Technology

The First Interactive Gaming Course

digital musicEssay question: can digitally created music ever be as fulfilling as music created by humans?

Yep, that’s what I have to write 4000 words on. I’m starting off with an analogy on what would happen if an academy award was given to the best score, and it turned out that no one made it. Or rather, it was digitally generated. Would they give it to the computer, or the person who programmed it? I’m having a bit of fun figuring out exactly what would happen. I think people would be angry at first, just like they are at the advent of any new technology. I was one of the first people in Melbourne to do a video game design course that focused on fully-interactive gaming (that’s a fancy way of saying virtual reality). It’s not readily commercially available, unless you feel like plodding around with an Oculus Rift. It’s still in the theoretical stage, although there are some exciting projects coming up that are going to take the world by storm. One of our video game design lecturers- who doesn’t come across as an absolute genius but I think he must be- showed us a piece of his virtual reality game. It’s just a project he’s been cooking up in his basement over a number of years, but it’ll turn the world upside down once it’s released. The amount of thought and work gone into it just blows my mind.

So that’s why I don’t think my course is worthless. Fully interactive gaming is coming, and it’s going to get far more people involved than the regular kind. Everyone will want to do a game design course once they realise that the possibilities are endless.  So I’m, a pioneer, kind of. Not that I’m going to be a big name (I’m really just here to get a glimpse of the future and maybe do a bit of playtesting), but I do believe that this is going to be big. I guess the people who did the first video game design courses, back when Super Mario Bros. was big news, faced the same thing. Eh, technology.