Gaming Engines and Effects of Gaming

This report provides a comprehensive overview of gaming engines, focusing on the comparison between Unreal Engine and Unity. It discusses various aspects such as pricing, programming languages, blueprint scripting, asset stores, profilers, graphical capabilities, and ease of use. The report also delves into the positive and negative effects of gaming, citing studies on aggression, attention problems, spatial skills, and prosocial behavior. Additionally, it includes a table of different gaming genres and their characteristics, along with a list of references.

Table of Contents
Gaming Genres........................................................................................................................ 3
Overview..................................................................................................................................3
Unreal and Unity Gaming Engine.....................................................................................................3
Price..............................................................................................................................................4
Programming Language................................................................................................................4
Blueprint.......................................................................................................................................4
Assets Store..................................................................................................................................4
Profiler..........................................................................................................................................4
Graphical Prowess........................................................................................................................4
Ease of Use...................................................................................................................................5
Positive and Negative Effects of Gaming.................................................................................5
Negative Effects................................................................................................................................5
Positive Effects.................................................................................................................................5
References................................................................................................................................7
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Gaming Genres
Description Platform Environment Example
Puzzle Problem Solving. Involves
strategy and logic
PC, Mac,
Consoles
and Mobile
Standalone Portal
Action Hard-core First or Third
Person shooter game.
PC,
Consoles,
Mac and
Mobile
Standalone Call of Duty
Strategy Top-bottom view. Involves
strategy.
PC, Mac,
Consoles
and Mobile
Standalone Age of Empires
Sports Simulation of a real-world
sports game
PC, Mac,
Consoles
and Mobile
Standalone Fifa Sports
Simulation Simulation of a real-world
activity
PC and
Mobile
Standalone Sims
Overview
A gaming engine is a software framework that helps with quick creation and development of
games. A gaming engine can be used to create games for desktop operating systems, consoles
and even mobile devices. The gaming engine consists of a renderer for 3D and 2D graphics, a
collision detection system, animation capabilities, artificial intelligence, physics engine,
memory management, streaming capabilities, scripting, sound, scene graph, localizations,
threading among other things. The overall gaming development becomes fast, cost-effective
and that of high-quality at a fraction of the cost as it involves reusing and adapting to the
same components for different games. Gaming engines also makes it easier to “port” games
to several platforms which means it provides easier interoperability between several different
gaming platforms.
Unreal and Unity Gaming Engine
The two of the most popular gaming engines available in the market today are Unity and
Unreal Engine. There are many large gaming companies that still makes use of their own
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proprietary gaming engine, but there’s a huge market for indie developers or smaller
companies who wishes to cut down on cost and time while still making sure the games are of
the highest quality. Games such as Hitman Sniper and Dead Island 2 are developed by these
gaming engines.
Price
The pricing of a gaming engine could the biggest factor in choosing the engine especially for
indie game developers. While Unreal Engine used to be hefty in pricing, the Unreal Engine 4
has dropped the pricing completely and now charges a royalty fee of 5% of gaming profits off
the games developed via Unreal Engine. On the other hand, Unity is completely free, but a
professional version of the engine is available at 1500$ of onetime payment.
Programming Language
The programming language can make or break the decision and therefore it’s an important
distinguishing factor between the two. Unreal Engine makes use of C++ and on the other
hand Unity makes use of JavaScript or C# mostly.
Blueprint
A blueprint visual scripting allows developers to create levels of the games or even entire
game without writing a single line of code. This is especially helpful for beginners or to
quickly create prototypes of initial gaming levels. This visual blueprint scripting is available
only in Unreal Engine and not in Unity.
Assets Store
Assets store means things like characters, props, skins, materials, textures, objects among
other things. The Unity has much larger and varied assets store in comparison with Unreal.
Profiler
Profiler allows one to optimize the game. This is made possible by recording the gaming
performance and debugging it. The free version of Unity does not have Profiler whereas the
Unreal Engine comes with profiler by default.
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Graphical Prowess
Graphical capabilities of Unreal Engine have been long established. The games developed
with unreal engines rivals some of the leading games produced by large studios with
proprietary engines. From more than a decade, unreal engine has dominated the gaming
industry with the most bleeding edge graphical capabilities. Apart from this, the particular
simulation as well as dynamic lighting is better than unity.
Ease of Use
The ease of use is a subjective choice. However, unity is being praised by many as being easy
to use compared with Unreal Engine. This means that, for a beginner, the learning curve
would typically be shorter for Unity.
Positive and Negative Effects of Gaming
Negative Effects
 Violent video games have increasingly been associated with violent tendencies. A
meta analytic review by Anderson pointed out that playing violent video games were
associated with an increased aggressive behaviour, aggressive effect, aggressive
cognition, whereas decreased prosocial behaviour and empathy. (Anderson et al.,
2010).
 Several studies have also shown that children as well as adolescents playing video
games tend to develop attention problems. (Chan & Rabinowitz, 2006)
 Some studies have also shown that people who played violent video games tend to
have poor results in emotional Stroop task.
 Also, another key problematic area has been school and studies performance. Some
studies have also shown that people who play lot of video games or spend time on
screen based media tend to have poor performance in schools and studies. (Anderson
et al., 2010).
Positive Effects
 Playing video games have been associated with increased visual and spatial skills.
Video game players perform better on tasks associated with spatial and visual skills
and it can be further improved too. Gamers tend to outperform non-gamers on several
visual and spatial tasks resulting in improved reaction times and faster reaction.
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 Playing prosocial video games is geared towards helping other video game players in
the gaming world. In tests, these games have shown to reduce aggressive thoughts,
improved feelings and empathy towards others, increased prosocial thoughts and
helping behaviour. (Greitemeyer & Osswald. 2011)
 Educational video games on the other hand improve are an effective teaching aide and
tend to increase knowledge and learning among people. (Gentile and Gentile, 2008)
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References
Anderson, C., Gentile, D., & Buckley, K. (2010). Violent video game effects on children and
adolescents (1st ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Gentile, D., & Gentile, J. (2008). Violent Video Games as Exemplary Teachers: A
Conceptual Analysis. Journal Of Youth And Adolescence, 37(2), 127-141.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10964-007-9206-2
Greitemeyer, T., & Osswald, S. (2011). Playing Prosocial Video Games Increases the
Accessibility of Prosocial Thoughts. The Journal Of Social Psychology, 151(2), 121-
128. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224540903365588
Hasan, Y., Bègue, L., & Bushman, B. (2012). Violent Video Games Stress People Out and
Make Them More Aggressive. Aggressive Behavior, 39(1), 64-70.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ab.21454
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