Research for Presentation

The first sub project for Ba5 was a research task. To choose a technological area of the game industry from the last 20 years (with the intention of showing our research in the form of a presentation) that we thought has had a significant impact. My research into changes in the game industry started with a quick search on Google to help me to define possible areas for further research. Though I acknowledge that internet based research is not the be-all and end all, I do find it a useful place to start to look and be able to throw down quick ideas and research, and get a rough overview of the topic and the research that will be required.

Gaming and education is an area that interests me, as such I thought it would be an interesting section of the industry to research, and one that my contemporaries might not think to look into.

If you watch the video, for the record i am in the "thought Leonidas was cool camp", and then did indeed end up on the wiki page for the battle of Thermopylae, so yes, i get tangential learning from personal experience. 

I feel that educational gaming in general is often missed or skipped over by many professionals in the industry, and there is defiantly a gap in the market for good educational games that make players want to learn. I also thought that it would be useful to research an area that I am interested in, to keep me applied an motivated.

My “quick search” quickly brought up an article on www.applywise.com that talks the reader through recent changes in attitudes towards gaming in education, specifically the growing number of courses (such as my own “Games Art and Design” at NUCA) though this is mostly an advisory article, aimed at instructing in and helping students to choose games or computer science courses, it did leave me with the idea of looking at the impact on gaming in education as my own specific research topic. From this I could look at the specific technologies that have created changes (iPads being used by toddlers and animals, or educational games such as Fantastic contraption – physics puzzle game)

“Educational game” seems to me to be a bit of a non-term, just like “Art game” surely any games can be educational, just as any game can be art, that’s not to say of course that all games are, or even should be those things. However for my purposes (looking at games that set out to educate) the term “educational game” will have to suffice.

One of the most successful “educational games”, and in this instance I use successful to mean financially so, is the “Brain Age” or “Brain Training” games by Nintendo for the DS. These games are an interesting example of the “educational game” in that they are advertised as such, and I think the success of these games is their intended audience. Though the game can be played by everyone, in the uk at least its advertisement aimed it at players outside the traditional market of 18 to 34 year old males, as part of Nintendo’s initiative alongside the DS and Wii to make gaming more accessible to everyone.