Components of Retro Games: Segmentation

    It was quite interesting to have a lecture earlier in the week regarding how gaming had developed and advanced in a transition between boardgames and videogames. However even though technology had introduced a tonne of new possibilities in terms of mechanics as well as aesthetics, I think a lot of the concepts remained the same but were just allowed to be explored further with the arrival of videogaming. There was a quote that was used during the lecture which sums this up quite nicely from Zegal saying "Classic arcade games are the ‘primordial soup’ from which many of the future conventions of games design were proposed". This would explain why we've been urged to play boardgames (I suppose retro games would also help), in order to understand basic mechanics and ideas, which are then layered up in 'aesthetic' clothing by modern videogames, obscuring some of the core elements which compose them. I was thinking about this after the lecture and wondered if videogaming would ever get to a stage where it was so far away from boardgames that the study of them would eventually become irrelevant and games design students would be looking at the games we consider modern now in order to educate themselves, however I cant see this being the case (not in the near future anyway).
    One of the design elements that was talked about in the lecture was 'segmentation' in retro videogames. This was dissected into a few subcategories like challenge segmentation, level and wave and spatial segmentation. Wave segmentation being a good example of a mechanic born from videogames. Before the arrival of these retro games waves in videogaming was unheard of, however I don't think it would be too difficult to implement a wave mechanic into a boardgame, for example perhaps after a certain amount of player turns or if a player progresses to a certain point in a game new challenges are introduced. Wave's being similar but not the same as level segmentation, in which certain aspects of the game are reset i.e. shield/health bars. From experience waves tend to just throw more challenges at a player, making it into more of a game of 'survival', whereas generally speaking levels tend to advance narratives and almost create chapters of the game.
    Spatial segmentation was basically something that related to aesthetics and to my knowledge doesn't affect game mechanics. This would be where a player can move through the game visually, which is something that modern videogames rarely go without however in various retro games like pong, environments are static. I was going to use Frogger as an example but I'm not sure that it wouldn't be debatable, as even though the background always stays the same, the layout of the obstacles and 'spaces' used to get to the other side of the river change, so essentially there is a spatial movement during the game.
    Challenge segmentation was also mentioned during the lecture, which links in to difficulty and creating new obstacles that differ from the last. I think this again is something that videogaming brought about, creating challenges using time limits, difficulty settings, checkpoints etc. Boss battles were also mentioned during the lecture and the Dungeons and Dragons boardgame sprung to mind, which was initially a thought in response to boss' being introduced with the arrival of videogames although upon further thought it also has spatial and level segmentation. So I did a quick bit of internet research just trying to find out when D&D was created and according to Wikipedia (so i may be wrong...) it was invented in 1974, a few years before games like Pacman (1980) and Asteroids (1979) were released. So if my research is right, then videogames may not have been the first emergence of challenge/spatial/level/wave segmentation, Dungeons & Dragons has all of these (albeit dependent on a dungeon master), however nowadays they are features you would find most commonly videogames.
    So that's a brief overview of some of the topics we looked at during the presentation.

    For my retro game review I'm hoping to look at Frogger (1981) mainly because it's a game I'm fairly familiar with and also it's mechanics are fairly basic but with a few added extra's like the time cap between levels and bonus points/extra lives, which would make it more interesting to write about.

Also whilst I was doing some research I came across this on Youtube which was pretty cool, give this a watch if you've got five minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6mu5B-YZU8