Day 5

In todays lecture we discussed modern applications for the web and computer. The first application we talked about was Instant Messaging (IM), this includes things like ICQ and MSN messenger that I have used. Of course these were not the first IM services, IRC had been in circulation since 1988. Of course when it first started it was text based, but it was good because you have multiple person chats in real time.

After IRC people moved on to chat rooms, but they were mass groups of people all interacting. With the introduction of ICQ you could have all your friends linked up to it and you could tell when they were on line and chat to them in real time. I keep saying this but its fantastic for people long distances away from each other. Although of course its mainly used by teenagers after school chatting to their friends.

Microsoft noticed the big number of people joining these pages and they introduced MSN messenger which came with every version of Windows XP. Which is handy as you don't need to find it and download it to your computer and since most people had it you could get in contact with more people. With MSN, it also allows you to have video chats, you can upload photos and you can do things like nudge each other.

Of course as in all applications on the net there are lots more versions you can find download and use if you feel the need.

We then went on to talk about Portable audio and podcasting, which is the ability to transfer your audio and video into a format on your computer that allows you to shrink the size of the file and transfer it onto Portable media players like MP3 and MP4 players. Shrinking the file size allows you to fit more files onto your player.

The second part of the lecture was about the study of video games in an academic sense. Arcade Games, Consoles, Computer Games, MUDs, MMOGs and others like this are all forms of Video Games and for a few years now people have been studying the games not in a psychological but as a form of cultural practise and what makes games uniquely entertaining in a different ways from books, cinema, television.

When academics first started talking about this study, there were two main schools of thought. The first school of thought was that video games are like stories and the study of games should be approached in the same way that one would study a 'text'. Like the video game 'Space Invaders' has the story of aliens are trying to invade earth and you and you space ship have to go out and shoot them all down and move onto the next level where more space ships come. These scholars were from the Narratology school for thought. On the other side, were the scholars from the Ludology school, rather than looking at the stories of the games these people looked at the play aspects. Saying games like Tetris can not have a story, and many games that have story elements are there for decoration rather and is incidental to the game being played.

And of course in all academic worlds there are more than just two views and many people fell somewhere in the middle of the Narratology and Ludology schools. For intense you can have academics that just focus on one genre of video games, e.g, only the study of console games, or computer games. Some consider that video games are a sort of media, and the game can be pulled apart into its different aspects and studied that way i.e. what are the rules of the game, what makes up the world in the game, and of course what makes it fun.

Its a pretty in depth way to look at what I try to think of as just a fun thing to do. Like most things if you know the behind the scenes workings of something does it make it less fun because you have taken the magic out of it.