Some discussion of late has gone in the direction of standardising the timing in games. People were saying how they would like to have a set length for games and a more in-depth story or better game-play. This would create a Computer Games alternative to the Short Film. This would allow for more arty games and more depth. I do not think that this is a real possibility for all games, but it would be nice to have a cheaper alternative that offers less in the way of time wasting but more in the depth.

In games, I am surprised that aging has not been a factor that is taken into account. I am not talking going the full hog and killing off your character with old age, but simply making them more adept at learning/training as they reach their peak (at 25) and then start becoming a little more feeble as time goes on (this is to help combat Powermaxing). In some RPG's there was some very poor attempts to use an atmospheric effect for time. It would get darker for night, and it would get lighter for day. That is all well and good, but when do any of these characters sleep?

What is the answer to my question? Whenever they want to at the moment, or not at all. There should be a tiredness factor, which continues to chew up that player's energy after a hard day slaying goblins. This energy is also in combination with two other variables, health and hunger (and possibly thirst, if it is separated from hunger). If a character is awake too long, they are decreasing their energy and therefore needs to find a means to replenish it. This could be done incorrectly by allowing the character to eat to avoid sleep, or there could be a strict guideline that forces the characters to both eat and sleep and try to get a required amount of energy.

Like I have already said, there needs to be a fairly strict scheme as to how this is accomplished. You need to eat. You need to sleep. You need to have energy. You need to eat and sleep to have energy. This is a little different to the ways that things like this have been tackled in the past. What has tended to happen instead is that you have an energy bar, you can eat and the energy bar increases, or you can sleep and the energy bar increases. This means that your character could go for a year with out either eating or sleeping. A little unrealistic, so our system forces the player to eat and sleep as well as maintain their energy bar. I think that this would provide a far better gaming environment, as long as eating and sleeping did not cut into game time too much. We need to attract players, so we do not want to make them act through tedium. Maybe if your game used either one or both of these tasks in a fun way, then it would be worthwhile (see "Learning Experience")

As has been a discussion of late, timing in games has come to the fore. This is about creating a standard in the length of game-play in our games. There is still some debate about the exact length that a game should be, but the point has been accepted that if game length was to be shortened that it should be done with more concentration put into the storyline/game-play. There needs to be far more depth in the story that would actually benefit the person who played that game more than once. By "more than once" I mean more than one times to completion, not by coming back to the game and the player is just continuing from their current position.

One thing that I think a lot of developers tend to forget is the art aspect of a game. There are so many games that are produced purely for commercial benefit and little more. This is acceptable to a certain extent. I like to look at a game as an art form. I believe that it is a culmination of a game-designer, the programmers, the graphics and sound artists, and the game-teams artistic expression. It is more than just the sum of its parts. For this reason, I think that less emphasis should be put on the graphics and the sound, and more emphasis put on the gameplay and storyline. Because it is a combination of all of its parts, there needs to be a balance in the content and the presentation. I am quite happy playing less graphic intensive games that actually have a great content in them. For this reason I believe that commercialisation is killing games as a whole. Something that could help this is the shortening of the game length (as mentioned above). This allows for a concentrated game experience for less time intensive playing. I would like to see concentration of story and gameplay that allow for a new experience in gaming. This is one step for bringing the art form of gaming back into computer games. Games should be art; they are made from artistic expressions, so should deserve a title of art. Let us all strive to make games that deserve an artistic title.

The advice that was given to me when I asked about creating a history for my game was quite astonishing. I was very surprised to see an answer that was so true and so broad. What you need to do is to grow your game world. This does not mean that you must create a simulation of your world and set things in motion and see what happens. Everything must grow together. To have a truly functional world that has reasons for being, you first need some main characters. Shape a world around your characters, give the character something that they must have done at some point in the past and then decide, according to their character, what the outcome was. Doing so, you will get a feeling for the surroundings of the character. Then, when you have several such surroundings, you should shape where these places are, give a reason for why they are there and how all came to be. I was originally looking just to write a history of what came before the story of my game as to explain all, but I realized that what I needed to do was to shape the history around the characters in the game. Everything must be moldable, the characters, the world and the history. They each grow on one another and as such they complement each other. You need to grow each of them together and mold them to your will. This is how you will make a truly great world, which has a depth and is logical and reasonable. This is not the only way, but a good way none the less.