Literature/Contextual Reviews

Been a while since my last update, so I’ll churn out a few blogs quickly within the next week to make up for it. My main focus over the last week and a half has been the Literature/Contextual Review module which basically requires everyone to pick a topic related to their work and research, analyse and evaluate different methods of research to expand upon our existing knowledge. We are given advice and lectures on Fridays to assist with this module but the lectures are absolute dire and a completely waste of time. They usually revolve around one or maybe two usefully points then the lecturer will just rephrases the same point about 7 or 8 times to drag it out to an hour. Maybe these lectures are useful to other students/courses but to me they are just an utter waste of time. I wanted to make sure I at least take something away from this module so I looked into an area that I would find interesting and usefully towards my work and a subject that would be easy to find plenty of sources for. I looked over my previous blogs to find a relevant subject,  some time back I spoke about the impact video games had on me growing up, the attachment I have for specific games and how they made me felt. I thought an interesting topic would be to explore how video games can produce those reactions in players on demand. So my subject became ‘How can emotion be produced through decision making and player actions?’

Fortunately I had already been reading some design books before I decided to start this essay so I already had some sources I could draw info from.  The assignment required two essays, a Literature and Contextual Review. The Literature Review required 30 sources (10 books, 10 journals and 10 websites) I think it’s a bit unreasonable to expect us to read 10 books in the time span but thankfully it’s easy to jump to relevant sections in most books. Another reason I picked this subject is that it’s pretty easy to find sources related to emotion/player reactions in video games, it becoming such a growing area of interest in the industry at the moment.

I’ve always found it pretty easy to just write and write loads of drivel as I think it up but for this assignment there was a word limit of only 750 words so after the initial flood of words I typed up I probably had to cut out nearly double the actual word limit.

The Contextual essay was easier I found, maybe because it was easy to pick 5 sources from 10 non-word sources than from 30. Most of my contextual sources related with ‘making of’ videos from game developers or interviews with successful creative directors. I attended the Bradford Animation Festivals some days earlier so it seemed only sensible to stick that in my sources as well.

Regardless how well I did or didn’t do I can honestly say not a single Friday morning lecture actually helped or felt relevant to my assignment, which just furthers my dislike for it. Also, we couldn’t even hand our assignments in till about 10:10am (10am deadline) because the tutor was running late, so technically everybody failed anyway.