Evolution
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
History has shown that Orcs and Humans alone from the first version of Warcraft (Orcs & Humans - 1994) weren’t enough to leave gamers begging for more. So they pulled out the whole mythical encyclopedia and threw almost all the characters they could find into the battlefield to join the war for the next sequel, Warcraft II (Tides of Darkness - 1995). Players loved it and soon became loyal fans that swore to buy and follow up with every warcraft game that Blizzard produced. Not disappointing the fans, Blizzard came out with Warcraft III (Reign of Chaos) in 2002. This game promised complete control over map creations and gameplay styles with the help of a guided ‘World Map Editor’ function. From there, it exploded! Thousands of different kinds of games started popping up on forums and hardcore fans with a vision to be recognized soon spent most of their time creating a new game play from the old traditional ‘player A builds army, player B owns your ass with an even bigger army’ gameplay as it was getting pretty predictable. What’s more, these gamers don’t really need a week to complete the entire storyline that came with the original gameplay. They were THAT sick in the head. Thou I must admit I ALMOST did get sucked into the dark side, but that’s another story.
Warcraft III (Reign of Chaos - 2002) and Warcraft III (Frozen Throne - 2003)
Out of those thousands of maps that were produced, “3 Corridors”, “Tower Defense”, “Heroes Arena” turned out to be the few most popular genres. The common biting point that they had was you ARE the hero you control. That made the gaming a lot more personal all of a sudden and people love the way they can grow from a feeble ‘Don’t hit me! I’ve got glasses!’ to a ‘Com’on biatch! I’ll pwn you all’ hero with sick weapons and armor. Then, like throwing the dog another bone, Blizzard came up with Warcraft III (The Frozen Throne – 2003) just a year later. Same gameplay, same platform, but more skills and characters for customization. What more of a reason do you need to own that expansion pack!? Then 3 Corridors evolved to DOTA (Defense Of The Ancients) and the whole game turned into a massive map factory where players are constantly exploring new ways to come up with new gameplay. If you ask me, I’d say Blizzard was super smart to let the public do the trial and error test for them. Why rack your brains so hard to come up with a new gameplay when your fans can do it for you while you sit back and count your muchos?
World of Warcraft (2004)
With all the arrows pointing them in the right direction of what people wanted, WOW (World of Warcraft – 2004) was born. Not only was the pun of the name very suiting, the game took a 360 degree twist of style. Interaction, guild forming, epic equipment, personalized avatar characters all mashed up into this MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game). If you scroll up, you’ll see that they started with a game with just 2 types of characters running around chopping each other around a 2D confined map. Now, they offer you the world with a simple payment of $70++ and a monthly $24. You can explore more about WOW just by doing a search on Google and you’ll see they’ve even created a ‘wowwiki’ just for you to find out just about everything in that game.
So introductions aside, you can clearly see that I’m a gamer myself. Not as hardcore as to not sleep for days just to play but I’ve been close enough, playing DOTA till daybreak. But that was just once. Anyway, in relation to our topic, the evolution that I’ve put up on the title was not focused on that game purely, but also the evolution of our approach to video games. We want to research and talk about how games make us want (if not NEED) to get the newer versions every time they come up. The example I’ve given above shows that almost every year a new version of the game is released and every year the same crowd camps overnight in front of the stores just to grab hold of the very first copy in their country. I’ve never done that but it really amazes me to see them actually being away from their computers for so long! Is it really a good thing that our society is being driven and motivated by games? Don’t get me wrong because I’m guilty of being addicted to them as well (hence the PSP wherever I go), but I want to focus on what really drives us to being so isolated in our own world that we hardly make time to talk anymore. We can’t go to our friends in school and expect a keyboard to pop out in their hands so that we can make a conversation with them (thou I must admit that might make an interesting video).
We are losing our power of speech, the one skill that we were force-fed to learn after we’ve mastered walking. As Henry from Group C and I agreed, people are now conveying their problems and life stories on their blogs instead of actually sharing them with their family. They rather let unknown people read about their life and leave their family in the dark about some abusive boss that they have back at work. Are we moving to a world where we have to start turning to media to find out how you family member is feeling? Should we all have floating emoticons beside our ears to tell people how you’re feeling at the moment? Do we all have to hide behind our computer screens because we are afraid to make mistakes in conversation? That our comfort zone is no longer our home, but the portable, log on anywhere, chat messenger that you can just download within seconds?
I shall not say more about this but rather let this blog inform you of our findings that show you how video games, in general, affect our world today. Someone throw in something happy to say about video games cos I’m logging off back to reality. >_<
posted by reH @ 1:30:00 AM,
