Archive for December, 2007

What is Genre?

Posted in Media Studies Research on December 5, 2007 by Dave

Genre is the categorisation of films, TV, books, games, music, etc. Genre is a very vague area with no set boundaries. Many people confine the scope of the word “Genre” to art, culture and especially literature, but it has been used in rhetoric for a long time.

Genre is in all media, for example it is in TV, music, movies, video games and literature. People tend to favour specific genres because that genre appeals to them and their interests.

Bit Depth

Posted in Digital Graphics Research on December 4, 2007 by Dave

Bit depth is a computer graphics term which describes the number bits used to make up a single pixel in a bit-map

Pixels

Posted in Digital Graphics Research on December 4, 2007 by Dave

Pixel is short for Picture Elements, pixels are small point of a graphic image. Graphic monitors display pictures by dividing into thousands or millions of pixels all aligned in rows and columns. They are so close together that it appears that they are joined together.

The number of bits used in a single pixel will vary depending on how many colours or shades of gray can be seen. For example, and 8-bit colour mode will use 8 bits for each pixel. 

On colour monitors, pixels consist of only three dots - a red, a green and a blue dot. The three dots should converge at the same point but some monitors have convergence errors which makes the colour pixels look fuzzy.

The quality of a display system depends mainly on the resolution, how many pixels it can display and how many bits are used to represent each pixel.

The History of Video Games

Posted in Games Research on December 2, 2007 by Dave

Origins

The first known concept for a video game was a device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Devicewhich was created in the US by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1948. The device would use vacuum tubes to simulate a missile being fired at a target and the player would use knobs to adjust the speed and ark of the missile.

Regarded to be the first true video game that wasn’t a representation of pen-and-paper or board game was created in 1958 on an oscilloscope by the American physicist William Higinbotham. The game was called Tennis for Two, it simulated a game of tennis using the oscilloscope. The player used an analogue computer to control the game and it consisted of mostly resisters, capacitors and relays but when the ball was in play transistor switches were used.