Thursday, February 11, 2021

Reading 03

 Doing-Reading 03










 Process of the Literature Review


For this week task I did some research and found out some of interesting sources describing the character development routine and talking about the methods. I did also some research how to write literature review, and I underlined some systematic strategies:

  • Review planning
  • question formulation
  • search strategy
  • selection process
  • strength of evidence
  • analysis
  • synthesis
  • process monitoring
I asked myself what can go wrong during the literature review?
  • maybe search can fail to be comprehensive enough
  • or maybe search and review may focus on the wrong sources
  • or maybe the review can be a collection of sources without a clear sense of synthesis

After looking through all these thoughts I started to read the abstract and introduction of my chosen topic. If I found it interesting and relevant to my topic then I started the literature review.

However, I used Three-Pass-Method, which is very useful and handy in this case.
First-read-through
read abstract, introduction, conclusion ,then describe it.
Second-read-through
read the content and summarize main findings
Third-read-through
identify and challenge every assumption and conclusion made by the author
identify strengths and weakness of ideas
identify inherent assumptions

When I starting my literature review I was passive note-taker, as I highlighted, underlining all the information ,after that I started to work as an active note-taker,-summarizing the text in my own words.

This is a screenshot one of the article that I am doing at the moment- the literature review as a passive note-taker-(Highlighted)

This is a sample of how I started to use MATRIX method, to be honest ,it is a little bit boring and wasting my time.



Annotated Bibliography



1.ISBISTER, K. (2006) Better Game Characters by Design. A psychological Approach. San Francisco, California: Morgan Kaufmann. Source



Designing a game character, it doesn’t mean that all the game characters should react successfully in all media platform. The game character designers should be very acute on the designing process to create a character which can operate for variety media formats. Also, it is important to transfer your character into different media platform preserving their quality and depth. Game character developer is always starting with research a character, building the base of character: recognition, fascination ,even mystery. Character must be unique persona for the players, having background, goals, needs and motive, and the main objective of the game character designers  enabling the character to interact with others.

When game players  choose their characters,(avatars),they are paying attention to their appearance, and where the character is going to take them, what journey it is-hard, simple or even fascinating. To convince the game player, the game character should be built on high standards. Sometimes a bad design might lose appeal to the players, and many video games become unsuccessful and failed in game market.

That’s why the visual design is playing a big role in character development. The game players want to feel their characters, and game characters affect the players’ emotions.  Emotional connection between the player and character might be believable and convincing.

The game players can choose their own game characters through their appearance and acting behavior: what sorts of power it has and how the players are feeling when they control them and move them using their keyboard and following the action that is happening on the screen. Also the game players want to see their character more intriguing and powerful, rather than shallow and dull.



2.
Nowak K, and Rauh C:"Designing Serious Video Games for Health Behavior Change": Current Status and Future Directions Debbe Thompson, Ph.D. Source


In this article the author was talking about a serious video game, how the video game character designers achieved the dual goals of entertaining people with special needs and diseases through character modeling and character dialogue. 

When game Character designers start to design a character for  a serious video game, firstly they might consult with a behaviour scientist and be guided by them, and follow to their five behavioural science concepts:

Game character or avatars are playing the main role in a serious video game, as they are teaching the players how to reduce risk of obesity and diabetes-promoting them health diet and physical activities, or people with cancer using the character to destroy the bad cells and get treatments. Also through the game characters the players can achieve some goals ,solutions, problem solving, self-monitoring. Observing their avatar with the similar appearance they can “coping style” and change their behaviour :positive or negative.

This type of video game can help the player to modify health behaviour.

A serious video game designer should count that their players are expecting to have fun and entertaining,and designing the games they might follow all the expert and specialist advice and get balance between seriousness and fun-ness.

Nowak K, and Rauh C point out a vital role of avatar in a serious video game, as it assists the player to choose the avatar’s appearance similar to theirs.



3.Felix Schröter and Jan-Noël Thon:" Video Game Characters- Theory and Analysis" .Source

The author proposed to distinguish between narration, ludic, social experience, and dimensional parts of video game characters' Eder, Jonnidas and Schneider have tended to consider that the characters in video games are “textual structures” ,” paradigm of traits” , or even “surface feature of discourse", however the cognitive approaches assume that “characters are the part of imagination in the player's mind”.

Many video games have been designed around character, laying as a” narrative", despite some scientist debate around it until now, mentioning that video game characters can’t be assigned as a narrative, as the character-avatars are just  people’s  imagination, and it's an equipment, tools that humans are playing for fun and entertaining.

Therefore, in contemporary video games the players can  use a variety of strategies in their scene, even they can change the mode `ludic events” while the game is played. It's described as four kinds of game rules: game mechanics, where the player having action within game space, the game goals-how the player can outcomes all the obstacles, the possibilities of interaction-relation between player actions and game actions, and the last rule is the rules of representation -how game play is represented. It is divided into three modes: Mode of narration- where the character is a fictional. The second mode is a simulation, it focuses on the character’s function(shooting, running, hiding),and the last mode of communication-allows self-representation in the social space of the game.

Goffman’s concept of three “frames” talking a game as a ”primary framework", when the players can recognize each other as a video game player and act as an event ,Second frame he called “in light of the conventions of the game”-where the players are governed by the rules and constraints. And the last frame is “narrative frame “keying”-when the players pretend as fictional characters and act out their logic.




4.Christopher Totten, Washington ,D.C,(2012):"Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity,(pp.4-5)Source-TU Blanchardstown Library

The concept of the game art is the process of creating and designing the video game character. When the game character designers are planning characters, first they should produce ideas for their characters backgrounds, tastes, religious beliefs, and include more details telling who they are. The author also points out the important concept not only to design the game character visually engaging but also make them marketable.




5.Cavazza, M. O., Charles, F. and Mead, S.J. (2002) 'Character-based interactive storytelling', IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17 (4), pp.17-24. Source



6.Kristine Jørgensen Eludamos:"Game Characters as Narrative Devices. A Comparative Analysis of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 . Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2010; 4 (2), p. 315-331 Source



7.  Jim Bizzocchi1 and Joshua Tanenbaum :Mass Effect 2: A Case Study in the Design of Game Narrative  Source


8. Jacqueline Burgess1 and Christian M. Jones:  “Is It Too Much to Ask That We’re Allowed to Win the Game?”: Character Attachment and Agency in the Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy.Source


9.  Jörg Kienzle, Alexandre Denault, and Hans Vangheluw :"Model-Based Design of Computer-Controlled Game Character Behavior" McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2A7, Canada      Source


10.Kristine L. Nowak Christian Rauh:"The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction,.."  Source


References: Image Info:

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