A final exam thesis on...video games?

I attend the closest norwegian equivelant of High School (our school system is somewhat different in terms of how it’s divided up in years, our “high school” is the optional year 11, 12 and 13) at a somewhat unique privat school. We actually don’t have any traditional final exams (or any exams at all for that matter). Although there are normal tests troughout our years at school, our final exam starts around February year 12, and ends aroung the same time in year 13. We get roughly 1 year to write a major thesis, about a freely chosen topic, and that serves as our final exam grade. Each student chose their own topic, and writes a thesis of 8 000 words or more + spends at least 100 hours making a practical work that can be presented at the end of the year (if they choose to focus on the practical. If they want a theoretically oriented thesis it’s a minimum of 12 000 words, and no limit on how long they have to spend working practically). Naturally, given my love for the cultural artform on witch this blog is based, I chose video games.

Over the course of the following year, I will write a major exam thesis about the history of video games; I will discuss and debate wether or not they are a cultural artform and how they can impact gamers and society. That’s all very interesting, but the main show is my practical project. I will (at least attempt to) make my own video game from scratch. So far, it goes by the name “Project: Arena”. It’s a 3D platformer, where you jump from platform to platform (yes, that’s actually what you do in this platformer), and try not to fall into the water below. I’m working with the free version of the Unity 3D game engine. Although it’s still fairly “barebones” I have a fully functional demo build, with 2 levels (and a third i originally built as a prototype, I will re-model it later to use in the “finished” game). Visually wise it’s nothing special as of yet, seeing as I have no finished textures, and I have yet to add any particular level of detail, and I’m still mainly working on tuning the gameplay “specs”. The height, speed and jump height of my character. Ones I get those “specs” closer to where I wanna be (I’m almost there) I’ll shift my focus to learning more about visual polish and start making new levels (as well as iron out some more than annoying problems with the pause menu).

As mentioned earlier, It’s a 3D platformer where you’r object is not to fall into the water below. The reason for the name, is that it all takes place within an Arena. I have several good ideas (at least i think they’re good) about what I can do to make the game interesting, including some features that I personally love, that faired over pretty well when i setup my prototype level at school, allowing my classmates to try the game out. They all got really, really frustrated because it was so hard, but few wanted to pass it on to the next guy in line, and I guess that’s a good sign (…or bad; R.I.P. flappy birds).I hope to share my progress on the project here; also, some of the stuff I’ll be writing in my thesis are highly relevant to this blog. Earlier, I shared a version of a chapter in my thesis on this blog, “are video games culture” and It’s one of my proudest articles. I hope to post more from the paper onto this blog, including my thoughts on how video games can impact society and gamers. I plan to release a reactions-video on youtube, where i filmed my some of the people at my school playing the prototype level for the first time(s. yes, they tried more than a few times). The reason for this is because many of them got delightfully frustrated and engaged. Of course I will post a link to the video onto this blog, so stay tuned. It’d definitely help you (and me, although I’m not a youtube partner) if you subsribed to my channel, “Thomas Tørrissen”, witch can also be found by searching for “Mr16thprestige”, although I have been thinking about making a new youtube user for the purposes of this project, although I don’t know if that’s so relevant, because I’m not sure how many videos I’ll have the time to record and edit, but we’ll see.

That’s it for now, and thank you guys for reading my blog. I notcied particular interest for my thoughs on the “how I met your mother” ending, and my alternate ending, and I thank you for that. I’ll write you in my next post, hopefully soon.