That can only be a good thing.

So, with two weeks to go until the deadline, I’m surprisingly on track. Things are looking up 😛

Eye-Tracking Research Project

7 March 2014 / Sinead

For my Methods in Neuroscience Research module, we were all tasked with making a mini-dissertation. This involved us getting into groups, making and analysing an experiment as a group, then writing it up. I thought I would show you a little bit of what we got up to in the last few weeks.

So, as you can tell from the title, our experiment was using eye-tracking. Seeing as unless you’re a psychology student you probably won’t ever get to see one of these, I thought I would document it.

Firstly, here’s some pictures of the eye-tracking lab setup. On the left is the participant computer: the metal frame is for their head , and the plastic is for their chin. The computer is running software called GazeTracker, which can track people’s eye responses to pictures and even track their responses inside some software programs.This means it can also be used for user interface data.

Psychopharmacology: The Brand-Name Debate

4 March 2014 / Sinead

One of my modules this year is Psychopharmacology- the study of drugs and how they affect people. One topic I often come across when researching drugs and medicines, which is often ill-explained, is what “generic drugs” are and whether generic drugs are ineffective, or different from brand-name medications.

When medicines are created,they are usually patented to one person or company, who become the only people who can make that medication. After a period of time, often 15 years, the active ingredient of that medicine (the medicinal molecule) goes off-patent, so can now be developed by other people. (This is similar to how music and books go out of copyright, and into the public domain).

Participant Effects and Popular Science

1 March 2014 / Sinead

As you’ve gathered from the last few posts, I’ve been spending the majority of my non-lecture time in uni, hiding out in my semi-underground lab and testing people. I’ve found the process of researching interesting, but it has also worried me a bit: doing my dissertation research has shown me there are many more things to take into account than I expected.

While organisation isn’t my strong point, it can be resolved fairly easily in normal lecture and seminar environments. During data collection, on the other hand, keeping track of many different variables and responsibilities becomes incredibly important, and my difficulty with it has almost got me into trouble already.

The Wolf Among Us

19 February 2014 / Sinead

Last month I posted about my liking for cel-shading. I already said I would play The Wolf Among Us because of that. However, I’ve also found two other very good reasons to play it.

In terms of game settings and aesthetics, I really like cel-shaded looks, cyberpunk looks, and Film Noir settings. The Wolf Among Us manages to wrap all of those things up into one distinctively-styled game, without it feeling like a mess or being over the top.

Game Graphics: Cel-shading

14 February 2014 / Sinead

A common media stereotype is that gamers are obsessed with the graphics of their games and systems. There’s an element of truth to this, but usually with good reason. This media portrayal can just happen because graphical improvements are the easiest way to demonstrate that one game/system is newer or more advanced than another, and also the most obvious difference to explain when talking about consoles to a non-gamer.

I don’t normally put too much attention on a game’s graphics – as long as they aren’t incredibly bad or otherwise distracting, I won’t think too much about them. However, one way to instantly get me interested in a game is to tell me it’s cel-shaded.