The game that Hayley and I are making centres on a young girl who is facing a familial crisis where her parents are constantly arguing, leading her to create a fantasy world with the arts and crafts she makes in her spare time. This is known as a Paracosm – a imaginary world often made in childhood.
The essay topic has to be relevant to my game and aid in assisting me with its development. Here are a few topics that I could explore as an essay:
The topics I could choose are:
- Childhood in games – How is it portrayed? How are child’s perspectives valued?
- Child abuse (in games) – How is abuse from a child’s perspective portrayed?
- Hair braiding in games – How is the craft shown in the medium of games?
- Games centred around Handicrafts – How does the human element of crafts influence the game and its story/art?
- The ways nature is shown in games (self-explanatory)
What I ended up choosing was: Childhood in Games
Why? I felt like there was a lot that I could cover, as there are not as many child protagonist’s in games and their perspectives as both children and people with emotions are rarely both discussed. I felt like this would also be a good opportunity to understand my own character as I am the Narrative designer for this game, and it would help me to understand how to make the protagonist appealing to players.
Material I can use to help me with this essay
- https://gamerant.com/games-child-protagonists
- Google Scholar
- Children of Silentown (Game)
- My Child Lebensborn (Game)
- How do you do it? (Game)
- Emma Reay – The Child in Videogames: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous
- Books about Child Art and how they engage with it (Library)
- Books from the perspective of Children’s authors, how do adults understand the child POV? (Like me as an adult making games from a child’s POV)
Brief
“You need to write a 3500-word essay that is split into an academic article and a journalism-style article about the SAME subject. You should split at 2000 words for academic, and 1500 for a journalistic style.
Think about the different audiences, the academic one must be Harvard referenced, and the journalism one is not a blog, it is still a formal piece of writing, think Edge or Guardian Games.”
We had a small sheet to fill out to help us understand more about the game and how to extract an essay out of it.
- What do you need for this game to be fantastic – This could be theme info, tech info, experience info.
- Of these which do I know the least about?
- Tech info: since I am learning C# code from scratch.
- Of these which do I know the least about?
- Of these which would be good to know more about to improve the design / visual / feel of my game?
- I think theme info, as diving into this theme of childhood in gaming will help me improve the visuals + feel – why are people drawn to nostalgic and comforting games like these? And how do people react to harder/realistic topics in a cosy game setting?
- Think about your brand questions: WHAT, HOW, WHY?
- WHAT: Childhood, Multifaceted, Nostalgic, Conflicting
- HOW: Through Dialogue, how the player character is treated by all characters, in-universe and not.
- WHY: Slowly reveal context for what is happening, why is the player in this world? Why does this Paracosm exist?
- Do some basic research online or library on some of these themes and ask yourself? ✅
- Is this a topic that I can write enough about? ✅
- Is it too narrow or shallow?
- I think that there will be many umbrella topics for me to discuss with this one.
- Will I find this interesting? ✅
- Yes, it is a subject that I am passionate about.
- Do I feel I can write about it given the short deadline? Maybe it’s too in-depth?
- I believe this would be simple enough to write about in a month, since I am already gathering info.
- Discuss themes you are narrowing down on?
- Childhood in games
- Art made by Children
- How children are portrayed by game designers and the different stereotypes.
- Has each team member got a different theme?
- Yes, Hayley is exploring Handicrafts side of our game while I am looking at Childhood. This is so we can both cover the 2 central themes of our game.
- How will you expect to see this supporting the game design / game project / marketing or branding?
- Game Design: Informing me how to communicate this theme better to the players
- Game Project: Help me to improve my Narrative Design.
- Marketing/Branding: It will help me to set a Discord server up if I have a game with a solid concept running.
Learning Outcomes for this module
| Reference | Learning Outcome | How could I potentially show this? |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | the relevance of key discipline-specific theoretical and contextual themes to your work; | – Examining theories relevant to my chosen topic |
| A2 | ways of communicating an informed and critical understanding of your work in the context of the your study. | – How can I dissect my references, and how they can provide context to my essay. |
| B1 | formulate and develop an idea and broadly research its context; | – Heavily researching my topic and dissecting it in relation to my chosen topic. For example, looking at the child in games, a topic I could look at is how are children treated between different game genres; horror vs fantasy? |
| B2 | recognise useful links between contextual data. | – See how I can bridge the gap between topics using references and my own opinions. |
| C1 | demonstrate organisational skills; | – Have a clear schedule of what I need to do, like researching a different aspect of my subject each week. |
| C2 | identify, select and draw upon a wide range of visual, printed and electronic sources. | – Use a range of information to support my studies. This will include websites, academic articles, books from the library, game media and playthroughs. |
| C3 | Demonstrate that you can articulate and communicate in a professional manner appropriate to the chosen topic. | – Proper grammar as well as using correct referencing – Study the styles of academic articles and apply it to my own |