How Video Games Imbed and Convey Sexual Messages
If you don’t understand much about these games or don’t even have a clue what all the fuss is about you’re not alone. How can a company or individual imbed something in a video game like the latest controversial sexual content in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I’ll help you understand all you need to know.
A video game can be a very complex thing. In the beginning there was games that were in the arcades. These had a hardwired set of circuit boards that constituted the video game. The arcade style game was the precursor to today’s console games such as X-Box and Play Station.
Some leaps forward in the technology were things like the disc player and the disc drive. The first game to come out with a revolutionary new technology from the circuit boards of the first games was Dragons Lair. It used a disc player much like today’s DVD’s and played portions of the movie that you could control.
Then things leaped forward in computer technology. No longer would games be limited to the circuit board. Apple and it’s home computers brought gaming to the desktop. Things progressed rapidly and games found a new niche. The computer game went from the hardwired boards to the programs with the invention of the computer disc drive.
The video game started simple and has grown more complex. AT first there were games that the programs were very strict in what you could do. Things like pong but more complicated. By this I mean that the programs were not very flexible in what they could do so the game was very controllable by the company that produced it.
The program is actually just a language that a computer understands, a simple set of instructions that accomplish certain things that are set in a certain order. Today the programs are longer and more complicated but basically the same. Simple sets of instructions that accomplish things that the person controlling the game tells it to.
So how can a company or individual set things into the program that no one until now could see. It would help if you understood some about how these types of games work on a basic level. I’ll not go into anything very complex or complicated.
A video game has a program that is very set in how it runs, this is the game engine. The game engine is the basic program that the whole game is based on. The engine as it is known in the industry can be a complicated and expensive thing.
To buy the rights to an existing game engine for use in your own game could cost well into the tens of thousands of dollars just for the first rights to it. This is not the profit that the designer of the engine gets when the game sells, that is usually a percentage of sales when the game starts to sell on the market. This is just for a game developer to use the game engine to see if he can use it in his own game.
The game engine is a very complex and flexible program but is very limited in it’s use. A designer will use the engine and create the world that the game will be based on. The engine is the things that happen in the game and how they happen.
Things like the physics that occur in the game and the way that things happen according to how the engine is set up. Things that occur according to the physics of the game set in the engine cannot be changed except to change actual numbers or formulas in the engine. This means having some actual interaction in the game program to change things that happen in the game.
To understand this I will demonstrate what I mean by talking about some first person shooter games. In a first person shooter you go around and shoot as if you are in the game, from the first person perspective on your video screen. The screen shows what your eyes would show if you were in the game.
During the game the engine runs everything that happens, when you shoot your gun at a target hundreds of yards away, the bullet goes out of the gun according to physics formulas that are in the game engine. The designer of the engine has all these formulas for how the bullet acts, things like gravity on the bullet as it travels, wind resistance to the path of the bullet and the movement of the shooter at the time of the shot all effect how the bullet will travel. These are things that are programmed and cannot be changed in the game unless you edit the game or parts of it.
These are very complicated and have to be an integral part of the game in order for the game to work correctly. The engine has all these formulas as part of the game and if you change any of them, the game changes. This sounds odd for a video game to have all kinds of real math and physics formulas but it is how it is done. To make the games as good as they are requires the real world math to make it realistic.
That is why the kid that loves video games and thinks he can design video games just because he can play them is in for a rude awakening. A video game designer or programmer has to know his stuff, math, physics and computer programming to design a video game. Someone who loves to play video may be able to play them, but that does not mean he can design them.
Speaking of which, if your child wants to get into this kind of career that is what is required for almost any job in the video game industry. Math, physics and especially computer programming. There are jobs like programmer, level design and graphics artist but all require computer skills and an understanding of math.
Programmer is for things like the game engine, computer programming, math and physics are required. Level designer actually gets the engine after it is done and builds the worlds of the game and sets the things that the player is supposed to do in the game. The graphics artist creates the graphics of the game, everything you see in the game is created by graphics artists.
So if your kid wants to be in a career with video games, he has to study and do really good in school. Game designers and such have a very tough job and its not all fun for them. It’s work just like anything else.
In a game, the game engine is the basic program that runs the game. There is something called the level editor or level designer that is a separate program that the level designers use to create the game world and the things that happen in the game. This is used after the engine is built and is used in conjunction with the graphics designers to create the game as we see it.
We will not usually see the game engine other than as a program that runs the game when we download it onto our computer. The command program that runs the game is the executable program or exe for short. The exe is just a program that starts the engine. The exe will usually have some kind of disc recognition on it so that you cannot play the game without the CD disc in the drive. Some games let you play without it but many do not.
They do this so you have to actually buy the game to play it instead of just copying it to your computer from a friend who bought the game. There is usually a protection from copying the game also in this program so you can’t make illegal copies of the game and sell or give them away.
There are, like many things in this computer age, ways around these copy and disc protections that people have figured out and give away on the internet. I use them myself but only for playing the game on my own computer so I don’t have to put the CD in the drive every time I play the game.
I definitely understand and agree with copyright law and the rights for these people to make money on their own efforts and abilities. I just don’t ant to have to dig through the four plastic bins of computer discs to play a game for ten or fifteen minutes. I do not condone people who give the game away for free or worse sell illegal copies.
Now off the soap box and on to what I was getting across. The people who want to add things in the game, the how and what of things that happen in the game do this in the level editor. The editors use the editor, I know it can be confusing, to make the game levels. They sit and have these maps and little figures on the screen and put things in place. They ask the graphics artists to make some sort of pictures that they think would look good for things in the game.
The editors pick what they want to happen and place everything where it should be. They do this until the game is ready to package and sell. It can take a year or more to do this. I enjoy games that have the editor packaged with the game so I change things in the game or try my hand at level design on my own.
There are many games that sell the editor with the game. Microsoft’s flight sim games and combat flight sims. Many of the first person shooters from Tom Clancy’s company Red Storm. And even the ht games like Halo and Far Cry have the editor so you can play with the levels or design your own.
And this is what all the fuss is about with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. You can do things with the game engine that the designer of the game maybe did not intend, or anyone connected with the game for that matter. I’m not sure who came up with the stuff that is the reason for all the controversy. Apparently it is someone connected with the game. The part that everyone is so concerned about, with good reason, is on the game disc.
So what can someone do with this. With the game engine and the level editor you can do all kinds of things. There are parts of games that are called cut scenes. These are like little movies of things that happen between game play. How these are made is using the game engine and the level editor.
What happens is that the editor can take a camera and film a scene that he scripts in the game. This is all done on the computer with the editor. This is how cut scenes are made. You can take a level of the game using any map of the game. Add characters to the level and a camera. You can, using a script tell the characters what to do and film them using the little computer camera that is part of the game. Then during the game you can play the scene that you filmed and watch it. You can do this at any part of the game that you want.
The scripting of what the characters do in the game has to be a part of the game and it has to be added when the game is made. It cannot be made and added later very easily. That is why the game was pulled for the content rating change. The characters in the game could do these things when the game first shipped. It just took time for someone to discover where these things were in the game and start using them.
I am very disappointed but not really surprised that this has happened. It is a possibility that I have known about and have seen coming. I have been playing video games and using editors for several years and it is understandable to me the things that you can do in a game. I just don’t think that the game producers or the company that sold the game figured it would happen to them.
Parents need to watch what there kids do when they are on a computer. This is more and more a necessity in today’s world. Kids can go online and find all kinds of sexually explicit content on the web and not even mean to. It’s so easy that often people looking for one thing find nude or explicit things due to how the ones who publish the explicit content want it to be found.
With chat sites and child abductions kids need to be careful of who they talk to and what they do on their own computer. Today it is more prudent for parents to actually not allow younger kids to surf the net without a parent or trusted older person actually sitting with them.
My home computer that is connected to the internet is sitting in my living room with a desk for working on crafts and such. My TV and couch is actually in the dining room. I can just peek around the corner to see what my kids are doing on the computer if I’m not actually sitting at the desk across from the computer desk working on a craft or model.
I have the regular protections that come with Windows XP and my firewall programs that has the restricted URLs on it. The restricted URL’s block the sites that you don’t want kids going to. But I personally do not trust these and would not suggest you do. I watch them, and they know if they do something like chat or go to a site I have not approved, they will not be allowed on the computer for sometime to come.
I watch what my kids do and I check out where they go on the internet. Even my seventeen year old. He is going to be a senior this fall and I still check out where he goes and what he does. He may not like it but he does understand I am helping him out and watching out for him.
You should do the same for your kids. Even if you are not interested in the games he or she plays, watch them to see what they are getting into. The video games industry will never be the same thanks to whoever did this to the game Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
But you can be sure that people will be watching their kids just a little bit closer and see what they are doing on the computer with more attention to those video games.
