Week 3: Qualitative Polls Start

Welcome to Week 3 of my blog!

Another short entry this week! As I wrapped up most of the quantitative gathering from weeks 1 and 2, I started work on creating google forms questionaires for the communities I intend to poll. With this, I have also started looking into Bernevega’s paper on Exploring the Assetization of the Triple-A Game in order to better understand the business portion of the video game industry. While this paper focuses more on the GaaS (game as a service) formula of video games where the game relies on live service updates and events for profit and design, the monetization and economic thought-processes are still relevant in the creation (or recreation) of a traditional offline video game as well. It discusses the evolution of video games as a form of entertainment to a commercialized form of profit, rebalancing the scales between financial stability and audience expectation. To connect this to my project, this paper can be applied to the core struggle many studios face in the process of remaking a game: balancing appeasing veteran fans or catering to newcomers. This confirms and expands on my suspicions since before starting this project: that the shifting priorities to make a video game profitable impacts the aspect that makes a video game “memorable”. To elaborate, many modern triple-A games follow proven methods of success seen in other titles such as the aforementioned GaaS model (i.e, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty), the hero-shooter model (i.e, Valorant, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch), among others. With “safe” models like these, the recreation of older titles when these models did not exist and when games were more experimental, the profitability and confidence that investors want become less certain, thus leading to this contention between faithfulness and modernization. 

While that’s in process, in week 4, I plan to start the distribution of my questionaires and (finally) learning the basics of GB Studio to start work on my first planned product! To do this, I will be employing YouTube tutorials as well as playing around with the program and its documentation. To make things easier, I already have a set of features and gameplay planned for this project, with benchmarks as I progress the development of this product. This will be quite a demanding task, so I expect to run into a few bumps along the way, but with my experience with getting into new software, it is doable.

In other news, my search for a digital placement is still in progress – I am currently awaiting confirmation from Rochester’s Strong Musuem of Play. I will keep you all updated, and hopefully GB Studio proves cooperative!