9A. Reflections on the Gaming Presentation

I just want to start by saying that the video game project and presentation was the hardest project for me that we have done all quarter.  I’ve never played a video game other than Frogger and I really have no background, experience, or knowledge in gaming.  So thank goodness I got an awesome group who spent a few hours explaining everything to me.  I think they did an amazing job on the presentation and idea behind our whole game concept.  And considering that it took them hours to explain all this different stuff to me, for the fifteen minutes we had to explain it to the class I think we did a darn good job.

I think the hardest parts of our game to communicate or get across to the audience was the objective of finding the safe haven because people didn’t really understand what the point of finding it was.  We were trying to explain that they had the capabilities to mass produce the vaccine and the character had the information to make vaccine, so they needed to come together and save the world from the zombies.  I think our group also had a hard time getting the whole vision across to the audience because we had two very talented digital media majors with strong and sometimes differing opinions about the game, so when we were trying to explain it to everyone else it came across a little jumbled and contradicting in some areas.

I think explaining or discussing the mechanics of the game was the easiest because most people have a general knowledge of how controllers and different consoles work or operate.  A lot of people have played games before and even if they couldn’t understand our game, they knew and could appreciate how the controllers worked.  Goals were also pretty easy to communicate because they were pretty standard and self explanatory, it was all based on survival, basic human needs.  Find food, water, shelter, weapons, and ammo.  These self-created objectives were ones that almost everyone had seen before and understood because we are all humans.  The objectives were probably the hardest to communicate and discuss because the audience did not understand the reason for the final winning condition of finding the safe haven.  It was the main non-optional condition that must be met to achieve the outcome of saving the world, so it was key to communicate this, but it was difficult.  The rules also seemed to be pretty easy to discuss because they have been done before and made sense to gaming in general and specifically to the world we had created.  Completing missions and delimeters provide context and structure, while also displaying procedural elements.