COMM 344: The Level

The perfect level is one that challenges us, but does not frustrates us, one that is neither linear nor a hedge maze. id Software has made a lot of games: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and Rage are the ones that come to mind immediately. 3 of those 4 games are level based shooters, while Rage is an open-world shooter (there's a longstanding community rumor that Borderlands was more or less designed based on prerelease footage of Rage, based mostly on how similar the games feel, and how Borderlands was developed almost entirely in the eternity between when id first showed off Rage and when it shipped, a year after Borderlands). The goal of this post is to analyze the structure of game levels, particularly how id changed it's methods of making a first level between Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake.

Wolfenstein 3D's Episode 1, Floor 1

The first level of  Wolfenstein 3D is mostly linear. There are some corners for early weapon upgrades hidden here and there, and a set of connected rooms that provide at least 3 ways to complete the level. As far as general game levels go, it's fairly fun to play through, though the world is flat in every way. The level takes place on a single floor of a castle to compensate for the lack of variance in floor height that the Wolfenstein engine had. The engine also lacked diagonal walls, making everything feel somewhat square.

Doom's E1M1: Hangar

Doom's first level is even more linear than Wolfenstein's, on the surface. The main path of the level is such that it can be completed in less than 30 seconds, however, some early weapon and armor pickups, plus a secret area that takes up roughly a third of the map, give the level more replay value than Wolfenstein's three slightly different grey and blue square paths. Doom also adds floor height and diagonal walls, in addition to enviromental dangers. The look and feel of Doom's level is closer to the expectation we would have for real architecture than it's predescessor. The issue with the level design emulating reality is that idTech 1 could not do what is called floor over floor, that is, multiple levels on top of each other. Height could done, but a second story, or even a balcony or bridge, was out of the question.

Romero's sketch for Quake's E1M1

Quake changes things considerably. idTech 2 introduced floor over floor, as well as smooth slopes (rather than idTech 1's solution of doing slopes as really tiny stairs) and rudimentary support for curved walls (basically the really tiny stairs idea, but with walls). Quake's layout is pretty linear, but contains more bonus rooms, a bridge, and the introduction of switches to id's first level work. Doom 2 also contained switches in it's first level, and Doom had switches and keycards throughout most of it's levels after the first, the reason I count Quake's inclusion of the switch as novel is that it's the first a switch is introduced in the first level of an unfamilar game, as Doom 2 was so similar to Doom that the game could assume more knowledge of mechanics in it's first level.

While first levels are not always the most exciting in the game, they serve an important purpose as a benchmark for change in a developer's expectations of a player. id Software made their levels more interesting over time while also increasing the general scope and challenge of the levels.

COMM 344: The Sounds Of Doom

Doom's sound style is rooted in two places - heavy music, such as Soundgarden and AC/DC, and the popular Sound Design library of sound effects. Sound Design is notable for it's use in other media, particularly in episodes of Doctor Who and in 1994's The Santa Clause (where enemy death sounds from Doom are used as Reindeer grunts).

But more to the point, we look at Doom's music soundtrack. The primary source (both in the sense of it being the main source of information and a literal primary source) of information on the inspiration for Doom's music is in the music files themselves. The files reference, for instance, AC/DC's Big Gun as an inspiration for E2M1 of doom.wad.

We know this is true of the whole soundtrack because, in 2007, John Romero released Bobby Prince's unused tracks from Doom (doom.wad) and Doom 2 (doom2.wad) with notations as to which albums inspired which unused tracks, and which unused tracks were adapted into other tracks. We also know, from Romero's own admission, that he gave Bobby Prince a stack of metal CDs to work from for Doom's (doom.wad and doom2.wad) soundtrack.

(Author's note: references to doom.wad, doom1.wad, and doom2.wad are made in order to show the usage of a primary source while not being able to upload that source directly due to copyright concerns. All the information found in the WAD files can also be found dissected on The Doom Wiki, but people who cite wikis as sources belong in the setting of Doom's second episode [hell])

COMM 333: Black Music on MTV

The situation with black music in the early days of MTV is fascinating in several regards. While, in lecture, we focused on the contributions of Rick James and Micheal Jackson, there are some other interesting points that bear mention.

There's the issue of musical memetics (that is, the cultural genetics of music, herein seen meme as a form of musical genealogy), which is an interesting subject in and of itself, but takes on a new dimension when we look at it's impact on MTV's refusal to play black music.

To dig into this, lets consider the memetic genealogy of a given song, with black influences in bold.

Another One Bites The Dust

• Queen's biggest inspirations in general are The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
• John Deacon, Queen's bassist and writer of this song, however, was inspired heavily by disco band Chic, whose song "Goodtimes" would have it's riff adapted into Queen's Another One Bites The Dust as well as into Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight later on.
• Chic also inspired Duran Duran's song Rio. Themselves, they were inspired by Ben E King, Arethra Franklin, and Parliament Funkadelic.
• Those three artists track back to Otis Redding, and Chuck Berry.
• The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are born of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, respectively.

The point being that most music that MTV was perfectly fine with playing and representing is, in a memetic-genealogical sense, far more black than white. Yet MTV didn't want to represent black music on their network? It seems as if the real issue that MTV had was in representing black artists as equal to white artists. When they did support a black artist in Micheal Jackson, it was after he left his Motown roots behind to create pop music with Quincy Jones. The threat of Jackson's blackness was subdued by a music with mass market appeal. Jackson's physical features were softer, less tough than Rick James. He was, in essence, white washed. Which begs the question of whether the industry desire to make him seem less black is culpable for his plastic surgery later in life.

COMM 344: Doom and the Columbine problem.

When the Columbine Massacre happened in 1999, pundits jumped on Doom. As this article from The Denver Post in May 1999 shows, a lot of focus was put on Eric Harris's love for the game. People speculated that Harris had created a Doom level of Columbine High School, that he and Klebold had practiced their massacre in-game. 

Commonly, Doom players rebutted this assertion. The common rebuttal is that enemies in Doom are aggressive. That, in 1999, the ability to change enemy behavior so that they flee was not possible. Regardless of these rebuttals, it is of high importance that we look into news media's portrayal of the impact of video games on violent behavior.

In the modern day, video game violence is no longer such a concern. In "Are Video Games Art?", Nick Gillespie states "...video games have become too ubiquitous to prohibit, their predicted damage to the fabric of society has stubbornly refused to materialize." Essentially, the people who called for bans on games in the Doom/Night Trap era were proved wrong by history. The news media still wants to discuss the issue, but banning video games is an absent concept.

This shift is apparent from a perusal of Gillespie's article. On Columbine, he says "The Columbine rampage was routinely attributed to the killers' playing of first-person-shooter (FPS) games such as Doom (where players were "space marines" fighting demons) and Wolfenstein 3D (World War II POWs vs. zombie Nazis), even though later analysis concluded, in the words of psychologist Peter Langman, "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games.". 

But what does the lack of calls for mass-banning of games really mean? Does it mean that child-friendly games like Super Smash Bros have gotten us to a point that banning games is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or is it games like Bioshock and Flower that reinforce the idea that games are art, as Gillespie argues? While the motivations for acceptance of video games are unclear, it is clear that games have become more socially acceptable in our society. Games are no longer our scapegoat. (Leave that to social media).

COMM 406: The Century Of Self

Edward Bernays was influential to the idea that Americans are now essentially consumers, and no longer citizens. He wanted to find a way to sell to the people in large cities that came about in the turn of the century. To accomplish this, he looked to the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. Freud's work concerned the idea of humans having hidden, irrational desires. Bernays decided that he could profit off of people's irrational desires. The film The Century Of Self articulates that there is more to our purchasing decisions than information.

The idea of selling things with information was a longstanding one. Items would be marketed on necessity, on facts as to how they will improve one's life practically. This changed with Bernays. He was the first to theorize that we should sell products based on irrational desires, and it worked.

Today we purchase Apple computers because they make us look innovative and young. We purchase Lucky Jeans because Oprah once told us they would make us sexy. We buy things to satisfy an irrational faith in image over substance. Is there a practical benefit to a Mac over an HP PC? In most cases, no (Final Cut Pro being the notable exception). We buy Mac because we want to be as Mac users are. Do Lucky Jeans offer any benefit? They fit inconsistently, are pre-shrunk, and tear easily, but we buy them at a higher price than superiorly made Levi jeans because we want to be seen as the type that wears Lucky Brand. What about Beats headphones? Tests have proven them to be lower quality than Sony headphones that sell for 150 dollars less, and yet we buy them for the idea that we can be like Dr. Dre. We want to be something bigger than ourselves, not for the value of self-improvement, but because it might chance to impress others.

That's essentially what Bernays theorized. He thought that we would want something for irrational reasons, and today, rationality seldom comes into play in purchases.

COMM 344: Doom and the question of art.

Artistically, Doom shares a lot of ideas with the Alien(s) film series. It's not hard to see why, in an interview with The Guardian, John Romero, the lead designer of Doom, listed H.R. Giger's Necronomicon and James Cameron's Aliens as the primary influences on the game's style. If you are familiar with the Alien(s) series, you'll know that H.R. Giger was the designer of the Xenomorph species that exists throughout the films. With the atmosphere being inspired by Aliens, and the monsters inspired by Giger's Necronomicon, it bears looking into Giger's work.

From the title Necronomicon, we immediately see that HR Giger was inspired by the work of the legendary gothic horror writer HP Lovecraft. In "The Gothic and the Fantastic in the Age of Digital Reproduction", Anne Quéma argues that Giger's work is both Gothic and a work of Fantasy. The Gothic is considered to be texts which are present in the place between pure reality and pure imagination. Quéma quotes Todorov's The Fantastic "The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.". Todorov gives the specific example of the devil, which, while not present in HR Giger's work, is absolutely present in Doom. The series takes place largely in hell, and forces us to encounter demons that are visually very much like the works of Giger. One of the earliest dialogue moments in Doom 3 is "the devil is real, I know, I built his cage".

But Quéma also looks into the sexual undertones that Giger put into his work. For Giger, necrophilia is a repeated theme. Quéma states that "erotic seduction is checkmated the necrotic display that identifies the viewer as a posthumous witness."  Giger is essentially creating an image that juxtaposes the sexual and the grotesque so as to create a level of discomfort in the viewer. In Alien, this is evident in Ripley stripping to her underwear in the escape pod before her final confrontation with the Xenomorph. In Doom, you shoot white plasma from a phallic looking gun that is mounted in the center of your body at a series of zombies and demons. The influence of Giger's necrophiliac work is subtle, but once you notice it, quite obvious.

The Plasma Rifle being fired at an Undead Soldier

1. Quéma, Anne. "The Gothic And The Fantastic In The Age Of Digital Reproduction." English Studies In Canada 30.4 (2004): 81-119. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

COMM 344: Research in gaming and education.

Slavin, Robert E., Nancy L. Karweit, and Baltimore, MD. Center for Social Organization of Schools. Johns Hopkins Univ. "An Extended Cooperative Learning Experience In Elementary School." (1979): ERIC. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

This article explores the efficacy of various team-based learning models. Included is the Teams-Games-Tournament model, in which Mathematics students competed with other students to earn points for their teams, and at the end of each week, the team scores were posted publicly. In the STAD model (used for language arts), students were put into teams, then scored based on their performance in typical class work, with team results posted weekly. In the Jigsaw II method, students were given a portion of each chapter, and went into teams first by topic, and then a mixed team of every topic, to discuss and teach each other student. Students were tested on basic skills before and after the models were used. The STAD method proved to be useful in Language Arts, while the TGT method was useful for Mathematics. Jigsaw II proved mostly unhelpful.

Bacon, Melanie A., and Marilyn M. Ault. "ALTEC Learning Games: Successful Integration Of Learning And Gaming." Online Submission (2009): ERIC. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

This article explores the idea that mathematics and language arts can be taught through video games. The reasoning the article gives is that children are already motivated to play games, and therefore learning through games is an easier sell. The games presented are essentially Space Invaders level complexity, but with subjects like basic addition added in. In the classroom, these games proved to be more effective than tradtional learning, with 14/24 students getting an 80% or above before games and 20/24 students getting an 80% or above after games.

Dusel, John P., Sacramento. California State Dept. of Education, and Others And. Bibliography Of Instructional Materials For The Teaching Of German. Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve. n.p.: 1975. ERIC. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

This article aims to catalog various methodolgies for teaching German language in k-12 environments. While a large number of the materials discussed are periodicals and books, variations on Bingo and other children's games are present throughout the text. In total, of the hundreds of learning products listed, only 17 were games. This speaks not to the efficacy of gaming in language education, but to the underwhelming presence of game-based learning. 

Oregon Univ., Eugene. Oregon Elementary English Project. Games And Activities, Volume 1, Part C: Language; Levels A-B (Grades 1 And 2). n.p.: 1972. ERIC. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

This article discusses possible games that can be used to grow the language skills of elementary aged students. Though the article primarily looks at games for 1st and 2nd grade, it also discusses game play for students as high as 6th grade. The author believes that game play encourages learning because it is different than the everyday classroom.

National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL. Ideas Plus: A Collection Of Practical Teaching Ideas. Book Eleven. n.p.: 1993. ERIC. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

This article discusses many ideas in education, but of concern to us is the author's editing game. Students were given Monopoly money for every good edit they made in a peer's paper. This money was used in an auction at the end of class periods for things like snacks, school supplies, and the ability to turn in a paper late. The exercise proved to be an effective motivator for the students. 

Tatar, Sibel, English, and Communication, Bloomington, IN. ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading, and Bloomington, IN. Family Learning Association. Dramatic Activities In Language Arts Classrooms: Resource Summary. ERIC Digest. n.p.: 2002. ERIC. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.

This article explores the usage of creative drama in the classroom to build upon language skills. The paper theorizes that children learn language through things like theater games because it forces them to use language in a way that simulates reality.