In a lesson we were told to play the game 'Desert Bus' and realise the purpose of the game.
The game is basically a bus in which you a driving it and the only buttons you can press are the arrow keys for acceleration, braking, steering left and steering right, honing the horn and opening the bus door. It is supposed to simulate a real bus journey in real time in which you are driving from Tuscan to Las Vegas and the time it takes is 8 hours. On completion of the journey you recieve one point and this is because existing games today gove you a numbber of points for completing a simple task and so the game creators wanted it to give you one point to make it seen that this is all you need and that you dont need 500 or 1000 points for just doing one thing. The fact that the game is made to be played for 8 hours is because games today that people play are played for short amounts of time for a single objective and not in real time and so the creators wanted to emphasise the reality of the game for having it for this long. As it is a simulation making it in real time makes it very 'realistic' even thoght the graphics are poor and the background is the same, a desert landscape, for the whole journey.
George.
ReplyDeleteRemember the game is deliberately boring and pointless. It is almost a pastiche of a computer game. It has all the elements of a normal game but just sets out to let you know they are 'stupid', hence the 1 point for driving 8 hours. They could just as easily awarded 1,000,000 points for it but by awarding 1 point it lets you know you've wasted your time.
Its realism (ignore the graphics) also makes it completely unrealistic. It was made as a tongue in cheek response to criticisms that games were too violent and fears that children might carry out violent acts in real life because they couldn't tell the difference (hyperreality).