Posts Tagged 'timeline'

Listening to the Game – A Brief History of Game Audio

Published April 12, 2008 Game Design , History 7 Comments
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One of the things I keep mentioning in the context of game design is the role of sound. Go to any games arcade, and one of the first things you’ll notice is that it’s an attack on all your senses.

Audio can play an important part in manipulating the emotions of the player – and their engagement with the game – as well as providing feedback when a particular action has occurred – or equally as a warning about something that is about to happen.

Today, many games consoles have part of their hardware dedicated to managing the sound – even surround sound in some cases. But high quality audio production was not always the order of the day!

Read A History of Video Game Music (GameSpot). As you do so, see if you can use the article to answer the following questions – or at least act as the starting point for a wider search that will turn up the answers!

  1. The Grammy Awards are best known as music industry awards. To what extent are game soundtracks eligible for recognition in the Awards? Is there a category for game soundtracks in the awards?
  2. How was sound used to create tension in Space Invaders? (Unfortunately, the links to the audio clips no longer appear to work. If you can find copies of sound files for any of the games mentioned, please comment back here with a link. If you want to share your own recordings, DivShare is one place to share them from (it’s not quite ‘YouTube for audio clips’, but then, is anywhere?).
  3. what is claimed to be “the first stand-alone audio soundtrack in the video game industry”? And just what is a “stand-alone video-game audio soundtrack”? ;-)
  4. when did stero sound start to appear in video games?
  5. to what extent was sound supported in the original GameBoy? How does this compare with audio supported in the current generation of handheld consoles (such as the Sony PSP, or Nintendo DS Lite?)
  6. when did sports titles first start to use continuous “play-by-play” commentary? What exactly is continuous “play-by-play” commentary anyway?;-)
  7. how did games from the late 1990s start to use music as an important part of the actual gameplay or game mechanic?

If you are maintaining your own timeline of notable events in game and interactive media history, why not add some important dates in the history of in-game audio to it? (You might also like to refer to the alternative game audio timeline given in the first part of Adaptive Audio: A report by Alexander Brandon.)

If you have access to IEEE Explore, for example through you local library, this paper provides an interesting technical history of game audio: Video Game Console Audio: Evolution and Future Trends, K Chang et al., Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation (CGIV ’07) 2007 pp. 97-102, 2007 (doi:10.1109/CGIV.2007.87).

For more general reading, try Game Sound Design at FilmSound.org.

A (Very!?) Brief History of Games

Published March 13, 2008 GM Free , History 10 Comments
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I was fortunate enough to attend the Media Guardian “Changing Media Summit” in 2008, and one of the sessions I attended was looking at the issue of games.

I’ll be posting more about the session later, but one thing that came up related to the definition of a ‘gamer’. Members of the audience were asked whether or not they consider themselves to be “gamers” (would you consider yourself to be “a gamer”? Why/why not?) and then asked to show whether they had played various games recently: Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, or Scrabulous, for example…

One thing that came out of the discussion was that people are unlikely to class themselves as gamers unless a significant part of their self-defining identity is wrapped up in gaming culture. Another point that came out was that computer games now have a claim on cultural grounds to be rightly placed as part of the tradition of gaming down the centuries, rather than as a geeky,spotty youth subculture!

Anyway, one of the most popular forms of computer game today – in turns of numbers of people playing them – are ‘casual games’ like Solitaire, Snake or Minesweeper. Casual games are easy to grasp and may be targeted at a mass audience and played over a short period of time. If you play games during snatched moments of time, such as a coffee break, or on your mobile phone whilst waiting for a bus, or train, the likelihood is that you’ll be playing a “casual game”.

Many people first play casual games that are based on variants of real world games they are familiar with. Historical games have provided a rich source of inspiration for many computer based puzzle games, from straightforward replicas to what might be fairly termed ‘derivative works’.

Not surprisingly, many of the earliest games we know about have been discovered through their remains or visual records of them. Some of the games are still played today – “living fossils” from the ludic past! –although whether the rules are the same today as they were several thousand years ago is open to question.

UPDATE: see if you can find two or three games timelines on the web. Do they show the same games? What criteria do you think were used for including a game on the particular timelines you found? What criteria would you use?

I was going to give a brief history of games, here, but instead I’d like to try out a little game… ;-)

I’ve set up a form to play the game using a Google spreadsheet: “History of Games” timeline.

The game is very simple…

Rules of the “History of Games Timeline Game”

  • I have seeded the timeline with scant details of three games and the periods they are thought to date from.
  • The game is time limited and next runs for fourteen days from May 3rd, 2009, for fourteen days.
  • The game proceeds by players committing sets of entries to the timeline.
  • You may make one set of entries to the timeline per clock hour, but make as many sets of entries as you like given that constraint for the duration of the game.
  • A set of entries is defined as follows: Pick one game from the games listed on the timeline, and enter two other games: one that dates from a period after the game you chose, another that first appeared before it.
  • Furthermore, the two games you add to the timeline must not be more recent than the most recent game in the timeline, nor should they be older.
  • You may optionally add a third game to the list that is either more recent than the most recent game, or older than the oldest game.
  • You may challenge as many other game entries as you like if you think the date, name, ‘creator’, location, or description given they have given for a game is in error; to post a challenge, enter the game details you believe are correct, using the same game name, and tick the challenge box;
  • Points will be awarded for each entry you make, and each correction you make, and deducted for each change that is made to one of your entries.
  • All rules are subject to change, and I may make arbitrary or incorrect rulings against them…
  • If you would like to suggest rule changes or modifications to the Timeline game (this is a first attempt after all!), please post a comment…

I have no idea whether this experimental game will work, so please engage with it, and please bear with me if one or two things need ironing out around it!

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