Into Digital Arts

      In the last meeting of my Graphic Design 2 class, the website's each of the students had produced were shown and suggestions were given on how these could be improved. As I expected, there were many suggestions about how my site could be improved. The most necessary of the suggestions was about the chosen color style of my site. I had chosen a light blue background for each page on my site, however this color proved to be quite distracting from the actual content of the site. It followed that the other colors on this site did not quite allow for easy viewing of my content. Such as the header backgrounds that I had chosen, which where a lighter blue. These created large horizontal lines across the page that broke up my content, but were too obtrusive for their own good. These obtrusive lines were not the only issue with most of my pages, as the margins for each of the pages was slightly different. This is a big issue as the minor inconsistencies from page to page can...

      A article written by the BBC, discusses the history of the "uncrackable" logic in an old Atri game called Entombed . This game contains a table that an algorithm uses to generate a wall or an open spacein which a player may move through. John Aycock, a computer scientist at the at the University of Calgary, wished to study Entombed  as it had never been studied in great depth due to its lack of commercial success. In his studies, he came across a table who's logic was unknown. Aycock attempted to reverse engineer the table and to deduce the underlying logic that was used to create the table, but this was to no avail. Even after speaking to one of the developers of the game, who stated that the table was produced by another developer while they were drunk, the logic of the table was still unknown and remains such to this day.       One popular guess is that this table was just formed from trial and error until the table produced the desired outpu...

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      With continuing my study into game design, this has lead me back in time to a game that encapsulated my childhood, PAC-MAN. Each of these four ghosts has a fun name, that doesn't really fit their character in English, and a specific algorithm that is used to help guide them toward pac man and ruin a players day. Each of these ghosts have a very specific rule set that states where they can move on the game board. Such as, how the ghosts cannot move beyond the boarders of the board. Finally understanding how these ghosts work make me it clear how professional PAC-MAN players can perform so well. These algorithms work to position each ghost in a different position around the character. For example, the red ghost, Blinky, takes the immediate route to chase down pac man. If a player knows this, they can watch for red and always know where he will be going and can plan to avoid him. There is much more to game design than just what the player sees. What is becoming abundan...

      A paper written by Walter Benjamin titled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction  discusses the impacts on art with the advent of technologies such as the camera. The impacts of these forms of art, like photography and movies, are all from a form of recreation Benjamin dubs Mechanical Reproduction. Any creation of man has always been reproducible, but to varying degrees of difficulty. Before the creation of the camera, works of art would have had to been recreated by hand which took a lot of time and effort and the recreations themselves would be slightly different from the original as is the nature of human error. With technologies like the camera, works of art can be quickly captured and are often presented the mechanically produced copy instead of the original work.Benjamin states that there are many negatives to this method of exhibition of artwork as many things are lost when technology is used to present works of art that are not in...

      A great game to give to someone who has never played a video game before would by Super Mario 64. The object of the game is to save Princess Peach from the evil dragon Bowser. In order to do that, the player must find all of the power stars that have been hidden in the many secret worlds in the castle. Control Mario using the joystick and the A button to jump and B button to punch, with combination controls like Z and A at the same time to get a higher back flipping jump. The worlds are connected to the castle by the magic paintings hanging on the walls in the castle, jump through them to explore the different worlds. The power stars are scattered everywhere, go find them and save the princess!

      Throughout my life I have played a number of games. Games ranging from educational ones, teaching the alphabet, to more complex games that attempt give a new view of the world from a different perspective. There are a few games that stand out among the others, in that they left a profound impact on me that kept me coming back to replay them.       The first game that I played growing up was Super Mario 64. Super Mario 64 was the first three dimensional Mario exploration game. It was released in 1996 for the Nintendo 64. This game was very influential because it was one of the very first three dimensional games. It laid the roadwork for games of the generation. For me, the game was so memorable because I grew up playing the game. I would spend countless hours in front of the TV with my father hunting for stars and the 100 coins required in each level to obtain the hidden star. Each level was very different from the last so every level was a surprise. ...

I am a game designer.       These are the words that lead down the path of exploration into this new field of study for me. These are the words that Jesse Schell, in his book The Art of Game Design , coaches his readers to repeat in order to encourage them to continue on their study for game design. What is most surprising about Schell's approach at teaching his readers about game design is what he chooses to focus on and the path that the studies follow. Schell states that games, other than video games, are as important as studying video games themselves, and the design of these games is the same as design in other forms of entertainment. One must know why one plays in order to design a game that allows players to do just that, to play.       What really surprised me about Schell is that he believes that the most important skill that a game designer needs is the ability to listen. As an example, Shell said that a game designer must be able to listen to...