9781422272916

Gaming HIGH-INTEREST STEAM

HIGH-INTEREST STEAM

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Gaming HIGH-INTEREST STEAM

JACQUELINE HAVELKA

MASON CREST PH I LADELPH I A | MI AMI

Mason Crest PO Box 221876 Hollywood, Florida 33022 (866) MCP-BOOK (toll-free) • www.masoncrest.com

Copyright © 2022 by Mason Crest, an imprint of National Highlights, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. First printing 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN (hardback) 978-1-4222-4522-4 ISBN (series) 978-1-4222-4516-3 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4222-7291-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Havelka, Jacqueline, author. Title: Gaming / Jacqueline Havelka.

Description: Hollywood, Florida : Mason Crest, 2022. | Series: High-interest STEAM | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020000840 | ISBN 9781422245224 (hardback) | ISBN 9781422272916 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Video games–Juvenile literature. | Video games–Design–Juvenile literature. | Video games in education–Juvenile literature. Classification: LCC GV1469.3 .H38 2022 | DDC 794.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000840 Developed and Produced by National Highlights, Inc. Editor: Andrew Luke Production: Crafted Content, LLC

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contents Chapter 1: SCIENCE IN GAMING ......................................... 7 Chapter 2: TECHNOLOGY IN GAMING ������������������������������� 27 Chapter 3: ENGINEERING IN GAMING ������������������������������� 39 Chapter 4: ART IN GAMING ������������������������������������������������ 51 Chapter 5: MATH IN GAMING ��������������������������������������������� 63 Further Reading ������������������������������������������������������������������ 76 Internet Resources & Educational Video Links �������������� 77 Index ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 78 Author Biography & Photo Credits ����������������������������������� 80

KEY ICONS TO LOOK FOR

Words to Understand: These words with their easy-to-understand definitions will increase the readers’ understanding of the text while building vocabulary skills. Sidebars: This boxed material within the main text allows readers to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives. Educational Videos: Readers can view videos by scanning our QR codes, providing them with additional educational content to supplement the text. Examples include news coverage, moments in history, speeches, iconic sports moments, and much more! Text-Dependent Questions: These questions send the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented there. Research Projects: Readers are pointed toward areas of further inquiry connected to each chapter. Suggestions are provided for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis.

WORDS TO UNDERSTAND

aesthetics— a particular taste for, or approach to, what is pleasing to the senses and especially sight taxonomy— an orderly classification of objects vorticity— the state of a fluid in a rotational swirling motion

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CHAPTER 1

SCIENCE IN GAMING

Do video gaming and STEAM have anything in common? To help answer that, let’s define the elements of a video game. In the book The Art of Video Game Design , author Jesse Schell defines a game as a “problem-solving activity done with a playful attitude.” No matter what video game you play, that game will have four core elements: aesthetics , story, technology, and mechanics. Aesthetics dictate how a game looks and feels and what you will see and hear when you play the game. Mechanics outline the rules by which a game is played. The story is about how the events of a game unfold. Since video games are interactive, the player has a big role in deciding what that story will become. Finally, the technology is the foundation of the other three; the level of technology dictates the limitations on how a game will look, how it will be played, and how its story will unfold. STEAM, which is short for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math, is being stressed in middle school and high school

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From the way the game looks on the screen to how the controls work and feel in your hand, STEAM impacts all aspects of gaming.

education to encourage students to obtain skills that will lead to great careers. Game design and gaming consoles and equipment have everything to do with STEAM. SOPHISTICATED SCIENCE Perfect mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics lead to the perfect video game. Developers create the games and players consume the games. Players want to understand the rules, and once that happens, the players interact with the game to have some fun. The mechanics are the hidden rules, driven by math, algorithms and data. The dynamics are the part of the game that the user can actually see. Dynamics happen when you press a button on your controller or take other similar actions. Aesthetics drive the emotions you have when you interact with the game. You may feel

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euphoria because you are immersed in a beautiful fantasy world or you may feel stress due to the time pressures of the game. Game designers build these in layers. Mechanics are the foundation; the next layer is dynamics, which work to create the aesthetic experiences that make up the top layer. Game theory is a sophisticated science, but modern video games use many other forms of sophisticated science such as computational geometry, fluid dynamics, biomechanics, and more to create the most lifelike games possible.

Many sophisticated sciences go into making games as lifelike as possible.

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SCIENCE IN GAMING

COMPUTER SCIENCE Games today look like the real world and creating this gaming universe takes incredible computer processing power and hardware. Computers must be able to process all the instructions coming from the mechanics layer and all the images from the aesthetics layer. Today’s games use multi-core processing, meaning simultaneous use of multiple central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). CPUs do one calculation at a time, so even though the hardware is very fast, calculations are in sequence. GPUs are specialized processors that do calculations in parallel. Most desktop PCs today have GPUs on a graphics card to show 3D views on the monitor. In video production, engineers use high-performance GPUs to create 3D graphics for games. Developers and gamers can also use virtual hardware, meaning multiple users can even share a GPU over the internet in order to run more and better 3D graphics without the need to buy expensive hardware on their own. PHYSICS If you’ve ever played a video game that involves fire, you would’ve likely noticed how real those frames can look. Programming fire and water are two of the hardest jobs in video games. To be realistic, fire must be fast-moving and it must burn other objects. Older video games used not-so-realistic animation to represent fire, but these days, fire is all about the physics. Programmers actually take into account the vorticity of fire. During a fire, air becomes super-heated and rises rapidly, drawing the flames higher in the air right along with it. If there is wind, then the flames begin rotating, creating a fire

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The better the GPU, the more realistic a game’s graphics will appear.

vortex. The whole fire vortex looks like a fire tornado and only lasts a few seconds. Fire in video games also only lasts for a few seconds. At least for now, it is displayed in short brief bursts. Despite fire being the most difficult effect to program, researchers at Stanford have created algorithms to make fire look real based on vorticity. They have algorithms to depict a gas fire (with lots of smoke), paper on fire, and even an oil fire on top of water. Due to hardware limitations, there are no raging forest fires because there is simply not enough processing power to handle programming graphics to represent all the physics required to make fire look real. Even Nvidia’s Quad SLI system with four standalone GPUs doesn’t have enough “firepower.” However, players have a high demand for fire in video games, so maybe hardware will catch up soon.

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SCIENCE IN GAMING

The movement of flames is one of the hardest things to depict accurately for game programmers.

PSYCHOLOGY Game designers try to create the most realistic-looking humans possible, and part of that is creating real human expressions. Programmers generate a long list of rules that determine the different expressions and emotions a game character must show. They use a taxonomy of 60 basic facial actions that was put together by psychologists Wallace V. Friesen and Paul Ekman. Programmers determine the facial and eye movements needed to create happiness, sadness, frowning, and more. Getting the eye movements right for each expression is especially difficult.

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The entire range of human facial expressions is challenging to replicate for programmers.

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SCIENCE IN GAMING

MATERIALS SCIENCE In video games, glass breaks, buildings blow up, and sand spills. All of these may look and sound simple, but programming these effects is a huge challenge to programmers. Using materials science to make their designs look realistic helps. Many designers use physics engines that depict how an actual material should crack and crumble. The physics calculations use a concept involving turning each object into a collection of very small tetrahedron shapes. Chapter 5 has more detail on how geometry like this is used in gaming. The complex science of physics considers how the material will react. For instance, take the example of a huge boulder hitting a brick wall. At the impact point, the game calculates how the brick wall would act based on its density and If you are a creative thinker who loves technology and likes to build things, a career in video game design may appeal to you. Some careers require a college degree in computer science, while other careers look for people with a strong artistic background. In your job, you would develop games for computers and mobile devices. You would be involved in brainstorming about and designing the game details, perhaps writing the computer code and testing the finished game. You might aspire to work for a major gaming company like Nintendo or Ubisoft. STEAM CAREERS

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