Sunday, July 27, 2008

Up Close And Virtual

Writen by Jonathon Hardcastle

Computer gaming has given birth to one of the most competitive and flourishing industries in the world. Game developers have been busy trying to take their games to the next levels in order to compete with their counterparts and earn their markets shopping dollar. With ever improving graphics, additions of improved artificial intelligence, better game play and game speeds, rigorous enhancements to game details and captivating story lines, each new computer game seems to become more addictive for gamers.

This huge success owes a lot to the feedback given to the game developers by the gamers. Clearly no one can understand what improvements a game requires for it to become even more attractive, than the people who play the game themselves. The game developers themselves can not notice the slight details that gamers can. This is why the big names in the industry have started giving more attention to testers and their feedback. So much so that they gave rise to a whole new study called "Game Study" and also "Play testing".

It has become more like war between the game developing companies and 'everything is fair in love and war'. Because higher-quality games tend to sell better, game developers are increasingly looking for ways to improve their games. Thus, to improve the quality of their games some game developers also tend to seek help from psychologists to study the patterns of how the minds of gamers work and what might make the game more addictive. One such way is to make the game more challenging yet easy to learn and use.

Multiplayer games tend to be more successful. The key to develop a successful and mind blowing multiplayer game is to maximize the quality of game play and adding strategy to it. For example Counter Strike by Valve has proven to be one of the most successful multiplayer games ever made, because anybody can learn how to play it, requires very little pc resources and thus most computers can run it, has an exquisite game play and with a little team strategy can be pretty fun to play.

Thus there is a lot to making the perfect computer game. Game developers are always aiming to improve all these aspects to make their games perfect. With developing technology, improved graphics cards and monitors, the game developers tend to make use of these to make their games as real as possible with ever improving graphics. It seems evident, that computer games one day will soon reach a point, where they become close to virtual reality.

Jonathon Hardcastle writes articles on many topics including Games, Toys, and Sports

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