If you’re new to Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, let me just tell you that it’s one of the most intriguing places to see what students today are doing in the realm of technology. Whether it’s the creation of innovative video games or upgrades to current technology, this is a place where you can see some truly innovative technology. This competition also helps students develop their pitching skills and get helpful feedback on something they’ve worked so hard on from the ground up. After watching this great video from Revision 3’s Anthony Carboni, I felt the urge to write about how videogaming does good for the world.
This video from @imaginecup featuring @acarboni is part of what makes gaming so awesome. http://t.co/ITX5XuWwOm
— Jesse Radonski (@JesseRad) July 17, 2013
This reminds me of something that Dan Amrich said in his book, Critical Path: How to Review Games for a Living. Dan said that one of the best ways to truly understand a game would be to develop one yourself. Whether it’s a text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD), a story fleshed out on RPG Maker, or something coded from the ground up, knowing how difficult it is to create a game on your own only makes you more appreciative of what developers have to create from what is basically a blank screen.
As you might’ve read in my last blog post, you’d know that I’m pretty excited for the possibilities in what the new generation of consoles will be able to do, especially in the Xbox One. Yes, both the Xbox One and PS4 have similar architecture to a PC, but as a person who was raised on playing videogames with a controller, I’m pretty excited with the merging capabilities that these consoles will have with PC features. Is it too ambitious to hope that a new version of RPG Maker will soon come to Xbox One and PS4?
Steam has RPG Maker VX Ace and I’m already daydreaming of a possibility to create my own game on the Xbox One, save it to my console and the cloud, and hope that the story is compelling enough to where people around the world can play my game (as long as they can read English — unless there’s a translator built in — OMG!) and inspire the creator in all of us to make his or her own game.
Sometimes it seems like only the bad news spreads from the world of videogaming to the general public, but as the Imagine Cup shows us, there are plenty of people who truly benefit from videogames and I love that.
Freshfully Rad 