All posts tagged: Week 7

Outside The Crosshair in Counter Strike

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After my first round of Counter Strike my friends laughed at me for how much of a loser I was at sucking so much. Shortly after, I bought the game on Steam and embarked on a long 3 year journey to reach the top 3 players on an Australian server of 100,000 for the map CS_Office. But Counter Strike became a lot more than a violent, team based shooter that I was really good at. I learnt a lot about how to preempt an enemy’s decision, adapt under pressure, and coordinate a team – I wish these could be listed on my resume. I discovered mods, hacks, custom servers, custom game modes, friends, and international friends.  “In a first-person shooter looking and shooting, tend to overlap” (Bittanti 2006). But it was outside of where you were looking that mattered most to me in Counter Strike. Counter Strike is a universe of servers, and each server was inhabited by recognisable players native only to that world. To describe this experience I’ll use Klastrup’s (2007) fantastic description: game worlds are “persistent online representations, which contains the …

The Walking Dead: Text Adventure

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I created a tiny text based game about travelling as a zombie. This is my addition to the expanding transmedia catalogue of content within The Walking Dead universe. Play: The Walking Dead: Zombie Survival The difficult thing about creating this text adventure within The Walking Dead narrative was coding the game, and thinking retrospectively about how a player would interact with the game. Making a Text adventure requires you to stretch your imagination and craft multiple stories within a story universe, essentially the epitome of the transmedia form, but in one media format. Text based adventures, like Telltale‘s episodic games The Walking Dead Season 1 & 2,  create new interactive stories within the “complex fictional world” of The Walking Dead (Jenkins 2007). Robert Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead series, has sustained his universe of interrelated characters across multiple stories, by utilising the multiple entries of transmedia storytelling. The Walking Dead’s comics, games and TV-show properties have worked so well because of Kirkman’s close relationship to their creation. As Jenkins (2007) put’s it, Transmedia storytelling “has so far worked best … …