Dr Tom Chatfield, an ex-ST John’s English student, talks about the ways in which games reward the brain.
Category: How to design a successful video game
LINGO: Where words are a matter of life and death
Learning a language is very much like playing a game: you need to be strategic, know how to identify what’s important and what’s not so essential. You must assess probability and take risks. Sometimes you must make do with little (your word bank, your range of structures) but you must also try to be accurate….
How to earn billions by giving something away for free
Few people can have escaped the massive success of Fortnite: Battle Royale. Launched in late 2017, the game had 250 million players by March 2019. In 2018 Fortnite made more money than any other game in history: $2.4 billion. While creativity and technology are essential to the success of a video game, economic decisions can…
Using Language to Build Characters and Worlds
Designing an immersive world is all about getting the details right. In a video game, the world consists of a number of elements, including the visual space, the characters that navigate it and the soundscape (music, sound effects and speech). It is in the finer details of these elements that the most immersive and fascinating…
Learn to programme
Turtle Academy is a simple-to-use website providing free lessons in basic computer programming. Using the LOGO language you can create amazing shapes and patterns in next to no time – give it a try and see what you can come up with!
Fun and games at the circus
See if you can outrun the lions and solve this puzzle from St John’s Maths Tutor Dr David Seifert…
A Tetris puzzle
If you fancy yourself as a Tetris whizz, try your hand at this puzzle set by St John’s Maths Tutor Dr David Seifert… One of the most successful video games of all time is Tetris. There are seven different Tetris pieces: the long piece, the square, the T-piece, two L-pieces and two Z-pieces. Each piece…
Is video game addiction a mental disorder?
Is video game addiction a mental disorder? Cast your vote here!
Donkey Kong or King Kong?
Donkey Kong was one of Nintendo’s most famous video game series, chronicling the adventures of the title character Donkey Kong. The game quickly became a bestseller, strengthening Nintendo’s standing as an industry leader. The gigantic ape is immediately recognisable for most video game enthusiasts. In fact, the character of Donkey Kong has proved so popular…
Maths in video games
My name is James Hyde and I am a build engineer at the UK’s leading games studio – Creative Assembly (CA) – currently working on several titles – including our brand-new IP! I’ve been with CA for two years now; my first project was Halo Wars 2 (HW2) – the sequel to one of my very…
A good story is key
The most successful kind of plot for computer games – and indeed for all kinds of other stories, from international folk-tale, to medieval romance, to the great fantasy works of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, is the quest. The hero sets out from home on a quest to find something or with a mission to…
Make your own video game
Using the free website https://flowlab.io/ we want you to create your very own video game! It’s simple to use and doesn’t require any coding: simply drag and drop the game pieces into position and build your own virtual world. The tutorial is a great place to start.
What’s the best way to win at Monopoly?
Monopoly may have started out as a humble board game in 1935, but it has since evolved into a multi-platform, multi-million dollar titan of the gaming world, appearing on almost every major games console over the last 30 years. The ultimate question then, is how can you improve your chances of winning? Watch the video…
The Game of Life
The Game of Life is one of the simplest video games ever to exist, and yet is one of the most addictive! It’s known as a zero player game as you simply choose your initial layout of black and white squares and then leave the game to evolve over time following a set of four…
What can we learn from video games?
What’s the point of a historical video game? What do you get from setting a battle in ancient Rome or on the battlefields of the Second World War, rather than in space, the far distant future, or an imaginary world? From a historian’s perspective, we might gain a number of new insights by playing through…
Why are video games addictive?
Psychologist Amy Orben discusses whether or not video games are addictive, and whether or not this should be considered a mental disorder.