week 1

For the first week of the module the games we were given to look at were doom 2, a shooting game, civilization 2 a turn based strategy game and a game called Samarost 2 an online adventure game. Also during the lecture we looked at a game called space war! which was one of the first and most basic digital games around. During the lecture we were given a theory by a man called Wittgenstein who proposed the digital games don’t all share the same features. whilst playing the games after the lecture i noticed this to be true. As i played doom 2 i began to think about what had been said in the lecture and believed it to be very true. the concept o f a game was described like a rope, there is no single tread that runs though it, it is made up of twisted fibers that come together as a hole. this is very true of digital games such as doom 2. All of the small aspects of the game such as the weapons, the enemies, the music all come together to create the scary atmosphere of the game. the are no genetic connotations for a shooting game, the is no rule to say what can and cant be done and this is what helps make games all so unique and individual and what helps to make the gaming market so profitable. if all shooting games carried a set of codes and were all the same there would not be so much interest and money spend on them. another theory put across by Wittgenstein is that games have family resemblances, again i agree with this. while playing doom 2 i thought to myself that all shooting games, however individual and different they maybe all carry some of the same traits. the are guns, the are enemies, there will be health to pick up when your hurt, and usually an overall goal to save someone or something. Civilization 2 is a complelty different game to doom 2, in doom 2 you control one person and fight, but in civilization 2 you have to establish your community and build an army to defeat your enemies which can often be more than one team at a time. as different these games are they still carry some family resemblances mainly violence which seems to be a strong genre in gaming, i noticed this when we looked at space war!. this was one of the first digital games invented and the designers made a game in which the object is shoot down your opponents spaceship. However not all games are violence based. the game samoroast 2 involves following the story of a small alien who has his dog kidnapped. you have to use the computer mouse to find point on the maps to click so the story can progress. i find this style of game very boring as you involvement as a player is very minimalistic, you simply have to drag the mouse across the screen and watch what happens. out of the four games i think that doom 2 is the most enjoyable as its fast paced and there a lot of action.