Media Revision Board

Cross Media Convergence is the process of different areas of media converging (joining) to create a different experience; this can be cinema joining computer games for cut scenes and trailers (God of War III and Assassins Creed III)

Cross Media Convergence can have many affects in any area be it the core game design of the game or whether it be the marketing strategy for the game using the internet.

Assassins Creed 3 is the most pre-ordered game ever - perhaps because of their huge marketing campaign?

Crowd Funding.

Kickstarter is an organisation that allows people to put their ideas out to the public and get some feedback, this then allows them to get a feel for the audiences reception on the project and also collect funding from the audience in order to create it, this cuts out the major publishers such as Ubisoft and allows the smaller game developers to have complete creative control over their project and furthermore adapt it to their target audience with the feedback of the backers. This allows the audience to play an Active role rather than a Passive one in games such as AC3.

"Double Fine Adventures" is a prime example of a kickstarter project, as you can see down below from the facts table they recieved $3,336,371 from 87,142 backers. Tim Schafer wanetd the return of the Point and Click Adventure genre of games and put his ideas out to everybody over YouTube and Kickstarter, these were greatly recieved and he made his intial sum of $400,000 in just under a day, and in the one month slot that it was open, $3 million.

Indie Games.

Independant Games otherwise known as "Indie" Games are video games created either by a small group of people or commonly an individual that develops a company after gaining success from this. (Minecraft and Notch -> Mojang are a good example of this.) They develop these games mostly without financial support from publishers.

Independant games mainly started development on PC systems but over time due to the more widely available variety of developer software out there now, they are expanding onto many wider platforms such as the Xbox Live Arcade, Steam and OnLIve.

Minecraft is a sandbox indie game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang. It was publicly released for the PC on May 17, 2009, as a developmental alpha version and, after gradual updates, was published as a full release version on November 18, 2011. A version for Android was released a month earlier on October 7, and an iOS version was released on November 17, 2011. On May 9, 2012, the game was released on Xbox 360 as an Xbox Live Arcade game, co-developed by 4J Studios. All versions of Minecraft receive periodic updates.
 

Exam Techniques.

When writing an exam essay question you should always read the question and break it down into understandable wording that you can clearly get a structure for, once you have this you should follow the following plan of layout making your 4 main bulk paragraphs relevant to the question.

Exam Terminology.

Publishing: The publishing of a game is very wide consisting of the genres (Can be multi-genre) and narrative as well as more core foundations such as the Target Audience.
Distribution: Distribution is how the audience receive the game upon completion (Online Retailers, Physical Stores and Steam).
Marketing: The marketing of a game is how the game is advertised (Assassins Creed III had a huge television marketing campaign).
Design and Production: This can also include the narrative and general design structures such as the game engine. (Moai and Anvil Next).