3rd+Hour+Group+7

=// **__Video Game Technology__** //= ===Industrial revolutions are beneficial because they create essential technology that betters the world in many many ways from medical technology for saving lives to video game technology for recreational purposes. Although the the revolution is very beneficial and has a ton of positives it also has negatives. The industrial revolution is detrimental because it has caused an increase in obesity from people becoming lazy and less active. People have turned to video games instead of going outside since you can just communicate on the gaming system. And finally I feel all this technology can be detrimental because our generation can become dependent on technology and if it ever crashes we could be in trouble.===

===Arendmedia type="custom" key="27563020" all ===

http://www.performancepsu.com/history-gaming-consoles-1972-2014-infographic/

1972 saw the birth of pong and gaming, the past 42 years has seen 8 generations of video game console with advancements and hurdles at every corner, but this info graphic leaves a burning question in my gut: //Has Hardware Advancements Come to a Crawl?//

I feel this is a very valid question. With each generation of console after the release of the Playstation 2 and Xbox improvements have been marginal at best. Ok, don’t get me wrong, I really love to see awe-inspiring graphics (que, Bioshock Inifinite Opening) but it seems with each advancement in graphical capabilities, developers are more worried about flashy effects rather then providing us with some solid game play. You may call me a retro gamer here, but if hardware advancements end up with games that are designed to either get money from us at every turn or provide very little quality game play lets go back to the old days, when Sonic and Mario ruled, lets face it when you think back to your child hood game that you played the most what was it? How long did you play it each day? How amazing was the gameplay compared to modern day video games?

The History of Gaming Consoles 1972 – 2014 [ INFOGRAPHIC ]
This infographic on the history of gaming consoles 1972 – 2014 goes over the popular arm chair consoles and its history to arise throughout the past 42 years from the birth of pong right through to current 8th generation consoles currently on the market now such as the Sony Playstation 4, Microsoft Xbox One and Nintendo Wii u. 

media type="custom" key="27365558"[]
Roth http://www.gamespot.com/videos/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-graphics

The topic of how video games have evolved over the years is massive.. So the best way to approach this topic briefly is to select a genre and survey the main trends. This essay will focus on games in the adventure/roleplaying genre in which players take the role of one or more heroes on a quest of some sort.

The earliest adventure video games were, in a sense, not video at all. Instead they used text to create worlds for the player to explore. The first of these was // Adventure //, designed by Will Crowther and enhanced by Don Woods. The player read text descriptions of a cave and typed in simple noun-verb commands (“go north” “take lantern”, etc.) to navigate through the cave and interact with its denizens. Text-based games worked around the limited RAM (random-access memory) in early computers by focusing on story and setting at the expense of graphics.

The earliest adventure video games were, in a sens e, not video at all.

A major evolution in the adventure genre (or step back, as text-game purists might claim) was the translation of the text-adventure to a visual format. In 1980 the Atari 2600 released its own // Adventure //. // Adventure // included the exploration, loot gathering, and simple monster fighting of the early text adventures. Given the limitations on computer processing power, however, the main character had to be represented as a colored square. Objects and monsters, swords and dragons, were all represented by crude pixelated graphics. Still, the use of a joystick and a visual environment gave players the ability to explore more widely and in real time rather than in the turn-based format of text adventures.

[New games] took advantage of gaming hardware’s increasing capabilities.

With the advent of computers and consoles that could render video, adventure games, and all other video games, began to develop in similar ways. First, they took advantage of gaming hardware’s increasing capabilities. The Atari 2600 had no hard drive to store programs, virtually no RAM, and ROM (read-only memory) game cartridges with only two to four kilobytes of memory. Graphics could only be displayed at a resolution of approximately 160 by 228 pixels in 128 colors. Modern PCs have hard drives measuring in gigabytes, onboard RAM averaging four gigabytes (one gigabyte is approximately a trillion kilobytes). Perhaps more important, modern gaming PCs have dedicated chips for rendering video, allowing for graphics verging on photorealism.

Second, controllers gradually developed into the modern forms. The classic Atari joystick had a directional control and a single button. The NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) controller had a four-way directional pad and two buttons: more inputs meant potentially more actions one could take in a game. Current consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have controllers with a directional pad, one or more thumb-sized joysticks, and a series of triggers and buttons that can be combined to create a large number of different player inputs. In the PC gaming realm, the development of the mouse and keyboard combination allowed for an even greater number of player inputs.

Players of the adventure genre came to demand more sophisticated stories and moral choices.

These and other changes affected adventure games in unique ways, as well. The original text and Atari// Adventure // games had bare-bones stories. As the art of game design developed and the representational abilities of computers increased, players of the adventure genre came to demand more sophisticated stories and moral choices.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Bright',Cambria,Georgia,Garamond,Berkeley,serif; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the better-known games to focus on moral elements was Bioware’s Star Wars-based roleplaying game (or RPG, a hybrid of adventure and combat games) // Knights of the Old Republic //. In this game players could choose to follow the “light” or “dark” side by making choices that helped or hurt in-game characters. In contrast, Bethesda’s popular Elder Scrolls RPG series, the most recent of which is // Skyrim //, focused on consequences to actions rather than an overarching morality system. The game’s designers created a sandbox-like environment where players could even avoid the main story altogether and focus instead on exploring the simulated world.

<span style="color: #ffbb33; display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Bright',Cambria,Georgia,Garamond,Berkeley,serif; font-size: 1.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">Video game history has not been a straight line towards larger, more complicated, more graphics-heavy games.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Bright',Cambria,Georgia,Garamond,Berkeley,serif; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline;">However, video game history has not been a straight line towards larger, more complicated, more graphics-heavy games. Text-based adventure games have not disappeared. For instance, the company Infocom developed and released text-based adventures throughout the 1980s. They actively compared their games to the crude graphics available on consoles and computers at the time: “We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination—a technology so powerful that it makes any picture that’s ever come out of a screen look like graffiti in comparison.” When commercial sales of text-based adventures trailed off in the 1990s, fans of the format began developing text-based games themselves and distributing them for free.

//**__http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/25764__**// ====== http://www.eurogamer.de/articles/2015 http://eagleviewnews.com/author/smorelette/page/2/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D59-bodcBlc

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">1. FACIAL RECOGNITION
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">3D scanning and facial recognition technology allows systems to actually create your likeness in the gaming world (so you can create a custom avatar that looks just like you), or to inventively transfer your own expressions to other digital creations. On top of that, the Intel® RealSense™ 3D camera could allow developers to create games that adapt to the emotions of the gamer by scanning 78 different points on a person’s face. For example, a few grimaces at your game screen means the system would dial down the game’s difficulty instantly.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">2. VOICE RECOGNITION
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Too lazy to pick up that controller? No problem! Voice controlled gaming has been around for a while, but the potential of using the technology in gaming systems has finally caught up to reality—computers are now able to easily recognize voice commands from the user. Not only can you turn the console on and off using this tech, but you can also use voice commands to control gameplay, interact on social media, play selections from your media library, or search the web, all by simply talking to your gaming system.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">3. GESTURE CONTROL
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Or, get rid of your controller altogether! Intel RealSense technology allows you to play first person shooter games—or simply interact with your device—with just a few waves of your hand. Using a 3D camera that tracks 22 separate points in your hand, gesture control allows users to connect with their gaming experience by using the natural movements of your body. For example, the game Warrior Wave employs RealSense technology so you can use your hand (the outline of which shows up on the screen) to lead a group of Ancient Greek soldiers to safety.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">4. AMAZING GRAPHICS
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">We’ve come a long way from the days of basic 8-bit graphics in gaming. Cutting edge advancements now allow gamers to experience games in fully rendered worlds with photo realistic textures. The ability to increase playability with higher image quality makes it seem like you’re right inside the game.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">5. HIGH-DEF DISPLAYS
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">With gaming graphics this good, you need to have a bona fide way to show them off. Enter Ultra 4K gaming. Though televisions with 4K capabilities (meaning it must support at least 4,000 pixels) or 4K laptops (like the Intel-powered Lenovo Y50) started out at thousands of dollars, their price points have steadily declined, making this format the eventual standard in the way we watch the games we play. With unbeatable colors and crispness, there’s nothing else that can come close. And you thought 1080p looked good…

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">6. VIRTUAL REALITY
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Though many virtual reality gaming consoles haven’t been commercially released as of yet, those developing VR headset displays are poised to grant gamers a fully immersive gaming experience the likes of which nobody has seen before. You’ll actually be able to lose yourself in the game before you come back to reality.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">7. AUGMENTED REALITY
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If the virtual world isn’t your thing, why not try out some games in ours? Not confined to a TV or computer monitor, AR games allow for a perspective unique to the gamer. They maneuver spaces within the real world and make the object of the game applicable to real-life situations. For example, play table hockey on your kitchen counter from any angle, or partake in some puzzles mapped out via obstacles in your backyard.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">8. WEARABLE GAMING
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Whether it’s smartwatches or glasses, wearable games make gaming portable without being too invasive. Companies that started by using wearable technology for fitness applications are now aiming to incorporate entertainment into the mix as well. Wearables aren’t only extensions of your body, but also extensions of the gaming consoles you know and love.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">9. MOBILE GAMING
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">With the advent of smartphones, the gaming experience has been taken out of the arcade and the living room and put into the palm of your hand. As evidenced by the countless people on your morning train commute huddled over games on their devices, mobile technology has made the love of digital gaming spread beyond hardcore console-consumers and online gamers.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">10. CLOUD GAMING
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Instead of creating video game systems that require more powerful hardware, developers are looking to lighten the load with the cloud. Games no longer need be limited by the amount of memory that discs or consoles have to offer. Using the cloud opens games up to massive server-size limits where images are streamed to your screen through the Internet.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #111111; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: baseline;">11. ON-DEMAND GAMING
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #333333; font-family: pragmatica-web,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Gamers can already watch and share live-streams of games, but what about playing them? Much like similar movie streaming services, the ability to stream video games is becoming more and more a reality, and it could lead game developers both big and small to compete for gaming glory.

cortesy of http://mentalfloss.com/article/61764/11-unbelievable-advances-gaming-technology

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkUmjlKi8_o
======

Video Game Graphics have made evolutionary improvements in the last 3 decades.
http://www.eurogamer.de/articles/2015 http://eagleviewnews.com/author/smorelette/page/2/ https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=D59-bodcBlc

http://www.gamespot.com/videos/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-graphics

cortesy of http://mentalfloss.com/article/61764/11-unbelievable-advances-gaming-technology