Its all game stories and BS

And by BS I mean Behavioral Science.

So I'm actually half way through my first two classes at Full Sail. So far English Comp/Game Doc is the best class. BS is a little odd, some things are helpful, some things are unexpected from a psychology class.

So the game doc class is way cool. The idea in this is class is to create the all the story, character, and level content that will go into a hypothetical game. On day one you start by creating some basic elements. They give you the game genre (My team got "action adventure") then you get three very random objects, we got a key chain with a bird head (it was just a toy not a real bird head), a pink plastic barbie purse, and a tiny plastic cylinder with a magnifying lens at one end. From these three objects you must abstract you game idea, and it has to be done in about an hour and half - it sounds insane but it was really fun. We were all skeptical that we could come up with a game that was interesting but its evolved into something that's really cool. It has personified animals in the game and somehow it's ended up having a story line and characters similar to star wars. It been fun fleshing out the characters and then seeing what other people develop and how they tie it to the main story. We've been learning about how to present the documentation in a way that's useful for the artists, marketers, executives and so on. This way everyone making the game can gleam the things they need from the document.

Its been fun learning how developers created story in some of my favorite games like half life, splinter cell, Max Payne, even Mario. The teacher discusses all the techniques that have been developed and what works and what doesn't. The major problems the industry has trouble with, like developing characters that are 3D or round, most all games characters are 2D or flat. Most characters don't arc, like in a movie or book, they don't really go through hardship and trial then learn from that. If the do its very hard to relay this to the player. There is no way to learn their personality as intimately as in a book. These are all challenges that no one was figured out how to effectively overcome and our instructor challenges us with finding a better way. You really get the sense that telling stories in video games is a craft still in its infancy, and in fact it is, its exciting though there is a lot of room out there to progress the art.

To future students: This class is being broken into two parts now, English Comp traditional style and Game Documentation. This will allow a more in depth approach to designing the game story, characters, levels and so forth. This will be a good thing.

Behavioral Science, while not my favorite, has its benefits. I've learned some interesting things about stress at Full Sail and how to handle it which has been helpful. The class so far is really easy, you get a book but its never required to read it, instead of reading the book we just use Power Point slides from class and all tests are based on them. Mostly this class seems to focusing on having you interact with people and get to know them, the big assignment is to work with your assigned group to come with a presentation, basically a skit, to demonstrate one of the concepts from class. This is a bit weird, I wasn't too excited about doing it but it does force people to work with others from different degree programs so you end up getting some good contacts in other degrees.

Culture shock - So getting up every day and designing stories for fairy tale kingdoms, skits for psychology, playing games for research, going to club meetings on modding the latest RPG game, and hanging out with people who's idea of a full day is 8 hours of World Of Warcraft is to say the least a major, major, MAJOR change. It's been strangely difficult to get in sync with this, I keep finding myself distancing myself so that I can clear my head and be ready to work. But this is the work! Crazy. It seems to be successful here you have to be really creative, really social, and work really hard and maybe not even that creative just social and work hard. It's definitely not the typical school, for better or worse, and when I start to take myself to seriously I have to remember that "hey, I'm making video games" its ok if I have to help design a skit for psychology class, or whatever.

So that's the summary for the past 2 weeks