#p2workshops

[atelier-amelia]

Outcomes Workshop

So this workshop was all about us understanding what our marking scheme was actually asking us for, breaking them down into their simpler, more understandable components. 

For some of these statements it was super useful, because I will look over some of these sentences and just turn off because of all the pretentious academic terms.

Eventually it all boils down to “Keep experimenting, show your workings, and Do Cool Stuff (tm)”

[levelthreehooligan]

Seth’s Workshop: Simulation

Seth Giddings came in to talk to us about Simulations and how we encounter them in everyday life as well as in gaming.

He talked about how simulation will mean something different to people in different sectors of gaming, and how they can often mean very different things.

In the morning we looked at Simulation as an emergent form of popular media, something that challenged the usual narrative heavy form of gaming we were seeing in the 90′s and early 2000′s. 

In games like Flight Sim and SimCity the simulation aspect of it is clear: a tight, somewhat realistic virtual version of the thing it is portraying, whereas games like Call of Duty and CounterStrike are loosely based on the experience you’d get in the military.

In Seth’s opinion, all games are Simulations. I somewhat agree with that in that all games “simulate” a situation, but I feel that in order for it to be filed under the simulation genre, it needs to reflect a real-life scenario.

Simulations allows a first hand experience of complex systems for people that wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience them. They are great for people to learn rules and relationships that they don’t have to place themselves in danger or in a position of blame for.

In the second half of the seminar, we were asked to design and prototype a sim game based off of magazines. This was a bit... odd, as the selection was limited and mostly kept to celebrity goss mags, and I didn’t really understand what he was trying to get us to do with them.

Kathryn, Chris and I worked on a card game that worked like a bluffing game, there was one ‘betrayer’ in a group of players and it was their job to sabotage the game, and if they did then they won. The others players won by crafting the right resources in the right places. The betrayer would sabotage these by putting in the wrong components.

We got this idea from the sheer amount of stuff you find in magazines, and the gossip and backstabbing that features heavily in celebrity journalism.

[levelthreehooligan]

Workshop: Researching

After our initial presentations, we went into a seminar with Adam in how to research.

I felt like really, after two and a half year of uni, that this workshop wasn’t really relevant, especially when we weren’t even applying it to our own topics.

I feel like the Flash card approach to researching different bits of one topic could be very helpful, but I do feel like I wasted an hour and a half on something that could have been ten minutes and then an hour of self-directed research.