Choose the Topic for Your Own Social Issue Game

After playing some social issue games and reviewing their purpose, how well they address their issue and how fun they were. I found that a game can be fun and good at exploring a social issue. its all a matter of letting the player discover the issue while they play instead of giving the exposition first then forcing players to think about the issue while they play. in other words can the game stand alone and teach without specifically stating what they want player to learn. as for the game play are the controls easy to learn, is it clear how to fulfill objectives and how much control the player can get as well as challenge them with multiple factors.

1. Explore Local Themes and Issues that matter to you

How do the following issues affect your local community?

Poverty - People are losing their jobs to outsourcing and many people need to work two low level jobs to stay afloat, some people give plasma every week to have some money.

Health - Huntington is one of the unhealthiest cities in the world

Environment - pollution, depletion of natural resources, mountaintop removal, endangered species facing extinction, destroying natural habitats, wasting power, destroying ozone, and looking for alternative fuel sources.

Education - is in the gutter no child left behind destroyed our art departments and is taking away many elective classes. My high school had a program called freshmen academy where the students all stayed together and went to all their classes together.

2. Choose one issue and find information about it.
~~EDUCATION~~

What do you think is the most important thing people should know about your topic? School funding and budget plans heavily influence how well students perform.

What actions should people do in order to help with this topic? Depending on what people find important there are many groups people can participate in such as Save the Music Foundation and Math Counts Foundation. There ways people and companies can make donations. Joining and actively participating in the PTA to make decisions and participating in fundraiser activities.

What do you want someone to learn from your game? The importance of education and school funding, and how decisions with the budget can influence how well students perform.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/backgrounders/school_funding.html
http://www.school-survival.net/articles/school/Why_education_is_broken.php
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
http://www.vh1savethemusic.com/
http://mathcounts.org/

Playing to Learn

3rd World Farmer is a Flash game that lets players manage a small farm in a developing country, and thus experience the hardships and dilemmas faced by the poor. 3rd world farmer teaches its players the difficulty of trying to raise a family while taking care of a farm, in a third world country. It doesn’t look incredible, but it’s clear what things are and where they go. The game is easy to pick up on from a player’s point of view with the specific color tiles for the items after a couple turns you begin to build a stronger base for money as well as start purchasing tools which yield multiplier bonuses the game ends after you purchase insurance for crops. Which is surprisingly easier to do under the strategy I used, which I found interesting was to focus only on the farm and no send anyone to school. I would like to learn the random name generation that the designer uses and the usage of the can and cant put item there mechanics aside from wanting to know how to make a working videogame. If I could improve the game it would be with a little better artwork and add a way to hired hands to help during later stages of the game when children are off at school and the women are having children.

Go rabbit go is apparently a social issue game, the object of the game is to collect as many carrots as you can before a sentient turtle catches you. You can use portals to move from one point of the map to the other, the one trick is that you can’t make your character stop or turn left which I think is either a cheep way of saving yourself from writing multiple control codes or a clever device to make players think of their left turn as three right turns. The imagery isn’t the best out there, but its good enough to tell the protagonist, the antagonist, the carrots, and the portals . I can see that each of the aspects of the game is made in flash, If I were to improve the game I would want to make a more clear storyline including an explanation to the only right turns or I would add more controls-- after all rabbits can jump. I would like to learn how to make portals and creating an antagonist.

Impressions 2 electric bugaloo

Well, here's my impressions of the game design class. I really like the fact that we don't have a required text for the class, one of our first homework assignments is to play video games. I am a graphic design major in the College of fine arts. I've taken 3d animation and a computer skills for art which let me gain some experience with flash. I feel this class will be fun.

THE START OF SOMETHING WONDERFUL.

My first post on this new blog

I've never had a blog, so lets watch this train wreck unfold. So I Made this blog for my intro to gaming class to basically use as a journal illustrating "what i did", "how i did it" and "what i learned from what i did." A blog, short for weblog, is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.
this site will mainly be used to catalog my experiences in the game design class, since it is an addition to my website it may also host my art work and those experiences as well. Thank you for reading my shiny new blog, I'm sure it has been an emotional roller coaster.