task 6teen, gaming cultures.

I cant check the gamesutra account because you need to register so i'm going to write what it think this task was on about.
Gaming culture is sort of like film culture were different people group towards their different genres of games, you have your RPG fans who might post pictures of kittens and listen to J pop, and you have your FPS fans who might argue about whos mom sux the most or how much George Bush is a fag,online forums is a popular place for this as gaming culture is tightly bound to internet culture, the internet provides a meeting place for game fans and allows users to play against each other online, it also provides users a place to post their own creations and get feedback.

The webcomic Concerned, highlights certain gaming "cultures"
within certain first person shooter games.

Webcomics are becoming popular in the internet these days, their are a few good ones such as
PBFcomics and Concerned, Concerned is made with garry's mod wich changes Hl2 into a sandbox game where you can make contraptions and "hilarious" poses, people now make comics with it wich.. 99% of them are terrible, but concerned had its moments, giving someone who can't really draw a chance to make a good webcomic. ( i won't go into machinima.. ew)
Modifications, to me are an important part of gaming culture and some day the industry, its were a lot of talent for the games industry is found and although there are some lazy, badly thought out mods a lot of them are gems and are really worth playing, certain mods make bad games good, operation flashpoint wasn't that great until it got patched and modded up, Battlefield 2 is a horrible game on its own but Project reality really makes up for EA's silly mistakes, and worked wonders with such a limited engine.
A lot of mod teams have been given support to release their mod as a full game, such as The Ship, and Red orchestra, also garry's mod was recently released as a full game, these games are usually released over Steam.
Mods are getting very popular, counterstrike has already shown us that a small mod team can get a huge playerbase, you just need a good idea and a few decent coders and 3d artists.
Gaming culture is huge and is no longer restricted to bedrooms and arcades, games are as much as a phenomina as TV or music and will continue to gain popularity.

task 15

It kinda looks like i missed a load of tasks but its actually the week 15 task and not 12 or something.


The game industry is constantly changing, at the moment we see big companies with thousands of employees releasing games, a lot of the work is outsourced to countries where labour costs are a lot lower.
Many people seem to think that the outsourcing will cause difficulty in getting in the industry, it probably will at first, but cheaper artists are no replacement for actual talent and motivation, i think that as games get bigger a lot of the generic objects (tree, wheeliebin,terracedhouse.) will be outsourced oversea's and the bigger, more challenging objects will be undertaken by game artists in country.
I also believe that smaller team led studios will be more popular as a teams vision could be created with the help of outsourcing, Some mod teams are starting to release games you pay for, The ship, Sin episodes, Portal, Red orchesra. are all games created by mod teams who moved on to bigger projects as the original mod gave them some experience.