Developing a New Major

ch4 – History

• lots of info organized by decade and by genre (just adventure, action, strategy, process-oriented/ simulations) – lots and lots of details, games, studios, hard part is what’s the take-away
• I think I”ll ask the students to re-organize the material by characteristics outside the industry such as technology, player characteristics, politics, economics -have to read and so ya see the names, but have to process, not memorize – maybe a table to fill in – decades down the left, characteristics across the top.
• Or give groups different decades and have them find some more info to flesh it out – what else was going on that decade in terms of things like technology and pop culture, have them say in one sentence or with one game what they think was most representative of their decade

couple of revenue streams – merchandising (starting with PacMan), licensing game IP to the movies like with Lara Craft, subscriptions (to MMOs like WOW)

good chart on p. 52 – summary of some of the points discussed over hte 4 decades – death race, ET game, Atari’s BattleZone, Pit Stop 2, Karate CHamp, Nuclear War, King’s Quest, ULtima series, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Unreal, Halo, Half-Life, 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria (from Sierra), Myst, GTA VIce City, Black & White

games I want to talk about/learn more about

questions

1. what role did each of the following play in game development – PC, CD-ROM, the web?
2. how has perspective (1st person, 3rd person, isometric…) changed over time and are there certain points of view that are specific/more likely to be found in one genre or another?
3. be able to define/describe vector graphics, platformer, side scroller, avatar, polygons, turn based strategy, real-time strategy, persistent world
4. what was the great videogame crash of 1984 and what caused it? what effect did it have on the industry?
5. what role has character played in game development over time?
6. what role has story/narrative played? Why was interactive fiction so popular for a time and then not popular?
7. how have players changed over time and why? What kinds of players are identified for different genres?
8. out of all the games discussed, which do you think is the most significant and why?
9. what can we learn from studying the past? specifically what can we learn from studying games that failed as well as games that have been commercial success
10. describe the role of the PC in game development – is it as important now? why or why not?
11. what was the biggest change/difference between the games of the 1970s and the 1980s? the 1980s and the 1990s?

here are some of my notes for the lecture -

Qual – go to Park Island, touch the burning pyramid in front of hte welcome center and let’s go to some places

games have tranascended time, language, geography, culture, social norms – people play games all over the world and some games cross cultures ex: hopscotch played in US, Nepal India, Burma China, Russia (it’s related to labyrinthes and mazes and then to the soul’s journey from earth to heaven chess started in India 1000 years+ ago

sketchy info on the earliest games because materials decay over time, we find game remnants in burial sites and drawings/wall paintings – but they don’t give us much info about how to play the games, many of these early boards already had the idea of a pattern of cells which is fundamental to board games

many early games were religious, not secular we have evidence of games going back before written history, lots of games related to the practice of dinivation to tellthe future, then to gambling, learning life skills (like for hunting)
basic types of games thru out history – alignment/configuration, exchange, war, hunt, race

games of alignment & configuration where goal is to get markers in a row, among hte oldest games that we know – earliest ones thousands of years old in many countries, many of these can be played with just a board drawn on the ground iwth a stick and using pebbles as markers (like tic tac toe, three in a row, five men’s morris, nine men’s morris, Go-moku is a 5 in a row game)

exchange games where you either try to capture their pieces or you try to get your pieces onto their squares, checkers = war game where you try to capture opponent’s pieces, pyramid, salta, halma, all played on board with squares and alternating colors like a checkerboard

war games based on war, 2 players usually, 4 types – battle games (date back to 1400 bc) where you try to capture or immobilize opposing pieces like with chess, territorial games where the idea is to occupy as much of the board as you can like japanese game i-go, blockade games where you try to immobilize (not capture) opposing pices, clearance games  where you try to make as many captures as you can of opposing pieces board type can limit moves – latticed boards let player move horizontally/vertically, diagonally or some combo Some pieces can mve one square and other pieces move multiple square

checkers around since about 1000 AD maybe but probably by early 13th century, might have started in france or spain US and britain ahve same rules. in europe its called draughts

hunt games developed later than war games, very opular in asia, usually 2 person games where 1 person has a lot of pieces/resources to be the hunter and the other player has just a few people/resources to be the prey, examples fox and geese

race games – oldest type of board games – senat and hound nad jackals are race games and so ais the royal game of Ur, teams of players race around a track and first person to complete the track for his team wins, you throw dice to know how to move, some regional race game specialties and others are more widely popular like backgammon ( romans had a game very similar to backgamman, game design may be influenced by the cycle of hte year with 12 points on each half of hte year

cards 1st mentioned in spain in 1371 and by 1380 had spread to italy, france switzerland- historians are pretty sure they don’t exist before then because there’s no mention of them in any of the popular culture of hte time – poems, histories,  stories like by chaucer, banned in a lot of countries – card importation banned in england in 1463, then in 1495 card playing banned – not because of gambling but because authorities considered that games took up too much time of the lower classes indices – those marks in the corners to easily scan the suit and number, relatively new feature – middle of 19th century<G>, backs printed with abstract patterns starting in 19th century (before then blank or just a repeating pattern of dots or fleur de lis) to help distinguish them from the front, usually intricate and colorful, helps cover up any stains or blemishes that occur as ya play with the cards, frequent card palyers tho don’t want pictures ont eh back just abstract decorative designs so they’re not distracted,

dominoes = descendents of the six sided dice, some developed in egypt, but developed independently in europe and china – different rules, different look, european domino games developed probably in italy in 18th century, brought to england by french prisoners of war (?), a cafe game in the 19th and 19gh centuries lots of people cheated (must have been gambling), played individually and in teams,

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