Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Author: Viljami

Masters Of Doom (Book review)

Posted on by Viljami

This book is written by David Kushner. It tells story of two creators of doom and also about id software company that was formed by them. Moving from how they first got into computers and gaming during 1980s to how they created first Wolfenstein 3D on which Doom was technically based. Quake was released by id software. Book ends as these two game developers go their separate ways.

This book was very interesting to read. I even borrowed it to a friend of mine who has been playing games like Doom nd Quake for many years. I can recommend it to someone who is interested in history of first person shooters and computers games as general. I think this book can also be interesting for people that make games themselves.

I have a pocket book edition and I bought the book for a bit under 20 euros. You can propably find more interesting books from my book shelves that have something to do about gaming. They include a book about Nintendo (and Super Mario), a history of SEGA company and some books about role playing games and these are just the ones that first come to my head. So…stay tuned and drop a comment if you want me to write more about gaming books.

I don’t want to rate this book. I also don’t want to make this a commercial so I won’t give a direct link to some web shop. You should find the book, if you actually want to invest in it, by writer and name but the ISBN number is 978-0-7499-2489-8. And remember to borrow from library or check if you can find a copy that is used. Thank you for reading and til the next post.

Masters Of Doom (Book review)

What makes gaming so addictive?

Posted on by Viljami

There are many things that you can have an addiction on. Drugs, such as nicotine, coffeine or heroin, are addictive. But there can be more behind an addiction than just pure chemistry. Fast learning and seeking of reward are some things that are present as you play a video game. Basically what happens as you are playing is that you just concentrate on the game. If we analyze what is happening physically is that you are just pressing the buttons at right time. The controller takes your input and forms a reaction based on your actions.

This is very different from working in real life. In real life you are dealing with your senses and reacting on what you see and hear or feel. Think about it. It is very different to for example carve a piece of wood with a real knife than to do that in a game. How this effects a young person who is growing up and is just beginning to form to become an adult is actually very interesting. There are different phases in growing up and it seems there is something very special about this part of it. I’m talking about persons that are aged between 14 to 16.

How did I became addicted in gaming? Do I play too much? Should I limit the time I spend on playing these games? These are good questions and in my opinion need to be given a thought. We as adults can analyze this but I think a child that is very addicted to some game might not just get the picture. Today there is already limitations created to control what kind of content is presented to for example persons under the age of 16.

You have to have some vision inside gaming to set limits to these young players. And maybe they are themselves somewhat responsible for how they spend their time. Gaming industry should have some responsibility in this matter also. I think they have so much resources that they can have a real research about these issues. All in all I think that we all, gamers and non-gamers, specialists and hobbyists, should have a good conversation as things are not so one sided.

Object Oriented thinking in game development

Posted on by Viljami

Object oriented thinking is a way of modelling real world. Objects have attributes and methods. Attributes are variables. There are different kinds of variables and they always have a type. Different types can be, for example, integer, float, double, string and character. I am talking about Java now which is very good programming language for explaining object oriented thinking. Methods are functions of the object.

So different object can have values, such as Person would have height, weight, age and name. Height, weight and age can be numbers and name is a string or combination of characters. For a role playing game you could a Monster that has values like strength and chance to hit for determining if player is hit and how much damage does the player get.

When there’s types of enemies in our little game they have these basic abilities. So we must create instances of classes to generate more enemies that are of the same type. There are many enemies of a type, for example “ghost” or “zombie”. Player can also have abilities like health, armor class and so on. We can build worlds in thinking like this.

To build a game you need many other things than just object oriented programming. You need textures, 3d-models, sounds, music. and logic for the game to exist. So you can begin programming with Java but you must understand that it is a tool that can be used to create something. Plain Java doesn’t do so much. I have programmed a text adventure game. I still think it’s not a full game. It’s more like piece of code that gives you some output for your input. If you are interested in creating games, rather than playing them, I think you should sharpen your skills inside Blender, Unity and graphics design. And these aren’t only tools there can be.