Well, I've decided to start a journal of sorts - or well, attempt one. If you're here reading my journal, regardless of how you got here, I'll be quite surprised; something actually came of this. Regardless, I thought I'd collect my thoughts and ideas in the area of games studies because I've been inspired. It's been 19 years since the release of the first volume of the GameStudies journal, and after reading it in a seminar with my university tutor, I was slightly inspired to put my own thoughts down.
So here I am, a 21 year old Games Art and Design University student in Norfolk who's had a quick idea to write down his thoughts, hoping that one day said thoughts might contribute to the massive industry that is games. Maybe they will, but it's likely that it'll be left alone much like many of my other unfinished projects. I start a lot, experiment, but I've never had the motivation to finish. I'll get out of that habit one day.
What will I be talking about, and how will I be presenting it? Well, to answer the latter I'll be presenting it in quite a casual format. I'm not a professional in the field and I don't have the experience to keep up the expectations of academic media, so I won't call it as such. It'll be my thoughts, opinions and ideas on the industry and how I hope I could change it. Oh, and that's what I'll be talking about. A (hopefully consistent) mish mash of journal entries with one theme ruling it all: Games.
Games as an industry, in my opinion, is in a bit of a mess at the moment. With the introduction of a £75 season pass that's just a few costumes and two characters in Dead or Alive 6, the massive flop that is Anthem, the building hype of Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077, there's a lot going on at the moment. Of course, all those things alone may be a minor thing, just a fraction of what's appearing daily in the games industry. There's a lot going on right now, and I don't know if it'll be worse or better in the future, but by gods I hope it'll get better.
Micro-transactions are quite big at the moment (or as some people have started to call them, Macro-transactions); many people, including myself, are worried where the industry is leading to in this area of monetisation. Some people are hoping the micro-transaction debacle will be improving - like how events like the Belgium Loot Box ban are influencing it - but many of us are fearlul. Events like the previously mentioned Dead or Alive 6 season pass (the first of multiple, presumably expensive, season passes) show that the publishers and developers of games are really trying to push how far they can go with monetisation, and they have no signs of stopping yet. We'll find out how deep the rabbit hole goes, whether we like it or not.
Some (perhaps most) posts in this journal/blog will be short, some might be longer, but they'll all be from me. It might be talking about a game or concept I'm working on, the current state of the industry, or it could be an attempt to introduce some new terminology - whatever it is, it'll be from my point of view.
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