Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Category: Gaming Philosophy

Some Thoughts About a Book

Posted on by Viljami

There was a huge clearance at a very popular mall in Helsinki some weeks ago. I didn’t find anything except two books. The first one was about games and how they shape you and your personality. The another, in which I am not going to go so deeply in, was about astronomy. But I will tell you a bit about this book about gaming. I have read the book. It was written in Finnish and I don’t know if it is going to be translated or is translated. Anyways, I will write about it.

The book is written by Aleksandr Manzos. I hadn’t heard of him earlier and this was first book of his that I have read. I haven’t even read any of his articles. There is a note on the back of this book that introduces him as a journalist and especially some sort of a gaming expert. He has written many books. The book basically tells a story of how video games have made an effect to Manzos throughout his life.

The name, “Pelattu elämä – miten pelit tekivät minusta minut”, can be translated, a bit freely thought, into “how gaming formed me and/or changed my life”. There is a kind of a wordplay here also that cannot be easily translated. “Pelattu” means “played” and “pilattu” means “spoiled”, so he has changed that one letter right there in that word and he is making a slight joke there.

The book begins with a story about Fallout. You might know this role-playing game. So you get to choose your gender. And Manzos makes very clear that he likes to pick a female character instead of a male one. He then explains how he likes to play as a female. He likes to pretend that he is a she. He continues to talk about this and explains that this doesn’t affect his sexual orientation and he says he is a straight person in that way. He just likes sometimes to be a cute person just like the picture besides his note in the book that introduces him shows.

There are lots of topics that are dealt with in this book. There is lots of thought about the characters in games and how you in a way empathize with them. Manzos writes about video games in the 90s. He is born in 1988 so he is about the same age as I am and there are lots of same influences in games that I can share with him. He talks about Final Fantasy VII and how it brought FF series to European gamers. There is lots of history that he explains in this book. The reader gets to think about worlds of different games from shmups to roleplaying and also to Tetris and Mass Effect.

I have to admit that it was a bit awkward to first read about how Manzos felt about playing as a female character. It was a sort of thing that you have to process a bit. I enjoyed reading this book. I think this writer has many interesting thoughts about games and personality all in all. I kind of have to give him props for his attitude on his personality. I am a bit lame about this matter. I have enjoyed playing as a macho male character in many games. Maybe that isn’t always how people want to present themselves. And it is now crystal clear to me that he is truthful in a way that he even gets to talk about sexuality. This is a sensitive subject. It is easy to misunderstand someone that has opinions in this matter. There are so many people in the world and I think they are all unique.

There are lots of books about games and gaming available worldwide. I have a privilege to live in a country in which language this kind of a material gets published. There are also many journalists that also have a privilege to write about games here in Finland. One other writer whose books I really like is Juho Kuorikoski and he has written many good books. As I don’t know if this particular book is going to be released in English I don’t know what this blog post has to give to an international English speaking game fan. I wanted to write something about this book. It was an interesting read.

What It Takes to Create Own Video Game?

Posted on by Viljami

What it actually takes to create your own video game? Does it take hard work or maybe talent? Well, that depends also on how high you set yor goal. It isn’t so hard to create a text adventure game. For me, the hardest parts are concerning programming and graphics. I have created some minor prototypes and an actual working text-based adventure game.

How did I make my game? I programmed it with Java. If you program some other type of game, like a simple platformer with some basic graphics, you are basically creating a never ending while-loop, inside your code, that will refresh the screen like maybe sixty times in a second. The code updates the screen all the time. It also records every rerlevant key presses and updates the objects that seem for the player to be moving on the actual screen.

This is the basis of a simple game. You can also create event or command based games. This is what I did with my small text adventure game. The game reads your command, like “look around”, and then gives you some new output in a form of text. And the whole text adventure game happens on a command prompt inside your own program or game or what ever you are running your code with.

So, what do you need to do when you actually create a new game. There’s lots of things to work on. You need a simple plot and some kind of a scenery. You need to know how the player of your game can interact with the software, or computer, when the player plays the game.

There are also more areas of knowledge that are needed. You have to come up with whole world of music and sound, graphics, controls and storyline. Making your own game is technically demanding. You have to know your computer and how it works. You know, a good painter doesn’t necessarily know how to make good-looking video game graphics. You might need a voice actor or maybe even three or four of them.

Making a video game is demanding. But it is very rewarding if you can actually make a game that people like to play. Some people might be more interested in finding out how did you come up with your game. That can concern programming, creating the music, writing the plot or dialogue of the game or some other area.

If you still want to make a game on your own, remember to not to set the aim too high. And this is propably a good advice especially when you are just starting out. Remember to try to collaborate with other people that have some of these skills I have mentioned in this blog post. If you feel like it, you can share your source code with other developers. There are also lots of information available online. There are materials and tips for you to use before you try to make everything by yourself.

There’s a saying in Finnish that goes “kukaan ei ole seppä syntyessään”. I am not going to try to translate that. But this means that you have to take your time to learn the craft. I hope you got some new ideas from this blog post. We were moving on some game desing principles here in this blog post. Maybe I will write something about actually playing some video games the next time. We will see that.

Easy to Get Into, Hard to Master

Posted on by Viljami

My original idea was to start playing just something on GameCube. I had already played Need for Speed Underground for a while. However my GameCube started to malfunction. So I turned to my Xbox 360. It is always a reliable option that you can actually run NFS UG 2 on. So I started playing a new game again without finishing something I had started. That made me wonder about what I am going to write about here today in this blog post.

Gaming systems can be expensive. Actually manufacturers sell their consoles at a lower price than they even spend producing them. This amount of money is gathered back through games that are sold. Gaming consoles enable gaming. Games bring game companies their money which then brings salaries to game designers and all the other people that are involved in the process.

People are buying games because they are attracted to them. They might find a remake or a sequel satisfying because they have played the original game. There is lots of consumers considering gaming to be a great hobby. Back in the 90s video games were thought to be for children. Now those persons that were playing video games as a child are grown ups. This is how the world changes. Today gaming is the biggest business in the world! Even movie and music industry aren’t as popular.

There is this kind of a formula that keeps coming up. You buy a game because you are interested in it. You have maybe read a review or two. You have seen the trailer and maybe a bit of game play. You buy the game, finally. You have start somewhere. This is when the game is easy. You spend lots of time trying to figure out how to control the character or interact in some other way. You are trying to figure how to play the game.

Then you start to really get into the game. You start figuring out how to succeed and process in the game. There are harder parts. There are easier parts. You might have to check something from YouTube or some other source. You might have to read a chapter of walk through. If possible you try to figure out and solve the problem you are facing in the game by yourself.

After all you have played the game for several hours. Maybe three hours, maybe ten hours or maybe several tens of hours. Some games, like for me, NBA 2K22, you have to spend hundreds of hours. Today I have played over 100 hours of this notorious basketball game. And I feel that I haven’t yet mastered it. I haven’t completed it like 100 percentage. It takes a lot of time to master a game.

So this is the way games draw you into them. But what do you do when you get stuck or the game becomes only a source of frustration? Do you abandon the game you have only some weeks or days ago bought? Well, that is sometimes the case. You change the game that you are playing. Because you feel it hasn’t got anything to give to you anymore. Today there are more and more games that are like this.

Expectations for a game have risen. Maybe you could be satisfied even more if you would spend more time on more better game? How could you find out what game you end up palying for hundred hours instead of buying many games, like tens of games, that you only play for two hours? That’s a tough question. And the stakes are, as you can imagine, very high. I have in recent years bought only some, maybe five or even less, new games in a year.

What is a possible solution and also my humble tip for you gamers? Here it is. Buy new games just some weeks after releasing. Then you can find out if they are full of bugs. Also their price will come down quickly even if they are popular games. You can also buy good but old games. You dive deep into retro gaming and find games you never thought even existed. nd always compare the price of a new game.