Key Posts

This page here permalinks and includes the key posts in this blog.

---

Game Engines – Which Ones?

Here’s an article that’ll be of interest to GET staff and students (especially in their second year!): what game engines really are used in industry?

Gamasutra has an article that deals exactly with that question, with the investigator noting he got involvement from 100 industry members in senior management positions. The most interesting result is this: which engines from the respondents were the ones they used?

Answer:

The full article is right here in this link.

---

Shoot’em up video games sharpen vision: study

Playing shooter games apparently doesn’t just increase your physical dexterity. Your vision improves too, according to this news article from MSN. Excerpt below:

A boy plays the video game “Counter-Strike” during the World Cyber Games 2008. Slaying hordes of bad guys — the more the better — in fast-paced video games improves vision, a study published Sunday showed for the first time.

Slaying hordes of bad guys — the more the better — in fast-paced video games improves vision, a study published Sunday showed for the first time.

Far from being harmful to eyesight, as some had feared, action games such as Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, or Left 4 Dead provide excellent training for what eye doctors call contrast sensitivity, the study found.

Contrast sensitivity is the ability to notice tiny changes in shades of grey against a uniform background, and is critical to everyday activities such as night driving and reading. It often degrades with age.

The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveal a previously unsuspected adaptability in the brain, and could open the way to new therapies, the researchers said.

Rest of article here.:)

---

Here’s an important article I’ll be duplicating under Key Articles for current 2nd year GET students in the Business in Computer Games subject next year in April.

IGN Entertainment and Ipsos Media CT did a comprehensive study on video gamers. Their study revealed a number of findings, some of which I think has long been suspected by many of us who play games, but now it’s objective and statistical fact. Some facts from the press release here.

Age: “55% of gamers polled were married, 48% have kids, and new gamers – those who have started playing videogames in the past two years – are 32 years old on average.”

Social networking: “According to the research, more than 75% of videogamers play games with other people either online or in person.”

Salary levels: “In terms of hard dollars, the average gaming household income ($79,000) is notably higher than that of non-gaming households ($54,000), but the value of the gamer as a marketing target can be seen in a variety of ways.”

The more detailed press release is available here.

(Picture from http://www.bethanylife.org/)

---

Spore, EA and Piracy

One of the more controversial incidents in computer gaming this year has surrounded EA’s implementation of Digital rights management in Spore.

Allegedly some gamers are actually consciously pirating the game as protest, if you believe what TorrentFreak says: that the game has been downloaded 500,000 times – making it possibly the most pirated game ever:

The editors at TorrentFreak suggest, “The idea behind DRM is that it will stop people from pirating the game, but in reality, it often has the opposite effect.”

Gamasutra has weighed in on the controversy with a succinct article that provides viewpoints from both EA and industry analysts. Its a great read, and will be bookmarked here as a resource article on the business of computer games.

(Picture from AtariArchives.org)

---

Game Career Guide 2008

Game Developer Magazine, the long-running USA based games industry magazine has just published its annual career guide. Packed with information on how to join the industry, what positions pay what money and which university courses are available, its a very interesting read.

And best of all, its a free download! Be warned, the pdf version is approx. 30mb.

http://www.gdmag.com/archive/gdcg08.htm

Michael Garry

---

Here’s a bookmark-able article for the GET students. At some point you’re gonna have to do a subject called Business of Computer Games, so here’s a resource you could use:

In-Depth Analysis of Games and Console Sales

Dr. Foo CY