Games Industry!

Typical,I miss a class and we have a guest speaker!!!! Its a good thing some of the class avoided my crippling hang-over and were able to fill me in! Apparently his name was Gary,unless I've been misinformed. From what I've heard,this well connected shop owner seems to have enlightened my peers a great deal. It was one of the few times I've heard of people actually talking about the kind of jobs that are out there for us. I'm fed up having people coming up to me at home telling me "did you hear Dell have sacked another three hundred!". Aside from mainstream game development,he mentioned work in the support field, modeling,and even marketing which I was surprised to hear.

Right,three hours on, 10 gallons of water later,I'm back in form!!! Just in time for our second guest speaker luckily enough. No sooner had I replenished my bodily fluids than I found myself on the verge of loosing them again. An idea put forward about the death of the games console nearly had me in a fit of tears!Is it really conceivable that the improvements in web storage and the ability of a player to access their game anywhere outside of their own home could really kick the games console into touch?I very much doubt this!In my opinion the games console will be here for a very long time yet. For me, half the excitement of gaming is the build up! Waiting semi-patiently for that next big fix,those few hours of pure elation!I cant see the attraction of having the ability to game in every direction. For me that would ruin the thrill and dampen the immersion!

Online Communities!

Right,so the mayhem is over,presentations are done and dusted,normal service is resumed people.Ah, so this week we discussed massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) and their biggest sub genre, massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG). Well I cant say I'm their biggest fan!That said I haven't much experience with them either. The game of focus was EverQuest. In the fantasy world of Norrath you customize your character,explore the game world,complete quests and other such bull muck! Not particularly exciting in my opinion but there are some interesting aspects of these MMO games, communities being among them. These games give the player the ability to join a faction,guild or community within the game. This ability adds a great deal to the players experience. I've never played EverQuest but I do enjoy other team based games,such as online first person shooters. The team play adds depth to a game.Not wanting to let the side down is enough,combing brains and brawn to accomplish a common goal. Also I feel that the players acceptance and sense of belonging, have led to the popularity of these such games.

Unit Operations!

So what's involved here then?Well what I understood from this discussion,all be it very little, was that these unit operations (UO) can be used to disassemble a medium, be it a film,poem etc. into elements that can be individually critiqued.

 It was compared to Object Technology (OT) which focuses on the use of components in the development of software. This eliminates the need to rewrite certain software or as one of our lecturers loved to say "there's no need to reinvent the wheel!!".

 Both unit operations and object technology seem to have a common goal. They both strive to disassemble a system for examination purposes and reuse.