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Personal Enquiry: Part One

So it's the start of the personal enquiry task, and the end of the history of computing! I'm excited about this one as I'm getting to write about a topic that I find particularly interesting...what to choose though? I started by producing some reeeeaaallly quick mind-maps in Photoshop. Haha good luck reading them.

In this first mind-map I covered a variety of different areas that interest me. The storyline of a game is something I've always found amazing, especially that in the Elder Scrolls series. The amount of lore within that game is absolutely insane! Graphics are also something I find really cool. Being able to create a game that appears so visually realistic takes a hell of a lot of time and effort, and most of the time, the results look fabulous. My mam was watching me play the Last of Us before I started university and for a split second she thought it was real. Until the clickers attacked. That's the kind of thing that fascinates me, how something like this can look so realistic.

After much um-ing and ah-ing, I finally decided on what specific area I wanted to research into. Graphics! Yaaaaaaaaaay. 

I did a couple of quick google searches to determine the development of graphics over the years, and compiled a quick mind-map/timeline of the various stages of improvement. This started from text-based graphics, as seen in the game Zork, to interchangeable third/first person games such as Skyrim.

Taken from Resident Evil 2, this image shows examples of the virtual camera system used and required in third-person games. Third person is more common in action-adventure games, whereas FPS are pretty self explanatory and don't require the use of third-person....

So now I've got some basic knowledge on what I need to research, the hard work begins. The us of graphics in gaming tends to be a very controversial topic, so I'm sure there's a mountain of articles and debates out there that I can have a nice little chuckle at along the way...