Author: Brittany Leigh Davis

I went into this project thinking of all potentials for a video game blog. At first I hit some speed bumps when I tried to come up with an idea that was different enough, making reviews and videos quickly out of the question to avoid being called a copycat. Thus Pixellated Culture combined my penchant for all things history, literary, and video game.

One of the first things I noticed when creating this blog is how hard it really is to get out there. There are a lot of blogs just on Blogger, let alone getting WordPress and Omeka in the list. I was unsure how to get into this. Thankfully Blogger’s random button convinced me I’d get traffic and off I went.

Right now, Pixellated Culture, while not a booming success, is a success by my standards. I had wanted only 10 page views per post, and have averaged that and more. This surprised me as I’ve done little marketing of the blog outside my Twitter feed. I do regret not being able to market more, which is probably the only thing I would change if I had to do this again. This whole project has made me think about the status of video games as part of a scholarly agenda and what kind of audience wants this type of blog.

What surprised me the most was the google searches that led to my blog. Unfortunately, those who read my blog appear to be RSS -and- Follow-phobic, as my blog does not have any actual follows through these things, meaning those who do read the blog either follow my twitter links or go out of their way to type the address into the bar. These same people also don’t comment. I consider this a good and a bad thing. It’s bad because I would love my reader’s input into what I cover or if they think I’m crazy, but it’s good in a no trolls on my blog way. Perhaps no news is good news.

This project also made me realize the international application of the internet. Most of this class was spent focusing on American usage and ideas, with the potential for these ideas to go across the board. I’ve had many hits from across Europe. The U.S. is certainly my prime audience right now with a majority of my hits coming from within the U.S., but I have readers in Finland, Hungary, Denmark. Unfortunately, I can’t tell if I have multiple readers in these areas or if it’s just one, but I now have to keep an international base in mind since video game releases vary. This isn’t much of a problem with modern video games, as most developers prefer to release world wide on or around the same day, but they might not have access to all the online games I do.

This blog has also made me consider what is a game. Recently, I decided to do a post on flash games, with the flash games all being on one particular site that I frequent. Hopefully, I can gage the response from that so I know how soon and if my audience wants to talk about those type of games or if they are of a more “hardcore” sector.

One of the last things I noticed as a trend was that my literary posts tended to get more traffic than my historical posts. My post on Bioshock (second post) garnered more hits than my post on Fallout 3 (first post), which could be handwaved by saying it was order. But my post on Silent Hill (fourth post) garnered more hits than either Metal Gear Solid (third post) or Assassin’s Creed (fifth post). What this tells me is that while my audience is interested in the historical aspect (they still read those posts) they prefer looking at the literary aspect, the story aspect. I find all this to be an interesting look into the current gamers’ mind, but can in no way call this conclusive. I will maintain the project in the future, as this topic still remains in my interest and I feel like I can’t let my readers down now.

1066 is a rather interesting flash game. It’s crafted really well and it’s not bad for a flash game, but it’s not the greatest either. From a gaming standpoint, it’s very pretty to look at, but the controls were a little off. You have three types of units, each capable of attacking and forming groups when in the right formation. Each unit is given three options: Move, Taunt, or Fortify, with the exception of Archers who can fire. Personally I never used the fortify option as the one time I did it didn’t see much of a difference and the game went faster if I moved the units into an attacking position. Units automatically attack when next to an enemy unit, capable of charging if you move them in a straight line from a distance. There are a great many options for strategies, including just having the computer randomize how many of each unit you have, and you quickly figuring out if your strategy is working.

However, the battle system is a little too easy to figure out. Here’s my strategy for winning: 1) get 1 or 2 groups of attacking units have them move together 2) have the rest of the attacking/soldier units go charging at the enemies individual units 3) line up archers with as many of the enemy as possible or their leader depending on situation 4) have your leader taunt. I didn’t have much time to experiment with other strategies, but usually it all boiled down to this. By the end of the battle, most of my soldiers were dead, I still had my archer and my leader and I won by calling them silly names. Every time, the battle fell into a fight of calling each other silly names and I won because I managed to keep my moral higher.

The battle system also has little mini games which while interesting for variety, weren’t always as well implemented. Taunting required you to do some fast typing, fighting requires you to hit the arrow keys at a specific time a la DDR, charging requires pressing the space bar really fast (more fun than it sounds), and archery makes you choose an angle and a firing strength very quickly. The archery was the worst in my opinion as you have no idea which angle is correct until you fire and if you accidentally select an angle that you didn’t want you can’t fix it. The others were really fun, though sometimes I suspected that the fighting mini-game was a little off on timing.

From a historical standpoint, the game is very interesting. You play through three battles that occurred in 1066. You get all your quick historical exposition in lovely cutscenes, and each army has different units to add to the flavor, i.e. only the Normans have knights on horseback. Each army also has customized taunts, the English being fond of ones involving poop and the Vikings calling you a troll. You get to play all three armies, and are on the historically winning side for each battle. This works great for those trying to learn a little about 1066, as then you are required to win to find out more. This bothered me because I didn’t get invested in any side and already knew that whenever the Normans showed up they would win. If each army had a campaign I felt I would have learned more and had more opportunity to learn tactics for each side (this is not overly complicated for flash games, as some are very in depth).

While the history set up the idea for the game, while playing the game I felt it could be any two armies, and 1066 was just the flavor chosen. This is a problem known as gameplay and story segregation. This comes in degrees, and for this game it wasn’t horrible, but it was noticeable. I felt no difference between the Vikings and English, and did absolutely nothing to change my strategy. The Normans I felt a noticeable difference as they had knights which just murdered everything. History can work as a setting for a game, it’s just that it needs to be more than a flavor, it needs to be visible in all aspects of the game.

Communicating Design by Dan M. Brown is best summed up by its title: it teaches you how to communicate the design of your website. The book carries through the ten deliverables and how each applies to a website, with everything from a simple flowchart to usability tests. Each deliverable gets explanations of its uses, when they are necessary, and every chapter has plenty of visuals to show you different types of each deliverable (definitely useful in the chapters dealing with charts). The book spells out its desires in simple English and even tells you how to deal with those pesky naysayers at meetings.

The book was created for people in the industry of making webpages, usually for companies. The book does not go over all the coding and such that goes into web design, though it does mention a couple tool for making some of the deliverables. Most of the deliverables are for when you are making a website from scratch.

So since most of our class is probably not currently designing their own webpage, what can we pull from this book? Many of us will most likely use services that have websites already preconfigured, with limited options for how we can personalize. However, I’m certain at least two of the deliverables can be useful. Creating personas will be useful for keeping a website focused on the target audience. Competitive analysis keeps in mind what other sites have done, not only in terms of design, but also in content, so you can make sure you take what is good and keep your site original.

Personally, I found the book very interesting. As someone who spends far, far too much time on the internet, I enjoyed learning what went into all the sites I look at every day. While I probably will not make my own website anytime in the near future, I can appreciate the work that goes into making each site useable.