Competition has always been at the core of gaming, and esports is a great example of the evolution of gaming over the last 50 years. Esports really began in the 1980s with Walter Day who, via his organization Twin Galaxies, hosted competitions to determine the best players for arcade games like Donkey Kong and Tetris based on high scores that spectators could watch. Today, esports are more in line with traditional sports, with leagues in such varied communities as NBA 2K, Call of Duty, and Overwatch.

The next esports milestone looks to be in game development itself for both Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, but particularly PS5 due to its storage architecture. Because of the way the hardware is built now with the SSD structure, as well as the elimination of hard drives, the jump in game development is akin to comparing an old record player to an iPhone.

These developments seem to signal a major milestone in overall entertainment in the gaming space, helping the form continue its transition from being an activity that only a few players can enjoy at a given time to something more like sports that thousands, even millions, can enjoy worldwide, whether you’re a gamer or not. NBA 2K League has even been featured on ESPN alongside “real” sports.

In the future, the acceptance of esports by major outlets will continue to make such an event the norm rather than the exception, especially as more games are created to work in this kind of sports format.

From its humble beginnings in the arcade, esports have become one of the greatest examples of how gaming has evolved to become the juggernaut of entertainment it is today.

Game developers are more frequently using stress testing on their games prior to finalization to ensure their game and servers will handle the demand of their player community.
The video game industry is moving to more digital copies of games. When a game launches, everyone downloads it and jumps online at the same time. Without stress testing, it can be hard for game developers to predict if their servers are going to hold up when everybody hops on the game at the same time. This is especially true for more popular titles that have a lot of player demand.
Think of when a new show comes out on Netflix and everybody jumps on to watch it at the same time. Netflix doesn’t run as smooth because of the service demand. The same thing applies to video games.
Companies in the video game industry will hold a public beta. They’ll give access to the game before the final version is officially released so players can play it and test the game out. As a player, you get to demo the game and decide if you’d like to buy the final game or not.
For the developer, these public betas give them a stress test of your game. They get to test out their servers and say “Ok this many people are on. Our servers can handle this many people. Let’s take this information and project how many people are going to buy our game. And multiply this many people so when it does come out and everybody jumps on at the same time, we’re not having server issues.”
Stress testing is an effective method that game developers use to make sure their game is running on day one. Use stress tests to your advantage to determine your community’s anticipation for the game so you can deliver a better launch day experience for them.

How do problematic social issues manifest within the gaming community? According to Maria Hwang, some game characters play off of racist and sexist stereotypes. She also points out issues in the way gamers and fans interact with each other. “There’s a cyberbullying aspect in online communities, and that includes game communities,” she notes.

Hwang highlights the novelty of humanity’s relationship with immersive digital technology as a possible contributing factor. “We’re still in a transition period where we don’t truly understand the distinction between our online and offline lives,” she continues. “As we define what that means and whether our online alter egos are distinct or just continuations of who we are, things will change. For now, though, the idea of embodying new characters and exploring virtual worlds is still a relatively new concept. Cyberbullying may be prevalent because people think that these experiences aren’t real, even though virtual reality is as close to real as entertainment media can get.”

These misconceptions find parallels in the disconnect between people’s actions and their outcomes – Some gamers conclude they can do whatever they want without ramifications. “There are consequences,” cautions Hwang, “but they’re often harder to observe or less tangible than what one might experience in real life.”

Hwang also says that profit motives play a role. “Some people want to capitalize on troublesome things, such as heavily accentuated, hypersexualized portrayals of female characters similar to those found in lingerie commercials and modeling.”

Despite such negatives, Hwang points to a hopeful future. “As we move forward, we constantly reconsider the fluidity between our online and real-life identities. This makes us better equipped to address cyberbullying, stereotyping, and other problems. I believe the gaming and online communities will follow suit, but things are definitely not ideal at the moment.”

Games are nothing without players, a sentiment that rings particularly true regarding Roblox. As an interactive experience based on community development, the company knew from the very beginning that it wanted players to be able to express themselves through shared collaborative experiences.

But to foster real collaboration, Roblox knew that respect among community members was crucial. Within the company, there’s a constant conversation taking place to ensure that everyone is given the opportunity to build something special. With this goal in mind, Roblox Studio was designed to use LUA, one of the most user-friendly coding languages available. Roblox seeks to give kids the tools to create; to see players become developers.

When looking at the top games on Roblox, you’re likely to see concepts that, if they were to be pitched in a traditional green light fashion, they would probably never happen. But thanks to the supportive community the company’s built, gamers don’t have to worry about that green light process. Any kid can come on to the platform and, thanks to its ease of use, they can create a game. It really allows them to express themselves without adults getting in the way with rules and regulations. Kids know what kids like.

Whether it’s a seasoned player who’s been active in the world for years or a brand-new developer coming to the community for the first time, Roblox provides everyone with amazing opportunities to be creative in a way that encourages others to add to the story…making the world of the game so much cooler in the process.

One of the questions Jessica Hammer is often asked is how games have changed with the advent of digital technologies. According to Hammer, games have been shaped by the technologies people had on hand for as long as people have played them.
“For example, if you look at the manufacturing of game pieces, of dice, of cards, of Meeples, of the things that we can make and that have a cultural understanding of how they work – these shape the kinds of play we can do with them.”
Hammer often connects games across the digital and non-digital divide. To her, there is no divide.
“The way I analyze games is looking at the sort of verbs or actions that they encourage players to take. So you’ve got matching games that are happening in the physical world. For example, if you think about Set, it’s a game of visual perception. You’re looking at a set of cards. You’re looking for matches.
“But that connects to games like match-three games, like Bejeweled or Candy Crush, where you’re looking for matches in a digital environment. Those underlying principles of what the player is doing and the kind of perceptual tasks that are being asked of them are the same.”
However, technologies still have new angles to offer. They provide new human-computer interactions, affordances, or new capabilities for interaction. One way they do this is by automating the complex equations that can make physical games difficult to play at an enjoyable pace.
“Most people who play board games have had the experience of sitting around and waiting while someone else is counting up points,” explains Hammer. “A computer can do that for you, what we call, automagically.”
Computers are also great at hiding key information in games that call for it like Hanabi, one of Hammer’s favorite games.
“These are new capacities that computer games give us,” says Hammer. “We can use them to enhance the kinds of core human interactions that games are.”

Which platform makes the most sense to operate tournaments on, and how do we decide which platform and which system we should be running these tournaments on? Ari Brummer has some interesting opinions on the topic. According to Brummer, it varies from game to game. Some games provide a simple answer. For example, League of Legends is played on a PC. And that’s the only way you play the game. Likewise, Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers are played on the Nintendo Switch exclusively. But some games, like Call of Duty, or sports titles, like Madden or NBA 2K, can be played easily across various platforms, so it’s up to you to decide.

Not all games are cross-platform, but recently, games like Call of Duty have adopted this approach. So, for example, you can run a tournament where gamers are playing on Xbox, PC, or PlayStation – both of which are cross-generational. But for a game like NBA 2K, you have to pick one specific platform to enter tournaments on.

Brummer is running a draft-eligible tournament for people to have the opportunity to join the NBA 2K league if they win. It will take place on the Xbox. Before choosing Xbox as the platform for the tournament, their research had shown that there was recently a high uptick in sales for Xbox. They also discovered that there are a lot of competitive players in NBA 2K that play on Xbox. This research drove them to shift their focus from Playstation to Xbox to make sure that top-level talent could compete in the tournament itself.

They aim to have a wide variety of tournaments to cater to players at all levels and make them more accessible to different platforms. This means, if they are running a Madden tournament on Xbox, they might run a FIFA tournament on Playstation. So, using research to make a decision beforehand, they ensure that there’s a clear marketing strategy in place so that gamers know exactly which platform is needed during the sign-up process.

“Some game engines are better for creating great, giant worlds,” says Genevieve Johnson. Unreal was initially known for that, whereas Unity’s metier was smaller, boutique 2D games that could render smoothly on a tablet.
“But what we’re seeing today is that Unity’s excellent for creating large, 3D games. And Unreal can create wonderful games for your phone,” continues Johnson, “It then becomes a question of, how strong are you in coding?”
One thing that Johnson particularly likes about Unreal is its visual scripter.
”I tend towards using Unity as my game engine because I find it to be programmer-friendly. Whenever I have a unique mechanism that I want to work on, I can effortlessly write the code from scratch. That may be more difficult for some people. But to me, it’s very freeing,” says Dan Shimmyo. Unity enables him to try lots of things in a flash.
Malik Forte’s advice to anybody trying to decide between Unreal and Unity is that if you’re looking for accessibility and don’t want to get too deep into learning a code language, then Unreal is the way to go. It’s a lot more accessible and easier to use.
“Unity is for more veteran developers who understand coding language and are further along with working with game engines,” he says.
So, for someone who is just getting started and wants to get an idea of how a video game engine works, according to Forte, Unreal is the way to go to get the hang of things.
“If you want to move on to something bigger like Unity, you can do that later,” says Forte.

Game development has become a very welcoming environment. The game engine is the hub that runs the entire game and makes your game assets work. Anybody can develop a game as there are many different types of game engines and environments available.
If you are an aspiring game developer just starting out, you may want to check out Unreal Engine. This is a popular engine that is good for starters in that it is a bit more user-friendly. Unreal Engine involves less technical aspects to it as compared to other engines.
Another popular game engine that quite a few people know about is Unity. This game engine has a platform that allows you to create game characters. You can also add physics to the game assets using Rigidbody dynamics, and you can make your characters do different things by adding some code to your program.
If you don’t want to install a hefty software application on your computer, there are a whole host of game development engines that are web-based. You would simply go onto an internet browser, type in the URL, and then start coding. Once you’ve created your app or game, you simply download your file.
MIT App Inventory is a form of Scratch, which uses a block-based programming language for you to create apps and games. You drag and drop various blocks to build the code needed to run your creation.
Flowlab is another web-based application. Using Flowlab you can create game characters, add different movements for those characters, and create a full-fledged game. You can also access this application on your phone.
If you start working for first-party studios in the gaming industry, such as PlayStation, Naughty Dog, or Rockstar, you may work with proprietary game engines that these studios have created themselves.

Animation for film, TV, and linear storytelling is you controlling the character, creating keyframes for the posing, and carefully planning it out.

Animation in gaming is about creating a character or an object that has certain behaviors assigned to it so that it will behave a certain way when you control it.

Animation in the gaming industry takes a cold, dead environment and breathes life into it. Animation is not just how your player moves through the world; it’s also the world interacting back with the player.

People tend to think about the obvious, walking around or dancing, but animation is so much more powerful than that.

For instance, you’ve got an ax that you’re swinging. If you go up to a tree and swing the ax and nothing happens, you’re probably going to think that you can’t knock the tree down. If, instead, the tree wiggles and shakes a little bit, you’re going to swing that ax again.

You feel like you’re engaging with the environment, and the environment starts feeling real. You’re also cluing players into the game mechanics and which actions they can take.

You swing the ax again. This time the tree shakes harder – you’re going to swing it again. You have positive reinforcement that swinging the ax does something, and you should keep doing it until the payoff.

There’s a huge team that works on all these projects within the esports industry. And at every level of gaming education and planning, they have to consider the gaming experience.

A character designer and a modeler work together to create the characters, make them look appealing, scary, or whatever the game requires.

Next, the rigger puts in a rig, a skeleton that goes inside the mesh, the skin of the character, and creates movement. Then, the character receives its texture. Textures give the feel of leather, skin, or cloth, and they create the mood, the sense of danger, or lightness, of comedy.

Animation in gaming is different from animation in television and feature films. Each step in the process must take into account the materials of the objects or characters.

For example, as online gaming education teaches, characters made of metal will move a certain way based upon the characteristics of the metal. A program (coding) will determine how a metal character will interact with its environment.

The environment must be specified as well. Is it metal, wood, or ground? Gravity is also critical; it’s the most important part of physics regarding how a character moves.

If you’re on Jupiter, you’re going to move very slowly. If you’re on Earth, you’re going to move like we’re used to seeing people move. If you’re on the moon, you’re going to move lightly.

All of these details get programmed into the game. Whether it’s an esports, 2D, or 3D game, these things give the character the performance that makes the game exciting.

[Please embed: https://pixabay.com/images/id-5091194/ ]

According to Dan Shefelman, 3-D game design revolves around an important process: creating dimensional assets. This includes objects and environments but also characters.

“A 3-D CG character in gaming or animation is essentially a puppet,” says Shefelman. “Inside that puppet, you’ll find what’s called a rig. The rig is attached to the 3-D mesh defining the puppet’s geometry.”

The animator’s job involves manipulating the parts of a character and creating behaviors for different movements. Shefelman also points out some conceptual parallels between three-dimensional characters and real creatures. “The best way to think of a rig is as a human or animal skeleton. It has bones with joints that fit into sockets, and they can move.”

Shefelman further describes the existence of a hierarchy governing a rig’s joints. “One joint is parented to another. If a joint at the base of a finger moves, a child of that joint, like one at the tip of the same finger, might also move. The joints can also move independently, just like what happens in nature.”

According to Shefelman, modeling on the computer feels similar to working with clay. “You start with some kind of lump,” he says. “In a tool like ZBrush, this takes the form of a sphere. In Maya or 3D Studio Max, you generally begin with a cube. From there, you begin to extrude, or pull, the shapes outward one by one. After pulling out one shape, which we call pulling points, you’ll move on to the next. A typical workflow consists of pulling the points of a polygon and adding more vertices as you build the shape. Or you can focus on pulling complex forms, like a character’s limbs. With either approach, you’ll mold the starting shape into something that becomes your model.”