Final Project

Final project; it came so fast. For this project Frank and I were partners again. We both had a good understanding of each other and knew how to compromise and develop ideas from working together on our previous project. Moving on, this project was the most different and collaborative than the others. First, Frank and I were given the video game theory II and we had to portray this theory in
our own way to the class and or critique the theory. Within this theory given to us, we had to read four different perceptions of people’s consumption of video game. In these pieces that we read, the theorist gave their perspective on very different components of video game; media, sound (voice), storytelling, equipment, technology, and computer's.

After reading the theory of video game from the different authors, Frank and I choose to portray their persona of video games. We thought that it would be cool to create a video game. We really wanted to create an action based game but we knew we did not have the time. So, we still kept the idea of creating a video game but we would construct it with links instead. In addition, time was
key in for our project and we didn’t want to have to create our own story for a video game so we thought to use the story of Zelda to interest the audience. Also, Frank and I chose Zelda as our story to show the theories that we read and to see if they were effective or biased.  In addition, time was key in for our project and we didn’t We were inspired to develop this game so that all of the computer’s components and capabilities which we learned in class would be utilized; sound, image, illusion/manipulation, video, etc. Also, we followed Markku Eskelinen “Towards Computer Game Studies” Aspects of time in computer games:

Order- relation between user events and system events (what is happening in the game), Frequency-the repetitive capabilities of the game, Speed- the computer’s ability to keep pace with the video game, Duration- any kind of shortcut or cheating, successfully completing all events, or loosing to the clock or winning to the clock, Simultaneity- number of simultaneous or parallel events which link to each other.


Markku piece was very helpful for us in terms of visualizing of project compared to the rest of the authors. In “If Things Can Talk, What Do They Say? If We Can Talk to Things, What Do We Say?” Natalie Jeremijenko, she talked a lot about voice chips and their relevancy and capabilities. She did not stake much about the relationship of voice and video but she did in terms of music and sound. We found that one section important to our project because she elaborated on how unmusical sounds (sound effects) become music and in video games this happens a lot. We can remember the sounds from Pokémon and Mario Cart and translate them to actual music. In our project we did not have a song played or music. We chose to have the sound effects in different events of the game to create our own music. Another theory that we read was by Marc Qouellette “I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This”; Pedagogy & Allegory in “Post 9/11” Video Game. In this piece Marc showed the connections of world events and video games. Janet Murray “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama” talked about the computer and it's components with video games which helped use with various parts of the project.

Overall, the process was very long to think of but after we accomplished our goal, the action was not as bad. We mapped out every step that we wanted to take in this game and if it didn't work as we were working, then we just took it out and went another route. There was many other things that we wanted to do with this project but we knew that we have time as a constraint and availability. There were many links that were not working for our media files or media in general but we circumference our problem and excelled, at least that's what we think.