Kongregate.com offers many ways to interact with fellow players of Flash games (chat, forums, comments). Do you think these methods enhance or take away from the gaming experience?
Many games on Kongregate.com have advertisements, either presented before the game is played or within the game. Do you think advertisements in games have a positive or negative impact on gamers? How about game developers?
Q1: I'd say that any way of encouraging communication between players would enhance the gaming experience. I enjoy playing xbox alot, but easily 90% of the time that I do play, I'm playing with friends because beyond typically short campaigns, I get little satisfaction from the repetitious nature of many games without someone to play with. To me, gaming is primarily a platform with which to interact and stay in touch with my friends. But that may be personal preference.
ReplyDeleteQ2: Advertising enables game developers to develop games. I feel like gamers generally understand this, and as long as the advertisements show up during down-times like between levels, I don't think they're all that bad. I'd actually argue that most of them, despite being inserted in the game, are tuned out when players get "in the zone."
Your presentation on Kongregate got me really interested in checking out the program itself, as I have never heard of it before. Maybe I will take some time to figure it out and play it!
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with Andrew that the encouragement of gamer communication is positive for the gaming experience. I'm not much a gamer myself, but my boyfriend's little brother is ALWAYS playing video games and I think that the part he enjoys most is communicating with other players and competing with them. I definitely think that some people use gaming as an opportunity to interact with others, making it a little bit more social.
ReplyDeleteAs for the second question... I tend to think that advertising has both positive and negative effects on users. As I said, I'm not much of a gamer, so I don't really enjoy the advertisements (because they usually aren't for things I'm very interested in). However, I feel like people who play games more often understand and appreciate the ads that they are presented with.