week 8

Lecture: Is gaming a waste of time?

The lecture today was split into two parts, the first part was presented by Stephen and the second by Adam. The main focus of the lecture was to discuss the relevance of video games and more particularly, to discuss the importance of computer games in our society. We talked about the research that has been done on computer games and all different approach used to study their impact on people and their notion of reality. We looked at different aspect of the games and at the long term effects that computer games have on players including the persistence of the effects. We studied the games as a growing cultural practise of our society. In the last recent years, games have become social experience and a universal language has been developed in order for players to communicate and understand the ‘gaming’ language.
In this lecture we also discussed the differences between Narratology and Ludology. What appeared is that, Narratology is the study of video games from a literary perspective, using story-telling, it is almost studied like text and Ludology is different in that it does not approach the game as a story telling but more as an entertainement.


Reading: Trigger Happy

This week’s reading was called “trigger happy” written by Stephen Pool. This text investigates the effects of video games in our society and on people. It talked about how game designers create voluntary a virtual environement but make their game as real as possible to challenge the player’s mind and make their game well known and popular. The games are made as a representation of our reality in order to immerse the player and project him in a space where everything is possible and where the impossible can happen. The logic is not taken into account and games are created in the most realistic way.

Tutorial:
For the tutorial this week we had to go through some tasks on how to use miscrosoft word an excel.The First Tasks on word were easy for me as i had already used it for university and daily life purposes for example how to open the document, type and save or when we were asked to put some of the words in bold or in italic, all of the first tasks of the tutorial were easy to do and quite automatic. But as we went along the task became more complicated and especially when we had to do tasks on excel, as i am not really familiar with excel, those tasks were, for me, more difficult and took more time to be done. This exercise was at first quite boring as i thought we would only have to do things i already knew, but it appeared to be more useful than i thought it would be. I don’t know if I would ever use all we have done for this tutorial task but it is still useful to know how to use those programs.