Monday, September 10, 2007

Mii's Taking Over the House That Mario Built

I chose an article titled: Casual Fans Are Driving Growth of Video Games. The article is about the quickly expanding video game market, and the affect that casual gamers are having on the video game market as a whole.

A column containing a series of bullet points that detail what a “Noob” is (a casual gamer). This would contain information such as specific examples of casual games. Other bullet points might include the birth and growth in popularity of services such as Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, Nintendo's Virtual Console, or Sony's Playstation Network. Though all three services are relatively new, each one has become incredibly popular, and each caters primarily to casual gamers by offering a host of simple, pick-up and play games.

A time line illustrating a history of the video game industry, specifically the history of home consoles. This would begin in the 1972, which marked the release of the first home console: the Magnavox Odyssey. Users could view information detailing important events that occurred during a given year by clicking on that year of the time line. For instance, 1975 would be a highlighted year because it marked Atari's first entry into the home console market with a machine dedicated to playing Pong called The Sears Tele-Game System. Other highlighted years would include 1983, which saw the collapse of the video game industry as a whole, and 1985, which saw the revival of the industry with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario Bros.

The most difficult multimedia treatment to put together would be a “Casual Game Player.” This would be similar in use to the video player on YouTube, but instead of being a simple interface for watching videos it would be a simple interface for playing various Flash-based games. A large number of these games are available free of charge, and it wouldn't be very difficult to put together 3 or 4 examples of “good” Flash-based games that users would be able to play. These Flash-based games are important because they paved the way for casual gaming.

1 comment:

Cindy Royal said...

I only see three treatments, column of bullet points , timeline, and the video game interface. The project required four treatments. I like the idea of having examples of games that people can play online.

With the column idea, however, it doesn't appear very interactive. You only describe bullet points. Perhaps some links could be added or an interactive graphic could be created to define these concepts?