The Real Truth About D&D – Charney Cale

http://www.cale.com/paper.htm

 

This article is about Dungeons and Drangons. If you have never heard of this game, it is a role-playing game, where you taje a person that you have created and expolre dungeons and fight monsters, etc. The difference with this is that  it is not virtual. It is what many games of our time have been based off of.

Genereally, when I think nerd, or when nerds are portrayed very steriotypically. One of the things that they do is play Dungeons and Dragons.

I agree with this aritcle. Personally, I have played D&D once or twice, and it is just good fun lke any other game. You can choose a diety for your character to believe in, but you yourself do not have to believe in it. It is just another part to make the game a little more real.

Some people think that this game can cause suicide and other problems because they day that the people get too caught up in their characters but the truth is that they probably had other problems beforehand, and their issues were not cause by D&D.

D&D is harmless, nerdy fun and if people try to say otherwise, they are twisting it for their own means.

Educational Video Games

1) Mark

• Yes the author is has written other publications.
• His educational backgrund is that he is a professor of Gambling Studies is the Psychology Division at Nottingham Trent University.
• From what I can tell he holds no biases. He is honestly doing research on the educational benifits of video games.
• No there are no other biased writings.
• His audience is people who would like to know a scientfic opinion on whether or not video games can be educational.
• It has gone through a lot of editing. It is a research paper from an educational society.
• He may have been getting money to prove this from an outside source. This could make him biased.
• This was produced for scholarly purposes.
• Yes, it agrees with other sources.
• He has a lot of references, which he lists at the end.
• Yes, there is corroborating evidence offered for generlizations.
• This was published on Nov. 3, 2002.
• It was put into the Education and Health Magazine, Volume 20.
• Most likely schools and doctors offices subscribe to this magazine.
• It comes out every month.
• It is circulated throughout America.
• He is trusted within the academic community.
• It is unclear who funds this magazine.

2) ABC News on The Benefits of Video Games by Scott Steinberg

• Yes, he has written other publications.
• It does not say what his educational authority is, but he is a high tech parenting writer. He is a professional speaker and a buisness consultant.
• He belongs to no organizations, but he is publishing a book, and by writing this, he could help the sales of his new book, so he could be a bit biased.
• This authors intended audience were people that he wanted to buy his bood and the veiwers of ABC News.
• It has gone through a lot of editing.
• The publishing of his book could alter his bias.
• This was published commercially.
• Yes, this is consistent with other sources.
• He uses appropriate sources in his writing, but does not have any listed at the end, so they’re not as easy to find. The sources he cose vary in bias.
• The generalizations do seem logical.
• This was publihed on Decemeber 26, 2011.
• No, the initial source was fine.
• This site is updated everyday, as they have new stories.
• ABC news funds this site.
• They do make sure that the grammar is correct on this site.
• Citations are not done as in a research paper, but he does refer to some other people and organizations.
• I can tell who the author is, but not necessarily all of his credientials.

 

Essay 4 Ideas

• Educational Games can help you learn
• PC gaming and Console gaming are both good
• Video games can help you learn real life skills

Education games can help people learn certain skills. There are games to learn how to teach new languages, such as Jumpstart Spanish. In this game, they teach you some very basic spanish words. There are also some to help you learn skills, such as math, reading, and many more. Some of these games include the Jumpstart series, as well as many others like Clue Finders. My arguement would be that they can actually work. I played many of them as a kid. My mom was a teacher, so she and my dad got them for my sister and me. They actually do work, because I also used them when I was tutoring kids. It helps them, because sometimes you forgot that you are doing math or reading, when you’re just playing a game.

• Psycologically, how do these games help you?
• How many people think that these games actually help?
• Is there research to prove that they help you? If so, how much?

I would be able to do the educational games fairly easy, because I pleyed a lot, betwee mom getting them for us, and then playing some at school…. so many games. Another games was a game made off of the Magic School Bus show. If I remember it was a science type game. Educational games would be a good topic.

Video Games – help your brain?

I agree with the writer of the article In Defense of Video Games: More than just an Entertaining Time Sink. In this article, the author talks about how some games help our brains, but it depends upon the certain type of game, to whether it helps or not. I use video games to help releive stress, because what is better when you don’t want to be in this world right now, than to escape to another world or life via a ideo game. You might be the world’s biggest loser, but in your favorite video game, you are Mr. Awesome. Video games can make us feel better. Another thing that video games can do is bring people together. There are many video game tournaments out there, where people will meet freinds, who if they had nto attended the tournamet, they would not have met.

As a kid, my mom who is a teacher bought my sister and me a lot of educational video games. We had one set that was 3 CDs: one for reading comprehension, one for math, and one for critical skills. The critical skills one helped you with stuff like memory. These actually helped me sublimanly. I liked playing them, because you would do whatever task and you would get a  item. With these items, you would eventually solve the game. The goal of one was to save creatures who had been locked up, so you had to get all of the keys, while the goal of another was to find Sam the monkey. Thsi was achieved by finding clues. Another one that I loved was a math game. In this one, you were in space, and by completing the math related tasks, you acquired pieces to this machine. When you got all of the pieces, you got a new alien creature for your zoo. These games helped me understand concepts when I was younger.

For a while I tutored some kids in math and reading. For some of the kids, I would use these games, because you remember more efficiently when you are having fun.

Zoo Tycoon for the DS

Zoo Tycoon halfway meets my criteria. The graphics are ok, but they could be better. The animals look like what they are supposed to, but you can tell that if you got up close it would just be blobs of color. The landscape bothers me, because it is just blocks of coor for each different type,; they could havve made it to where it would blend and look a lot ore natural. There is no story , just senarios, which I guess you could say that there is a story within each one, because each one has a story behind the goals that you are trying to accomplish. There are different levels of senarios from beginner up, but you have to beat all of one level or type to get the next one. I very much like the controls for this game. The creators did a very good job taking the touch screen in to accordance when they made it. You are on the buisness side of it, so you don’t actually interact with the animals :(. One major down side to the game is that once you finish making the habitats for the animals, which is very easy, the tell you what kind of tiles to put in and exactly what the animal wants in its habitat, there is reall nothing left to do but twiddle your thumbs. Once youfinish all the goals for the senario, you have to wait until the alotted time for that senario has run out. So lets say you’re playing one that you have 12 months to finish, but you complete all the goals within the first 3 moths, then you’re left just to manage the zoo and wait for time to run out for 9 months, and they run on a month system, but they don’t tell you how soon the month ill be over. There had to be a better way to do that.

Good Game?

A good game in my opinion has a mix of good graphics, good story, good gameplay, and easy controls. To be specific, by good graphics, I mean: it doesn’t look blocky, the colors flow well together so you can see each individual pixel, and it doesn’t lag a lot. A good story consists of: an intelligent plot, it has to make sense and make you want to do it, not do this just because I said so,and the story has to be easy to follow. I don’t like it when the story either is too short, makes no sense, or there is no plot at all. Good gameplay and easy controls go together. To have good gameplay, you need easy controls, a good tutorial so you’re not completely lost, and you don’t want to play for a even an hour and then get bored with a game. It needs a point.

For my game, I am choosin Zoo Tycoon for the DS. Instead of a plot for the whole game, it has a senarios, each with their own plot. The graphics are ok, but I don’t like that each of the terrains are a square, they don’t blend. I don’t think it looks good. It has easy controls, and they make it easy to do what you want to do, but some of the tasks are confuing as to how you accomplish them.

This is my criteria on what makes a good game, and a brief review of Zoo Tycoon DS.

Dave & Busters

This week in Jeff’s class, we went to Dave & Busters. It was a fun trip. There are many differences between the old school arcades and the modern day arcade. Some of those reasons are: the way they handle the money: at D&B they did it by card, at an old school you pop in the quarters and you’re ready to go; the games that are available to be played: I think that a lot of the games in an old school arcade were single player, but in the modern day arcade more of them are multiplayer; and lastly the last difference that I saw is there is a different atmosphere at the arcades. Dave & Busters is a completely different atmosphere than I think that the old school arcades were, Dave & Busters has a bar, a full fledge resteraunt, and only part of it is a Chuckie Cheese style arcade. By this I mean that there is a good mix of one player versus multiplayer games. One of the games that I thought was fun was a game where you raced a horse. The fun thing was that, if ou so desired, you could choose a sire and a dame and make the horse before you raced it, and if you raced it twenty times, it then retired it and you could use it to parent more race horses. It was fun, but I was the only one playing it, in a quiet corner of Dave and Busters

Donkey Kong

This week in class, the new game that I played was Donkey Kong on the Atari. It was a fun game, but it was kinda difficult. It makes no sense to me why the barrely can roll down the ladder that I need to climb, and it’s always a suprise because there are no hints as to whether it’s going to roll down the ladder or keep going on the ledge. The makers of the game made it pretty simple to play. You move the joystick in the direction that you want to move, and you press the big red button to jump. It’s a fun game to play; I’ll have to play it again sometime.

I played a few more games, like Spyro, some racing game for the dreamcast, and a few others. A lot of the games that were present, I had already played.

Spyro is and always will be an awesome game. It has a pretty long story mode, but it’s a lot of fun to be that little purple dragon.

Another game I played was the infamous Hey you Pikachu. Me, along with a few others took our little Pikachu on a fishing trip. the hard thing about that game is that annoying little Pikachu never wants to listen to you, so you end up yellng at a TV screen. One day he will learn……

So I had fun in the most amazing English class ever.

Topics for Essay 2

Ok so I durped and did next week’s blog post instead of this one. As it goes for topics; I could do 1) Games that defined the N64, 2) Where did Pokemon come from, 3) Where did Harvest Moon come from, 4) What is Dungeons and Dragons, or 5) Why are people so addicted to Skyrim. Here are the questions for the games that defined the N64: 1) What were these games, 2) Why were they so great, 3) How many of them have I played (research by experience), 4)What was the best one overall, and 5) How do people feel about the N64, graphics, sound quality, etc.

About the N64, I already know that a lot of people see it as a good system. Although it’s old and the graphics were blocky, the games had a better quality. It’s like old movies; they may  not look as pretty, but they actually had a plot, good actors, etc. Some of the newer systems and games are good, but I love the classics. I know that some of the games were of the Mario and Pokemon series. Both great and classic series, that over the years have gathered a multitude of fans. I know that personally, I could spend hours playing Mario Party or one of the Pokemon games, such as Pokemon Snap, or Hey, You Pikachu!, or just one of the basic Pokemon ruby, gold, etc. They do a really good job of making you want the same goals that the game says that you need to accomplish.

So these are my topics, and as you can tell, I think that I’m going to write my second essay about the games that defined the N64.

What games defined the N64

When I looked up what games defined the n64, the first thing that popped up on google was someone’s personal site about what games defined the N64. According to them the games that defined the N64 were as follows: Super Mario 64, The Lengend of Zelda: the Ocarina of Time, The Lengend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros., Star Fox 64(Lylat Wars), Mario Party Series, Pokemon Stadium, Wave Race 64, Mario Tennis, Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Diddy Kong Racing, Aki Cooperation Wrestling Games, Star Wars Games, and Turok Series. I have heard of many of these as have many of the rest of us, but there’s a couple like Banjo-Koozie and Perfect Dark, that I was unaware ever existed.

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racketBoy.com. 8 August, 2011.  Web. 12 February, 2012

I agree with the author of this site that at least half of these games were legendary as beginning   games. Some of them though I have never heard of, but to each his own. Just because I have not heard of them does not mean that they were not famous then or now.

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 We all know that many of these games have had multiple sequels on many of the newer systems, but for some of them nothing is as good as the original N64 version.