Articles on good and evil in gaming (23/1/2014)

* During today's session we continued to focus on key words and texts so as to expand our research.
Therefore, I decided to try and find some examples online and look back at some previous ones already recommended to me.

• Read the article I found two weeks ago 'Babies know the difference between good and evil at six months' (2010) in which it discussed a study about how children reacted differently during a puppet show. Findings showed, that they reacted positively towards the helpful puppet and negatively towards the naughty one. One child even punished a naughty puppet with a smack. It was an interesting article, but I felt the evidence wasn't conducted on a wide enough demographic. I even  found a comment stating that the research should have gone further. For example, they should have had an adult puppet tell two child puppets not to go into an area as it was dangerous, therefore when one tried to go in and the other stopped it it would be for their safety, not as a an obstruction which may have been seen without any context. Still, it is an interesting field of research which suggests babies may be born with some 'understanding' of good and evil even before nurture and environment influence them.
• I then looked at the article 'Moral Decision Making in Fallout' which was recommended to me AGES ago. In short it related rather closely to the example below which I read just before.

* Adam who is also looking up morality in gaming recommended that I include the characters' motivations and shared with me an article on Dorkly '5 Mistakes Every Videogame With A Morality System Makes' (2013).

Reading it I found that, although games may provide a morality system there is never a middle ground. In most examples of these types types of games you will never see anyone swap between the options good and evil. This is especially obvious whenever you choose to be evil as it is often cartoon villainy in comparison to the villain you are tasked on defeating. 
Often most players will pick just the one morality and do that for the whole of the game, especially since a lot of games reward players for becoming completely good or evil. However, often it is only the good path that leads into the sequel and not the evil path, thus your decisions that should carry over don't completely.  

However, it was good to point out that 'Dragon Age: Origins' and the 'Fallout' series deal with morality appropriately as it doesn't state whether you are good or evil, instead the people around you see you differently and either agree or disagree with your decisions. This is interesting as I had already used the 'Fallout' series and 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' (almost identical to 'Dragon Age: Origins') as examples of games with morality since I remembered them as being unique.

* The lecturer also recommended that we use the website http://gamestudies.org/1302 to find more gaming articles that may relate to our work.  

* Overall, I will need to try and find an example that grabs me the most as, although some articles talk about morality they don't cover exactly what I want to talk about.

Harvard Referencing:

• Takacs, M (2013) 5 Mistakes Every Video Game With A Morality System Makes. Available at: http://www.dorkly.com/article/56575/5-mistakes-every-videogame-with-a-morality-system-makes (Accessed: 23/1/2014).
• Game Studies (Unknown) Game Studies. Available at: http://gamestudies.org/1302 (Accessed: 23/1/2014).

Advice on my context project (16/1/2014)

* For this session our lecturer talked to all of us in order to find out how we have been getting on and whether or not he could recommend any resources for us to use.
The lecturer and my peers gave me the following advice...

• Use the term representation for referring to good and evil. 
• Look up 'Media and Morality'. 
• Try and find subtle examples e.g. someone who creates a polarity between two things, thus making one thing sound good and the other evil. One real world example could be George W Bush who claimed America were the good guys during the Iraq war. This could then easily blend in with the 'Call of Duty' games as you seem to always be fighting people of other ethniticities, therefore I could reference my work done in my Digital Arabs work last year.
• 'Borderlands 2's Handsome Jack is a villain who believes himself to be the hero.
• 'Grand Theft Auto's gameplay as the game encourages reckless and out of control gameplay. 
• In general try and include some real world examples to further back up my work with broad theories. 

* I also continued to work on the presentation and word document, noting down the new advice provided and finding images for my document.

* Next week we will discover more key texts that we can use in our projects.
He also recommended that we continue to find and read research online so as to keep expanding the areas we can look into.  

Key Word for our Project (9/1/2014)

* Today our lecturer spoke to us about our chosen projects and how we can become so absorbed in trying to find something to write about, that we don't realise it doesn't exist or is in another field.

Therefore, he suggested that we narrow our search by trying to find existing articles and papers based on similar subjects such as film and TV. By doing this we find out what others have written and whether or not it is relevant at all to our ideas.
My research included... 

• Looking up numerous movies that have clear examples of good and evil within them, such as 'The Lord of the Rings', 'Star Wars' and 'Harry Potter'. 'Star Wars' is an especially good example as it involves the battle of good and evil between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, yet Vader redeems himself at the end by saving his son Luke from the evil Emperor.
• Whereas, in TV I remembered the great show 'Survivors' in which the characters are portrayed more as humans with the instinct to survive rather than being solely good or evil.
• Looking online, I found an interesting article that claimed that babies of six month old's could tell the difference between good and evil, thus I could perhaps mention this in my work.

* We were then asked to write down a broad description of our chosen topic, using a key word to focus our search on. I chose 'Alignment' (a term used in Dungeons and Dragons for morality) as my overall discussion is on good and evil in gaming.
After doing the above we then shared our key words with the group in order to see if anyone else was doing something similar.  
I found that Adam would be someone useful to share resources with, as he will be writing about morality and indoctrination.

* With my key word chosen, I then used it to further expand the material I looked at today.
This research included...

• Finding many images that people had made of characters from both video games and movies showing each one as one of the nine alignments which included Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic all within Good, Neutral or Evil.
• I also found numerous examples of video games (mainly RPG's) that include alignment through the moral choices players make, such as 'Fallout' and 'Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic'.  

The lecturer also gave the following advice...

• As always keep researching things and add useful discoveries to our blogs, as this will show your work efforts outside of college. This is especially useful since we should be doing the same amount of work outside college as in.
• In general we should support one another, so if we find anything that could be used to help others in the group then we should share our resources. Therefore, a Facebook page will be put together in order to share things.
• We will need to have a presentation ready in order to showcase our concept to the group at some point, so I should start to create one.

Harvard Referencing:

• Derbyshire, D (2010) Babies Know the the difference between good and evil at six months, study reveals. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1275574/Babies-know-difference-good-evil-months-study-reveals.html (Accessed: 9/1/2014).

Research Proposals (12/12/2013)

* Today we worked on our research proposals by filling in forms.

We did this so the lecturer has an idea of what we wish to write about in order to give us feedback. This also gives us a working document that we can use and refer back to.

* If we do contact anyone for their input/knowledge on our chosen subject, then we should include it in our work as this all adds to our research and evidence. We also need to make sure we explain what we are doing and why we are interested in a particular person's work so as to link to explain why we contacted them.

* I also decided today to figure out which examples I wish to write about in my project that I have so far entitled 'Beyond Good and Evil in Gaming - How has this changed over time?".
These examples include...

• Pacman and the Ghosts
• Contra's heroes that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone
• Mario and Bowser 
• Kefka from 'Final Fantasy'
• Snake and Liquid from 'Metal Gear Solid'
• Lee and the survivor he stole from in 'The Walking Dead' game
• Joel and David from 'The Last of Us'.

* In the third year we will have another written project which the lecturer would prefer to follow on from this year's one. However, we will be starting the third year's writen project next year so as to get a head start.