Week 3, Meeting 1:
Date: 23/02/2010
Time: 02:00pm until 02:30pm
Staff present: Claire Brierley, Amanda Dewhurst
Location: C2 – 04a
Items addressed:
i. Feedback.
ii. Hypothesis.
iii. Goals.
Marvel Comics' The Sentry, the golden guardian of good... and bad?During Week 3 I researched Personality Theory & Archetypes, and compared what I'd learnt to my existing knowledge of superhero comic-books and films. The report I wrote as a result can be found here.
"When designing characters to engage the player there are a multitude of elements to consider, such as the visual and auditory design of the characters, as well as their personality. These design elements become especially important when creating characters a player will only interact with for a short time, as a lot of the player’s opinion is formed with the first impression."
Dragon Age: Origins [Bioware, 2010]'s Alistair and Morrigan, the example characters from my report.During Week 3 I borrowed C. Crawford's 'Chris Crawford On Interactive Storytelling" from the University library.
I completed reading the book over the course of the week, and the source analysis report I wrote as a result can be found here.
"C. Crawford’s 'Chris Crawford On Interactive Storytelling’1 is an intriguing book. On the one hand, it provides deep and detailed information regarding any way that plot and characters can be used in videogames, but on the other hand, is presented in such a confrontational and condescending way it’s hard to take the man seriously. This stems from the fact that while Crawford practically invented his field, other writers were published dealing with it prior to him, and there seems a kind of resentment present. Struggling through this, however, I found the book to be an excellent source for our project, as it presents further development in the ‘Personality Modelling’ I’ve been working on. While the entire book is useful from a narrative perspective, we are only concerned with Chapter 11, which deals with character-driven storytelling and believable NPCs."
After analysing David Freeman’s book “Creating Emotions In Games”, we were told that an outlook from outside the industry would benefit our project in terms of research. One book that came recommended was K. Oatley's “Understanding Emotions”, to have a general outlook on human behaviour and things that could be possibly be added to NPCs to increase their appeal. The entire book won’t provide solid, beneficial research towards our project but some chapters could give us valuable factors to take into consideration when it comes to creation.
The full document is available in .pdf here.
I've begun the 'Source Bible' of all of the sources used by research in Project Skills and in this unit. As this will be completely iterative, could I please request team members take a little more care with their referencing? Simple things such as giving the title of a paper without a URL for easy viewing, or citing a book without its ISBN. Other than that, I'm very happy to see several sources cited across multiple pieces of work (even one source across FOUR seperate pieces), let's keep that up, too!
Also, a minor update with regards to my Research Survey. The Mass Effect survey is being cancelled due to lack of replies, and I've still to recieve completed Dragon Age surveys from the team and from our second testing group. I'd be particularly grateful if this situation could be wrapped up by Sunday. For those who missed the link last time, they're here.