Reading 05 - Week 17 (05)

For this week's reading task we had to go through annotated bibliography and code them in order to discover themes between all of them. 

Screenshot of my different themes.

So I came out with these possible themes. I don't think I'll use them all as some aren't really interesting. I am interested in difficulties with genres and grouping them, a few of papers have that in common so I think it would make sense to do it on them. I also like ways to improve genre grouping as this goes hand and hand with difficulties with genres and grouping them as they usually include a solution and how to make them better. I think it'll be important to include the genre definition and all about the genre which might go with popular genres. It'll give it a solid ground to start with and make sense straight away going into it. I think gender differences in genres are also interesting and comes up a lot too. Another interesting one is problems with specific game genres, this is about how there are problematic tendencies with the people who play certain genres, for example, first-person shooter games. Obviously, it's not all people but it's a very interesting read! 

Hopefully, I'll be able to get 5 sentences out of each theme next week! Thanks for reading!! 

-Megan :) 

 Annotated Bibliography found here

Meme Generator Tech Tip

Hellooo, this week for the tech tip I decided to do a meme generator, I find it fun to do. 

Here is the meme and of course it's politics-related!! I used imgflip to make the meme.

A picture of the meme I made 

Thanks for reading!! :)

-Megan

Twitter Task - Week 17(5)

Hello! This week for the Twitter task I picked the twitter task below! 

TWITTER TASK 13

Twitter Challenges– For this tasks tweet about your experience in using Unity so far in this semester

Here is a screenshot of my tweet!

screenshot of the tweet I tweeted

Thanks for reading :)

-Megan

Analysis

 Reflection:

Image source
Image is of three platform games side by side.

Hello and welcome to this week’s reading task! Okay so compared to last week I think I definitely got on better. Don’t get me wrong, there is still loads of room for improvement, but It’s definitely gotten better than last week. I struggled a bit to keep motivated. I realized I needed to set out a plan for myself and try to do one a night to make it easier. I did one on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday but on Friday I decided to take a break and video chat with my friends. So, on Saturday I did two and I did one today (Sunday). I struggled to find papers towards the end of the week on Saturday and Sunday. A lot were using shocking complicated words and just made no sense to me, so I said there was absolutely no point in torturing myself further. So eventually I found three that would be suited. By the time I was doing todays my head is absolutely melted. Especially since I’ve been doing each one every night (which is my own problem of procrastinating) but I would be up later than usual, so I think I’m just very tired. Overall, I think I’m doing okay I have nine done instead of ten as I only did three last week instead of four but I’m going to do another during the week. I just don’t have the motivation or attention to do it now. I really hope this doesn’t get worse as I am struggling and can’t imagine having less motivation than I have now.

Anyways, thanks for reading and talk soon,

-Megan

Here is the link to my google doc that has my annotated bibliography. 

Annotated Bibliography:

Kao, D. & De Simone, J.J. (August 2019) Exploring how Preference and Perceived Performance Vary in Different Game Genres Across Time of Day. : Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1-5.



In this article, the authors are discussing how people prefer playing different genres at different times of the day. It is a very interesting read, to see how there is a difference between the two. People seem to prefer the evenings to play first-person shooter and other RPG games. They’re most common between the times of 6 pm and 12 am. Whereas Puzzle and Board / Card are more common between the times of 6 am and 12 pm. The authors talk about how there is a difference in athletic performance peaks and core body temperature in the evening which would say why people prefer the first-person shooter and RPG games then. There’s quicker reaction time needed for them and they have more of that in the evening and at night time. Puzzle and board/card games being more relaxed are better suited for the morning due to less tired. This is the first study that has gone into a specific time of day effects for playing games. The authors got this information from doing the study on 504 gamers. They had them answer two different questions. They then did up a survey that took about 5-10 minutes to answer. In the survey the authors asked the gamers to rank genre preferences, to say the certain time of day they prefer to play a specific genre at, and finally, to say when they think they would be more successful in the games their playing and the genres. They made sure they got people who played games on a regular basis to answer the survey only. The authors have a lot of research done yet leave it open for more people to look into this further. I think this would be interesting research I can use as I don’t have anything like it. It is very interesting research and I don’t think many people would think that time of day would affect what game genres you play.



Heintz, S. & Law, E.L. (2015) The Game Genre Map: A Revised Game Classification. Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.


In this article, the authors are discussing how they think the game genres that exist today lack clarity and aren’t a good way of separating games into categories. They made a survey to collect data regarding how people play and perceive games that they are familiar with. With the responses, they developed a new method of categorizing the games into new and improved genres. They called it the Game Elements-Attributes Model and GEAM for short. In the article, the authors describe a game genre as is the mechanics and styles of gameplay. They went on to say that game type is similar to a game genre but game type would be architecture and functionally. They also stated that game class would describe the player’s behavior and experience. They have stated several issues with the game genres that exist today, these include, they’re not clearly defined, there is no set relation between genres, the definitions of the genres are based on different aspects and finally, different sources use a different set of genres. There have been other authors too who have stated a concern that game genres lack clarity and didn’t think they had consistency throughout and they proposed new and alternative versions of genres. With all their research and surveys they carried out they were able to suggest a new way to group games together. There would be 5 different genres as follows, mini-game, action, adventure, role-play, and resource. They got rid of both the simulation game genre and the sports game genre as they thought the simulation would fit into the genre of resource and sport would fit into action. The puzzle genre was renamed to mini-game, and the strategy genre was renamed resource. Having a game with multiple genres is still possible as they say there was always an overlap. In conclusion, I think this would be really good research for me to use as it shows why the genres we have today might not be the best thing to categorize games with.



Rehbein, F., Staudt, A., Hanslmaier, M. & Kliem, S. (2016) Video Game Playing in the General Adult Population of Germany: Can Higher Gaming Time of Males be Explained by Gender-Specific Genre Preferences? Computers in Human Behavior. 55 pp. 729-735.


In this article, the authors are discussing the idea that higher gaming time in males is down to gender-specific genre preferences. The study took place in Germany so there is more research needed for different countries to see if the results differ or stay the same. The study included 3073 people. They asked the participants how long they spent gaming on weekdays and weekends. The results for normal/frequent gamers said on average the women spent 77.3 minutes per day playing video games. Male normal/frequent gamers on average spent 97.7 minutes a day. They discovered that on average the genres role-playing, shooter, sports, racing, action and adventure, and strategy are preferred by males compared to females. While on average the genre brain and skills are the only ones preferred by women. The genre of the simulation was preferred by both males and women. Both shooter games and role-playing games are usually at the highest daily gaming time which would make sense as to why males would have a higher gaming time due to males preferring both genres. On average males that took part in this study spent 20 minutes more playing video games than women do. This is due to a number of factors including education, genre, age, and employment. The authors state that people who are highly educated do not have as much free time as people who have lower education. In conclusion, males do spend more playing games than women do. I think this would be really useful to use in my research as it’s the first gender-based study on the genre I have come across.



Na, E., Choi, I., Taek-Ho Lee, Lee, H., Mi, J.R., Cho, H., Dong, J.J. & Dai-Jin Kim. (2017) The Influence of Game Genre on Internet Gaming Disorder. Journal of Behavioral Addictions J Behav Addict. 6 (2), pp. 248-255.


In this paper, the authors discuss internet gaming disorder and how specific genres might affect this disorder. They state there hasn’t been a lot of research into how specific genres influence internet gaming disorder. They used four types of genre to test, real-time strategy games (RTS), massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), sports games, and first-person shooter games (FPS). They did an anonymous online survey to conduct their research. 2923 people participated in the survey. They all played one of the four genres listed above. They discovered that of the 2923 people who took part in the study, 494 people met the criteria of internet gaming disorder. 72.5% of those were male and 27.5% were female. 32.2% of those who met the criteria were MMORPG players, this was the highest percent when it came to the genres. 28.1% were RTS players, 19.8% were FPS players and finally, 19.8% were sport game players. Overall, more of the MMORPG players and FPS players met the criteria of potentially having internet gaming disorder compared to the percentage of people who play the other genre. These results do suggest that people who play these two genres have a higher chance of developing internet gaming disorder. They noticed how each genre group that met the criteria of Internet gaming disorder had specific gaming patterns. They were different per genre and went hand and hand with internet gaming disorder. It includes spending a lot of time playing games during the week for RTS players. Joining clubs and the time spent gaming for MMORPG players. Using PC rooms for sports players. Finally, joining clubs for FPS players. Another common thing found in the players of each genre is anxiety. Whereas impulsivity was common among RTS, sports games, and FPS gamers. In conclusion, people with internet gaming disorder in each genre had specific characteristics and gaming patterns. This research and further research could help people who have the potential of developing internet gaming disorder in the future.



Peever, N., Johnson, D. & Gardner, J. (2012) Personality & Video Game Genre Preferences. Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Playing the System. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.


In this paper, the authors are discussing how people’s personalities could make them have particular preferences for video game genres. There are five broad types of personality being used in the research. They are known as “The Big Five” model. It takes different things into account to decide your personality type like your interpersonal skills, attitude, motivations, emotional and experimental styles. The five different types are known “as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism”. 466 people took part in the study, they had to complete an online survey. The participants had to fill out which their favourite game genres were on a scale from 1 to 7. The list of genres included action role-playing, board or card games, action-adventure, casual, education, fighting, flight, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), music, party, platformer, puzzle, racing, real-time strategy, role-playing (RPG), shooters, simulation, sports, text adventure, and turn-based strategy. The participants also had to state their current video game behaviour and answer about their personality relating back to The Big Five model. The results show that they were correct in saying personality is connected to what genre of games people prefer. For example, people with the personality type extraversion, party, music, and casual games came up a lot compared to the other genres. People with the personality of conscientiousness, sport, racing, flight simulation, simulation, and fighting games were up on top compared to other genres. For openness to experience, there was a significant connection with action-adventure and platformer games. From reading the paper there is a definite link to personality types and genre preference. The authors aim in the future to explore this topic more and branch off to other similar topics.



Lewis, J.P., McGuire, M. & Fox, P. (2007) Mapping the Mental Space of Game Genres. Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.


In this paper, the authors discuss game genres and more specifically how they group together now but how they’ve come up with a better way of grouping them together. They say by doing it this way it could make it easier for online stores to give game recommendations and evaluate a games market potential before production along with other reasons. They state that by mapping it this way it’s more challenging. This is due to games varying and appearing in different spots. The authors state that they think that they’re the first people to use these techniques in games. They decided to do an online survey for their research. They also needed a way of pairing similarities for many games. They did a pilot study first to see how their research would come out and if they could improve it in any way before the actual study. By doing the pilot study they found out that Isomap would probably be best for their study as it will give reasonable results. They had 124 participants rate 92 games by saying if games were similar or not. Out of the 92 games, it made up 4186 possible comparisons of games. With the results of the study, they found out people group games by content which is the setting or aesthetic rather than the primary mechanic which they group second. On the map, you can see new genres forming from similar games yet also traditional ones staying together. This study shows that players' interpretation of the games matches the developers’ priorities of content and aesthetics first, then mechanics, and then finally technology being third. They have a cluster on the map called “run and gun” this cluster contained first-person shooter games but also 2D platform games. They were ranked as similar games. So, fans of first-person shooter games would tend to be a fan of the likes of Super Mario Bros. So, by looking at this study you’d see that the map and how it’s arranged might contradict genres that exist today.

Unity Tutorial 04

 Hello and welcome back to my blog post! 

This week was absolutely not my week, I was doing the first tutorial and it wouldn't work and there were loads of errors and I was so stressed and had absolutely no idea what to do. Eventually, I gave up and I had to restart my game unfortunately because even when I went back to the previously saved versions it just wouldn't work. So below is a screenshot of my new layout of the game.

A screenshot of my game!

Apart from that struggle, the tutorials were okay, once I got past the bit where I had to restart I was relieved but when I got to the second tutorial it was really confusing. They just tell you to do things without properly explaining what to do, so I spent ages reading and re-reading the steps in case I was doing it wrong or missing something. I'm just delighted to have that done and hopefully can do another in the next few days to get them done with asap! I take back what I said about the reading is easier, as I said I have to be extra careful when reading it because I miss some things they say. But sure look, I'll get it done! 

Thanks for reading, talk soon! 

-Megan

Tech Task - Fake Social Media Generator

Hello! For this week's extra credit I decided to go with a fake social media generator, the one linked wouldn't let me upload a picture so I decided to use this one instead! It was really easy to use and I wanted to have a bit of fun with it so I did the tweet below.

A screenshot of the fake tweet I made

I just thought this would be funny so I decided to do it! That's all from me now.

Thanks for reading!

-Megan

Twitter Task - Week 16(04)

For this week's Twitter task I decided to do one of the new ones and tweet out a question to my class and see what they think! I got one reply! Hopefully, more will reply too. Below is a screenshot of the tweet.

A screenshot of what I tweeted and a reply I got

Thanks for reading :)

-Megan

Reading 03

Image source.
Photo of different images from various games of different genres.

Reflection

Hello and welcome back to my blog! For the reading this week we have to continue on with our research and had to read four academic papers and write up annotated bibliographies! I ended up reading three academic papers for this week, as four was just not manageable for me. I struggled to find papers on Games Genres. I picked this topic thinking I know what a genre is so, therefore I'll be able to do it but not looking too great. I might be just looking for the wrong things, who knows. Overall, I'm really confused as to what I'm meant to be looking for in the articles as my topic seems broad and none of them seem to be answering the questions as to what a genre is. Hopefully, as the weeks go on this becomes easier as I really struggled this week and I'm not really looking forward to continuing it. The first one I read was "An Operational Study of Video Games’ Genres". It wasn't too long and was easy to understand for the most part. The second one I read was Video Game Genre as a Predictor of Problem Use. Cyberpsychology, Behaviour, and Social Networking, I found this one more difficult to understand what exactly they were talking about. I'm still not sure it'll be competently useful for my research. Finally, the last one I read for this week was An Introduction to Videogame Genre Theory. Understanding Videogame Genre Framework, I got the gist of this one quicker I think. The language used wasn't too difficult. The author talked about Daniel Cook which I've seen a few papers talk about him so far so I think I'll have to look up his work to see what I can find! Overall I am struggling with this and I really hope it gets easier, I kept putting it off because it was stressing me out and then I became more stressed as I was leaving myself short to complete it. I'm not sure if they're even long enough but hopefully next week I can improve on them.

Annotated Bibliography

Qaffas, A.A. (2020) An Operational Study of Video Games’ Genres. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies. 14 (15), pp. 175-194.

In this article Qaffas, A.A presents their study on the most successful video games of the last thirty-four years. It explains how they all fall into only sixteen genres. The author explained that they have looked at the evolution of the sixteen most popular game genres and they've analyzed it. They note how some genres are becoming more popular now than ever before. The authors show the evolution of game genres through charts and how many games there were falling into the genres. In the conclusion, they make recommendations for game designers and entrepreneurs and how they can profit from the more popular genres. Also how other researches may go about future research about game genres. This would be useful for my research as it can be used to show popular genres.

Elliott, L., Golub, A., Ream, G. & Dunlap, E. (2012) Video Game Genre as a Predictor of Problem Use. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. 15 (3), pp. 155-161.

In this article, the authors discuss their study on problematic use for specific genres such as first-person shooter, action-adventure, role-playing, and gambling games. More specifically they talk about the impacts Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games(MMORPG) games have on people. They state they are more addictive due to the dopamine released during play, saying it's the same as the high you would get from drugs. The authors say that MMORPG is the new highly addictive games. These games have a never-ending feel to them. They got 3,380 people to take part in their study. This would be useful to my research to show the bad side of gaming genres and how they affect people.

Cășvean, T. (2018) An Introduction to Videogame Genre Theory. Understanding Videogame Genre Framework. Athens J.Mass Media Commun. 2 (1), pp. 57-68.

In this article, Cășvean discusses different forms of genres. She states that although there are many genres, they're becoming a thing of the past, and instead games will have multiple genres, therefore, creating new ones. Cășvean says that once a game has a certain genre attached it makes it easier for people to pick it up once they've played a game of the same genre before. So saying you've played a first-person shooter, then therefore you should be able to play the majority of other games that fall into the category. She also questions if the genre of games is a marketing plot just to sell games or is there a framework behind it. Cășvean states that there are two definitions for a genre that suits the research she has carried out. She says "the game genre is "a recurring type or category of text [...] defined by structural, thematic and /or functional criteria". She goes through the industry's point of view of genres.

Link to the google docs with my annotated bibliography 

 

Einstein Tech Task

 Hello and welcome back to my blog :)

This week for extra credit I decided to do the einstein chalkboard!

This was really easy and fun to do! Check out this post for how to do it. I used this website to actually make the image.

The image I made using the website above.

Thanks for reading, 

-Megan

Week 3 - Twitter Task

For this week's Twitter Task I decided to go with tweeting about the module so far!

A screenshot of my tweet

-Megan

Unity Tutorial 03

Hello and welcome to another unity tutorial! I did the 3rd unity tutorial early as I had spare time and wanted to get it out of the way so it was handy to have it done! Hopefully, now I can keep it up and be ahead, or even if I get busy at least I won't be worrying that I have to do it as I'll be a week ahead! 

The tutorial went great, it was easy to follow, I'm really liking the reading set up as I can read it at my own pace and just go along with it. Unity was working fine and with the code on the screen and being able to copy it means I don't make mistakes with spellings. I do make sure to read over what it is and what it does a few times to make sure I understand what exactly is going on. 

A screenshot I took of my game, it is in the editor view.

I'm excited to see where it goes with this game, it's very cute looking! This tutorial was all about adding items to either damage the player or to give them life. We first had to add the extra life, it seems to be a little strawberry. In the picture above it's behind the camera icon but below you can actually see it.

A screenshot I took of my game, it is in the scene view.

We then were told to add the damaging cones at the bottom and then the enemy who seems to be a robot. He seems a bit big for Ruby so I might make him smaller or Ruby bigger. I will decide on that next week. But everything went great and I was able to do these no bother which was great! Hopefully, I keep going this way and it won't cause me as much stress as last semester!

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

-Megan

Unity Tutorial 02

Hello and welcome back to my blog post, as you can see today's post is about our second unity tutorial! I had absolutely no problems with this, thankfully! I've heard from a few people that unity itself just won't work so touch wood mine stays working! (I definitely jinxed myself).

I think it makes it so much easier this year because it's 2D but also the fact we have last semester under our belts so we have an idea what we're at. This week we added more decoration to our game and we added rigid bodies and different components so we could actually make it a working game!

This is a screenshot I took of my game so far!

I think it's looking cute so far, I'm hoping it stays that way. I'm not sure if I'm meant to have more paths around it but if all goes I can easily add them in. 

This is a screenshot I took of my game so far!

I included two screenshots so you could see the game while in play but also the whole map! I thought the house on top made it look cute. The tutorials are really easy to follow, I was worried about it just being written rather than a video but it is easy to follow and there are even comments on the trickier bits and you can see if anyone had the same problem you had and if someone fixed it for them!

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

-Megan

Planning

Hello and welcome back to my blog, this week for the reading it's all about planning! Not going to lie I am nervous about this reading task but I know if I put my mind to it I should do okay. I decided to go with the topic "What is a Genre". I went with this topic as I thought I already had some knowledge on genres and it would have a lot of academic papers on it. 

Image Source
Image of a brainstorm with different genres listed

In the lecture this week Lindsay from the Library came to talk to us about the services available which would very much be of use for this reading project. It was really useful as I really didn't know how to do any of it before she came in. She gave us lots of information which made me feel more confident that I would be able to do the reading to my full capability. I took notes and will definitely be using the majority if not all of the things she thought us.

I had a look at the Matrix Method and it looks a bit complicated for me, so instead, I plan on making a list on my laptop to keep track of anything I've read and any research I want to use. I use lists for just about everything so I am sure this method will work for me. I much prefer the simple, straightforward way. 

I then began to search for different keywords to use to find papers that will suit me, so far I have come up with "Gaming" "Genre" and " Video Games". I plan to create a brainstorm to find more and keep looking up various papers to see what I can find to help me. I will be using the library resources to find papers to research with. 

Tech Tip: Animated Gif

 I decided to go with the animated gif making this week for the tech tip and I picked pictures I took when I was actually in college with my friends :( sad times. I made the GIF using this website :) Check it out!

A GIF I made of 9 different photos of me and my friends 

This makes me miss spoons a lot (can u tell we went there a lot hahah)

-Megan :)

Week 2 - Twitter Task

 Hello!!

For this week's Twitter task I did Twitter task 3, which was to follow 5 people additional to classmates and lecturers! Below is a screenshot of who I followed :)

A screenshot of my following list on Twitter

-Megan

Unity Tutorial 01 - Week 14 (02)

Helloooooo!

New semester, same me lol.

This is a blog post about the unity tutorials, the first one of the semester and it actually went great? Apart from a minor detail of trying to figure out how to actually paint the scene everything else went great?? (Cheers Sean for the help). I'm shocked, especially considering how bad last semester went but hey this is the first week so it will definitely get harder, but hopefully, because it's 2d it might be a bit simpler? (I am probably completely wrong with that statement and will regret saying it in like 4 weeks haha). I'm excited to learn new things and to get stuck in and get bits done!

screenshot of my little world I painted in with tiles

It's much handier to read the tutorials rather than watch videos, I know he might go more in-depth in the videos but sometimes he was just as confusing (and annoying). So far it's been great and I can go at my own pace without having to pause the video or put it slower. I like the little GIFs they add in every now and then to show it happening, that's really helpful! Overall, the tutorial was really helpful and went through what different things meant and why we were doing them which I really liked!

Hopefully, the rest of the semester will go like this and I'll have no other at all (Fingers crossed)

Thanks for reading, 

Megan!!