Defining Your Content

In this blog post I will be writing about defining my content within my game, I will also be writing about a certain piece of content in another game and then analysing it with one of the methods that I have learned the past week. Next I will be writing up a questionnaire about what people expect in a game that is defined by the game genre that I had chosen.

In this part I will be writing about two similar pieces of game content, one from GTA 5 and the other from The Last of Us. Both are torture scenes which are quite brutal in their own ways. The first one is from GTA 5 which had a lot of criticism from people complaining that it is over the top and very extreme as one report I found online described it as a “Brutal scene.” And another quote was “Kids in our playgrounds are displaying more violence and we have conducted polls and found they are viewing games like GTA.” Whether GTA did this on purpose in order to gain more views and publicity on their game is another matter, after viewing this clip on YouTube it does seem extremely violent and was very graphic. Now comparing that to the torture scene from The Last of Us which in my view is not as violent as the one in GTA 5, but still very brutal in ways he extracts the information he wants, the torture scene from GTA 5 in context with the story, so could they have gotten this information from another source without torturing someone for information, then the scene from The Last of Us is implied violence as you don’t really see the acts being performed, Joel had to do this as there wasn’t any other way he could’ve gotten this information from elsewhere. 

Then using a method I learned called hyperdermic needle theory, this process is also known as magic bullet theory is a communications model that suggests that messages can be directly received and wholly established by a receiver.  This can be related to the scenes from either game in opposite ways as the one from The Last of Us didn’t receive as much criticism as the one from GTA 5 which had a number of complaints and a news paper article online also suggesting that the scene was over the top and too graphic.  The term basically means something that has a direct impact on the viewer and its audience, and the GTA 5 torture scene was a perfect example of this as people went nuts over it and had multiple complaints. Others didn’t react in the same way as most of them weren’t affected by these scenes and carried on playing it like it was a normal everyday scene.

In this next part I will be writing up a questionnaire and asking questions specific to my gaming genre that I want my game to fit into, the chosen categories that I have chosen are Sci-Fi and First Person Shooter (FPS)

First off, one of the questions that I asked were if they played any kind of FPS games such as any of the Call of Duty series and any of the Battlefield games. The picture below shows how many answered it and the percentages which are split into.

Next I asked the question “Have you played a Sci-Fi game before?” and the image below summarises that answers, as you can see they are totally different to the first question as 100% of them said they have played an FPS game before whereas in this question only 13 of the 17 that answered the question had played a game in that genre.

Finally I asked what console or platform they play their games on and the picture below shows you the answer, the majority have gone for the two biggest consoles which are Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 whereas some other such as the PS Vita and the DS didn’t achieve any votes, this proves players prefer playing games on consoles rather than handhelds.