Everyone has different reasons for playing video games. Some of use it in our professional lives and careers while others just use it to pass the time or have fun with friends. But aside from personal motivators there are also several aspects of games that make them appeal to a deeper part of us. A good friend of mine brought up a particular article (attempting to find it) that discussed how video games satisfy a set of needs that often are not met in someone's professional career.
Diving deeper into that thought of games having the ability to...
Friday, September 28, 2012
A Spectator Sport
When I was growing up I would occasionally find myself watching one of my friends play a video game for brief periods of time if it wasn't a multi-player game or just didn't interest me that much but I never really went out of my way to sit down and watch someone else play a game. More often than not I'd vastly prefer to play the game myself rather than just watch someone else do it for me. However, nowadays we have seen a massive surge in the popularity of spectating games of all kinds; anything from multi-player games like Starcraft 2 or League...
Friday, September 21, 2012
Video Games as a Medium for Storytelling
I've always loved games. Ever since I started playing Mario for the first time on my cousin's SNES as a tiny child I have adored them. I count myself lucky to have lived in a time where games have gone from something so simple a concept as Pong or Pacman to something as complex as any number of current generation games. But it's not the fancy graphics or game mechanics that fed my love for gaming all these years...it was the stories they told.
Story has always been a central concept in every form of media entertainment and that goes two-fold for...
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Shifting Focus: A Look at Free to Play Online Gaming. Blog Assignment #3
As an avid MMO player I have found that in recent times a vast quantity of fairly large MMOs have made the switch from a subscription model to a free to play model. In this post I'll mainly be focusing on AION, as it is a perfect example of a game I actively play that has fully transitioned from a monthly subscription to a truly free model.
Aion is one of the more popular MMOs on the market right now with most of its player-base residing in Asia, and more specifically, South Korea. Since Aion is a Korean game we've received a "westernized" version...
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Direct Downloads: The Future of Gaming? Blog Assignment #2
This is a topic I've liked talking about for a while now as I am a huge proponent of games shifting into a direct download style of distribution as opposed to the typical physical disc. Why? Because it's healthy for the game studios/companies that are putting years of time and effort into making these games for us. Stores like Gamestop tend to make most of their money by offering gamers minuscule sums of store credit for their used games. This may seem like a benign practice but it takes a chunk out of the profits made by the...
Friday, September 7, 2012
Virtual Reality: A Step Forward? Blog Assignment #1
Alright so one of the things I looked into/tried out at PAX Prime was the virtual reality headset they had up for demo. I was pretty excited going in as it was my first time trying something like this. That initial excitement died fairly quickly as I realized that first off, the game was pretty "meh" and the headset was rather clunky, among other things.
The headset itself was connected to something else through a fairly thick set of cords that were anchored to the back of the headset. What this meant was the person running this booth was constantly...
