Archive for January, 2010

Best educational computer games for children

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

It is a known fact that children enjoy video games. They will spend countless hours sitting in front of their computer monitor or television. Most video games on the market aren’t aimed at younger children. Some think that video games are a mindless waste of time. This is untrue, there are many educational video games that will entertain and teach at the same time. Just because they aren’t shooting aliens or out-driving the police, doesn’t mean that the player won’t have fun.

It is hard to shop for video games with young children in mind. There is a hefty amount of games out there and very few of them are appropriate for small children. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Video games designed for children ages four through six do exist, and three popular titles are the following.

Caillou: Ready To Read

This game features the popular PBS character Caillou. He helps children learn about growing up and learning can a great adventure. This software is multilingual and can teach small children essential reading development skills in English, Spanish, and French. This game also won the Parent’s Choice Award. The game has three skill levels, lots of colorful characters, and flash cards. The game will entertain young children for hours. The price for Caillou: Ready to Read is set around $10.00 at Best Buy.

Finding Nemo: Learning with Nemo

Another popular title features Disney’s beloved colorful fish, Nemo. Finding Nemo: Learning with Nemo, is designed for children three to five, who will enjoy the colorful animation and the voices in the game. The activity game offers lessons in pattern recognition, counting, basic math, and in identifying numbers and letters. Both entertaining and educational, kids will be enticed by the undersea visuals which can be printed out for their own sticker collection. The price tag is around $19.99 and is available through Best Buy.

Jumpstart World Kindergarten

Knowledge Adventure, a company known for their educational games for over twenty years, designed this game. The game, aimed at children four to six, contains all the skills a child will need to learn. The skills taught throughout the game are math (sorting, shapes, graphs, counting, measurements, and calendars.), reading (rhyming, phonics, letters, sounds, and listening comprehension.), problem solving, and social skills. Parents can receive progress reports from the game and children can receive hours of educational fun. The price is

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The web community surrounding Wizards of the Coast games

Friday, January 29th, 2010

As the dawning of the digital age had arrived, Wizards of the Coast was quick to follow suit afterwards. So far, Wizards of the Coast has benefited from a powerful presence of a web community. Wizards of the Coast definitely has a powerful presence on the Internet. The company’s main site is known as www.wizards.com which is designed towards promoting its line of trading card games, roleplaying games, and miniature games. The two most notable games promoted on the website would be Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons.

The founder and former CEO Peter Adkison is an avid fan of Dungeons & Dragons. It is expected for Dungeons & Dragons to be promoted on the main website since it was purchased from TSR, Inc., which was strapped for money during the time. Many of the designers for Dungeons & Dragons ended up being rehired to work for Wizards of the Coast.

The web community that surrounds Wizards of the Coast is quite a vocal one. The most vocal would be the community built on its flagship trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. There is a sub-forum called “magicthegathering.com” where there is much articles and content on the site. On the website, there is a database known as “Gatherer” which lets you find info on any MTG card. It tells you the sets the card was printed for and the rarity of such cards. A web community for Wizards of the Coast has proven to be very invaluable.

Also, it has proven to be very valuable as a tool of gathering information by Wizards’ game designers. One example would be the designers for Dungeons and Dragons to visit the D20 Character Optimization Board. On the board, the designers have gathered information on who uses the various character classes, how the classes have been used, and which classes are deemed to be too powerful.

The web community has been very vocal and active in the creation of new cards for upcoming Magic: The Gathering sets. One such initiative would be Wizards of the Coasts “You Make the Card!” project. Registered members can create their own cards that could be chosen in the next upcoming set.

There is something similar known as the “Select Xth Edition” which enables registered members to participate in a poll. They can vote to see on which cards they want to be seen in the next Core Set of Magic: The Gathering.

Members have their own competition called the annual “Urza Awards.” The forum moderators have the “Unconventional Convention.”

In a nutshell, the web community has been crucial for Wizards of the Coast’s survival.

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Video game degrees: Will they actually help you get ahead in the games industry? – Part 1

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Simply put, video game degrees will not get you ahead in the games industry. Good curriculum in these programs may incidentally prepare a student to work in game design, programming, or art position, but the commercials for the majority of these institutions show that they are altogether aiming at the wrong type of people to bring in to the industry. Why would they want to advertise an almost blatant lie of two guys sitting around practically just playing a game and only needing to “adjust the graphics on level 3″, not believing they get payed to play games all day? Of course there’s the money a school stands to gain from the tuition of students looking for that easy job doing what some of them do all the time for entertainment.

What game studios that are hiring are looking for most of all are a portfolio, or examples of work you’ve done, second comes degrees in a certain development aspect, such as programming or graphic design. If you don’t have much to show to a company, and you still manage to get hired, even with a video game-related degree you’re going to most likely end up as Quality Assurance, or QA, Tester, which is most definitely NOT an “ahead” position in this current games industry.

Furthermore, the price to attend one of these schools or enroll in a video game degree program is often higher, yet leaves you with no mastery over any particular facet of game development. To make it worse, the fundamental classes such as math and writing may suffer in certain ways, and in certain cases the credits may not be transferable or usable towards future education.

On a positive note, if a student were to indeed thrive through a game-related education, graduate and receive their diploma, make it into the games industry and advance their career, they are likely to be well equipped to make well-informed decisions in regards to things they are in control of. Students working towards a video game degree are very often engaged in studies of games of the past, their mechanics, limitations and mistakes made, among other things. This fact may very well help raise the bar for gaming in the future.

Basically, the only thing getting any one ahead in the gaming industry is simply showing what they are capable of. The men and women in lead positions in any given studio had to first prove themselves to get where they are, and no piece of paper of any sort can currently replace that.

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Video game reviews: Guild Wars (PC)

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

First off, what is an MMORPG? A MMORPG is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Game is one where you connect exclusively to a server and play online with other people from all around the world. You level up together (if you are in the same group), work together on problems and share the rewards.

Guild Wars is a game I’ve been playing for around 2 years. For me it has the novelty of being able to submerse yourself in another culture, like many other games. With thousands of people online at any one time you can easily find a group of like minded souls and go off and adventure, capture a skill, level up, complete missions or quests.

So what does Guild Wars offer?

Well Guild Wars is a unique game for its time as you don’t need to pay a subscription each month to keep playing. As a one off payment for the expansions allow this game to carry on into the foreseeable future. This is a big lure for many people who either can’t afford the 9.99 a month that most games require, or don’t want to be bothered to pay it.

The game depth and its scope are truly massive. You start out in a newbie area (Pre-Seers) with a few very low level monsters, you can level up a few times and explore an area that is a light more easy going than the rest of the game and prepares you for the battles ahead. When you are ready, you can advance to the next stage of the game which is a couple of years into the future (Post-Seers) where the monsters are harder and the missions and quests ramp up quite quickly and soon span a whole continent of the world.

The graphics are average, with few attempts at anything superb or mind blowing. The game designers have gone for a somewhat basic design to keep the game focused on the actual game play and replayability factor. They have recently given the game a boost in all expansions and the original game by adding lip sync to all characters in cut scenes. The cut scenes themselves are of poor quality and really should have been done more like Diablo 2 with impressive animation and good voice acting. This is probably the worst part of Guild Wars as the average graphics really show through. The Alpha Channels are of poor quality and the grass and trees often show signs of being the gif’s that they are. Overall compared to games like Morrowind (cue applause) and Unreal Tournament, that are older games with superior graphics, Guild Wars doesn’t shape up.

In game items are items that are dropped by monsters or acquired by completing missions.

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The Evolution Of Video Game Design

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

It all began with Atari. Established in 1972, Atari started the revolution of not only video arcade games, but home video game consoles and home computer games as well. Game systems and video games have come a long way since the first Atari came out. Every year, new games and game systems are being established. Each system has bigger and better graphics than the next and each try to incorporate new and innovate features to out do competitors. Video game design is constantly changing, and allows designers to have the freedom and creativity to come up with systems and games most people could never even dream up.

The video game industry is full of competition all across the board. There are technology companies competing to have the best game system on the market that game enthusiasts are going to crave to have. Then there are game companies who are competing to have the best game out there by incorporating life-like graphics and new features. Video game design has come a long way from the days of Atari and it does not look like the industry is going to slow down any day soon.

The competitive market of video game systems is saturated with top name electronic companies. Companies such as Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sega make up the most popular video game system companies in the United States. All four have distinct video game consoles with innovative graphics and features. These companies come out with game systems every year trying to out do the current systems that are already on the market. Each company has a full range of employees specializing in video game design to make their product better than any other.

The popularity of these game systems is evident around Black Friday and Christmas time, or even when a new system is about to be released. Most recently when Nintendo was coming out with it’s Wii game system, avid gamers camped out for days in front of the nearest Target or Wal-Mart, hoping to get their hands on one of only a few systems to be released. The same can be said for the new Sony Playstation system that was recently released. With the popularity of these game systems, it makes a degree in video game design that much more appealing.

Colleges all across the nation are jumping on the video game design bandwagon. Programs in animation, digital design, game design and computer technology are mainstreaming their way into the classroom. These programs are designed to give students an insight into the gaming world and give them the tools and skills necessary to be successful in designing games. There are a lot of factors that go into designing a game, which makes this career field challenging, but exciting at the same time. These skills include game coding, computer technology, animation, graphic design and many other factors that are essential to creating game systems and video games.

A career in video game design allows students to tap into their creativity to craft new worlds and characters. Upon completion of a degree program, students will have the skills and knowledge necessary to create these games. Students will gain knowledge in story development, project management, digital content creation and artistic design. Advanced classes in 3D modeling, animation and game content development round out the skills necessary to be successful in designing video games. Students will gain enough knowledge and experience to produce a portfolio that will showcase their video game design talent. With students completing animation programs every year, the video game industry will never be the same.

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The use of video games as a learning tool

Friday, January 1st, 2010

In a world where computers have already become a necessity in our daily lives it makes perfect sense to utilize them as an educational tool. Computers are a valuable piece of hardware that has come to symbolize the last couple decades and are in everything we do.

I have been using computers for over 20 years now and from the earliest stages, there were games out whose sole intention was education. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is one of the earliest I remeber. No not the version 18 thats in the stores now, I mean version 1. Designed to be played on a computer with no harddrive and only equipped with 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, two of them if you were lucky. Games like this helped to prepare me for the world that we know now, fully computer integrated where typing skill is not a luxury or a bullet on your resume but a skill you need to do even the most basic of jobs.

I was introduced to computer gaming as education when I was still being educated myself at the age of 5 years old. Computers have been everywhere in my life ever since. In recent years I have watched my cousins, nieces, and nephews grow up in environments saturated with computers achieving higher levels of education thanks to games designed from the ground up to educate children. Often times these games target children who haven’t even started traditional schools yet. Thanks to these games they are more prepared than most for that first day of school. They are going to that first day of kindergarten already knowing their ABCs, 123s and even knowing how to read in some cases. Technology is turning our children into higher achievers and we should be there to encourage it.

I have seen some games that are designed for college age students too. My aunt who is a Physicians Assistant has games that allow her to learn more about her own job. It uses real life scenarios from medical clinics to help her learn more. It trains her to recognize certain symptoms when a patient comes into her clinic. The game has all the appearance of a traditional game but is designed purely for education. The teachers of this materials understand that, even in adults, making learning fun and interesting is the key to long term memory retention.

These learning games are not just for children. They are not just for adults. Learning games are designed to be used by everyone. That being said, it is important to get games specific for the age group you intend on learning from the game. Your high schooler is not likely to be impressed with a game that talks to them like a 3 year old and your pre-schooler is not likely to understand the material that an adult needs to learn.

Games are an important learning tool when applied properly. I believe that we will see the computer games role in education increase more and more. The computer game is here to stay. We might as well make use of it for teaching.

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