Bobby Miller
Writer Website
Entertainment Technology
From Discs to Digital Streaming: The Changing World of Anime Distribution
1,200 words
Anime has always been a niche market here in America. With its unique sense of humor and Japanese style of story-telling, anime rarely reaches mainstream viewers. The exceptions tend to be shows geared toward younger audiences, such as Pokémon. For those of us craving more mature entertainment, however, it can be difficult to get our hands on translated anime.
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Gaming to Learn: How Educational Games Benefit Students
1,200 words
When someone’s playing a game, whether it’s a physical sport or a video game, the amount of concentration they show is amazing. It’s as if the entire world is reducible to that game—everything else is blocked out. And the best of the best don’t hesitate to practice for hours a day in order to maintain their skill. If only we could get students to show that level of commitment to their schoolwork. So often, poor grades aren’t the result of plain incompetence, but rather a lack of motivation to study or finish homework. In order to inject students with motivation, some teachers use educational games in their classrooms.
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Surprising Benefits of Video Games
2,800 words
In another article, I explored how interactive online games can be used to help people overcome phobias and other mental illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Even games designed for entertainment can benefit a person’s mental health; for instance, Tetris can divert a person’s attention away from traumatic events. However, the surprising ways that video games can be used to help people does not end there. Video games can be used to raise your self-esteem, to learn empathy, to soothe pain, and more.
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Konichiwa, Amigo: Localizing Video Games for Different Countries
2,400 words
According to The Escapist, the video game industry was worth about $105 billion worldwide in 2010. To obtain such profits, video game companies usually do not release their products only in the country where they were made. If that were the case, we Americans would only be playing Microsoft’s systems right now, since Nintendo and Sony are both based in Japan. By translating games into different languages, companies can expand their profits. While this process might be simple for games with little text, localization is much more complex with games chock full of words. As companies have discovered over the years, an effective translation often requires more than just converting each word of a language into another language; the game as a whole must be tweaked to suit different cultures.
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An Overview of Flawed Video Game Reviews
1,500 words
According to Reuters, the video game industry worldwide is a $66 billion market when we look at sales across all platforms, include consoles, PCs and mobile devices. This huge market owes itself to the fact that video games have gone from being viewed as a pastime for children and niche enthusiasts to an activity that just about anyone can enjoy. Despite the overwhelming popularity of video games, the professional reviews that critique them to help consumers pick out the best possible experiences still suffer from notable flaws. Inflated scores, peer pressure and more hold back a number of reviews from being as useful as they could be.
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Twenty Years of Change in Video Games
2,200 words
Even people who don’t consider themselves gamers are well aware that video games have evolved tremendously in the past twenty years. The graphics have gone from pixilated sprites to breathtaking scenery that almost looks real. Mute characters have finally found their voice. The budgets are growing, and so are the development times. However, there are a number of other more subtle—but equally important—differences that have arisen in gaming in the past two decades. From broader audiences to the death of arcades, the face of gaming has seen enormous change.
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Sing, Computer, Sing: Vocaloid Technology
1,300 words
Ever since Cher auto-tuned her song “Believe” in 1998, the line between an actual human voice and a digital one has slowly blurred. However, auto-tuning still requires a human singing. But thanks to technological advances by the music company Yamaha, voices can now be produced with just a computer program.
This program is called Vocaloid, a combination of vocal and android. According to Vocaloid.com, “the software allows users to input melody and lyrics in order to synthesize singing. In other words, with this technology, singing can be produced without a singer.” Everyone who uses the program has a database of sounds at their disposal, the “phonemes” that make up language. By combining these language sounds at will, they can produce song lyrics.
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