For as long as I can remember I have loved playing video games with a good story. It turns out that most of my favorite games are in the Action/Adventure genre or more specifically the Platform style. These range from older game franchises like Ratchet and Clank and Jak and Daxter to newer titles like Uncharted, Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed. I am interested in the research of this because there have been several times where not only does the story of the game have a good message behind it, but it can really boggle your mind with science fiction possibilities.

My personal experience with video games seems to differ from most people. Sports games bore me as well as some FPS games. When I devote my time to a game I want there to be a story within it that can only be lived out through the game. Instead of playing a sport game, you can just go outside and play it in real life. I have played Destiny since its launch date it's essentially all out warfare on aliens. You can't tell me I can go outside and do that in real life like a game of football.

By no means am I a hardcore gamer. I merely love a good story that's only possible within a game. Perhaps a mystery, or puzzler, or finding a treasure lost to time such as the Holy Grail or Shangri-La. The Jak and Daxter took place in an entirely different universe for example as well as being filled with time travel and a deep story that couldn't be fully grasped until the final installment of the trilogy. I could tell you the story behind every game I listed at the beginning of this paper plus several others.


The central claim of this source is about how the Role Playing Game genre of video games has grown into one of the most popular and how it is also being implemented into other genres. Later Aaron Birch gives examples of some of the predecessor games that helped start this genre and also includes some nice pictures of the games.

Stakeholders

I see the possibility of two major groups invested in the success of the RPG genre. Those who are the game developers of RPG games and those who are developers of other game genres. Clearly the RPG developers will benefit the most but the other developers will as well since the RPG style is implemented into other genres

Author Credibility

Aaron Birch continues to write reviews for newly released games and even though this specific article is two years old it focuses on a subject that has become even more prevalent in modern games. The RPG genre of games has become one of the most popular genres as it is also implemented into other types of video games.


In this blog, the user Carbon64 brings up a good point and explains how important the media such as trailers, interviews, ads, and previews can be in publicizing a new game. Based upon how a game is marketed it can sink or swim. Good reviews turns into more sales for that game which in turn is more money. This effect can also be said about bad reviews but in that case the outcomes are quite the opposite. It's hard for me to believe that if Mario had gotten bad reviews that there might not be a Mario of today.

Stakeholders

On one hand there are the game companies and on the other are the review sites. The companies benefit from good reviews and are hurt from bad reviews. The review sites should be unbiased while doing reviews. A review site could potentially get a bad reputation for giving a bad review while other sites gave good reviews for a game. This could be detrimental to the site so there is a potential bad side for these stakeholders

Author Credibility

Even though Carbon64 is just a username, he wrote a mature article and then other users on GiantBomb commented on his work. Granted this is not as credible as other sources that I have found but this is a very good point that this blog got across. This is about as peer reviewed as an online video game article can get.

The main point of discussion in this thread ties in rather well to the issue of marketing. The author recalls a game that was talked about for 35 years but had been put on the back burner by the developers. So many people had highly anticipated it over the years and once it was released it was a major letdown. He states this game was not very good but continues on to find out if overhyping of a game could even kill a good game.

Stakeholders

In this case there are the game developers, once again, and the consumers themselves. If a game developer takes their time making an "awesome" game that would equal profit. Although if the consumer community overhypes it and then considers it a disappointment after launch then the developers lose that potential profit. This ties back in well to the issue of marketing. If the developers had chosen a different marketing path perhaps that could have saved the games profits. Essentially these profits are put back into the company to make other games and buy new technology to "evolve" the industry.

Author Credibility

Once again, just like my marketing source, this is just a thread but there are other user's comments that give feedback to the author. These in turn help reach a consensus on the topic. These are debatable points since I realize that some people might not get excited or hyped about any game meaning that overhyping could never potentially kill a good game for certain people.

Feasibility:

These previous points are so important to the development of future games because these lead to profits for the companies which in turn leads to more games that are hopefully better than their predecessors, which is the evolution I keep mentioning. So the text time you are playing your 8-bit Super Mario or 1080p Fallout 4, remember that these games will continuously develop and evolve over time so long as people play them and the companies earn profit. 

As long as there are games with good stories I know these developers will be getting my support. Which is one way of how this is an arguable topic. Everyone has their own opinion of what they like, maybe its sport games or no games at all. Perhaps it's just on what things contribute to the evolution of games. Either way all of this is entirely relative and is totally up to each person's own interpretation. I would say that a potential revision of my research could be to not use community threads but I find that these are opinions of the community as a whole which have helped me try to determine which ways truly benefit the progression of video games.

