Overview of my artefact.

When creating or forming any sort of project, it is always important to follow passion, as by following your passion comes greater levels of investment as you find what you are creating more meaningful intrinsically, more effort is put into the project. This is why I decided to form my digital artefact (DA) around the game of FIFA and gaming graphics, as I have enjoyed watching the development of gaming graphics particularly within Esports, as it continues to provide users with more life like experiences. By creating my DA around this curiosity, I was hopeful that my analysis of the topic would have greater contribution to the game media industry.

My DA, was centred around FIFA by EA Sports , which looked thoroughly at the progression of the games graphics between the time period of 08 – 22 through a four post blog series that include how technology, fandom, esports and advertisement had influenced the games graphics during this time periods.

How it works ?

This project worked through weekly uploads of each blog topic for five weeks between the 2nd of September to the 5th of October.

Blog Post 1 – Technologies impact on FIFA’s graphics. (Uploaded 2nd September 2022).

Week-off between blog post 1 & 2 .

Blog Post 2– Fandom’s impact on the Progression of FIFA’s graphics. (Uploaded 12th September 2022).

Blog Post 3– Esports impact on FIFA’s graphics. (Uploaded 26th September 2022).

Blog Post 4– Advertisements impact on the progression of FIFA’s graphics. (Uploaded 3rd October 2022)

All blogs were heavily researched and formatted around the chosen topic of that week before being uploaded to my WordPress site. Once uploaded it was immediately shared and promoted via my twitter account and done once again three days later.

Inspiration for the series

As mentioned earlier, within gaming I have always loved watching the industry progress, particularly when looking at the graphics and the quality of experience it can now provide in contrast to the mid nineties. This is why I also picked FIFA as it was developed by EA sports and this organisation provides the most realistic experiences within the Esports genre for over a decade, it was the driving reason for me to come up with a project that would enable me to research and explore this progression in a greater detail.

Analytical framework

Within my DA, I critically analysed the games graphic progression through the games texts and para-textual elements. Although throughout the series more time and research was spent exploring the games para-textual elements, this involves looking at how the audiences understands and makes sense of the main text. This as a result shaped what content about the game I explored and researched and involved, looking at how the games covers, special features, menu and more impact the way the audience interacted with and perceived FIFA’s graphics between 08 and 22. It also built which concepts I would need to research in order to find more about how the audience was engaging with the game outside the primary text.

Concepts

The four concepts I used to analysis FIFA’s graphic progression were:

Technology, this concept was by far the biggest influence towards FIFA’s graphic progression and made it essential that I analysed it for my DA. With progression of technology it made FIFA’s graphics progress with it or risked being left behind.

Fandom, this aspect of academic research is becoming increasingly more important as it offers insight into connections between fan social structures and overarching social, cultural transformations in the world. Due to its integral part of modern life, directly affecting global patterns of consumption, identification, communication and creation, I thought it was necessary to analysis for my DA in order to expand my knowledge on the impact it has had on FIFA’s graphics. Due to the games strong fandom, EA needed to improve its graphics to ensure continued consumption.

Genre, is used in the analysis of popular media due to its ability to provide patterns of a genre and find more easily defining features making it a very important analysis within my DA. From understanding the features of the genre FIFA knew what priorities to improve within its graphics.

Advertisement, despite having no direct involvement in the progression of the games graphic in comparison to technology, these updates in graphics still needed to be communicated to the public which is why advertisement was so impactful to the game.FIFA needed to communicate to fans what was better about their game and it’s graphics than others.

Ultimately I chose these four concepts as I felt it most impacted what I wanted to share through my artefact.

Iterations/progressions

The biggest iteration that I made to this series was the final decision to no longer include researching the progression of FIFA’s consoling system along with the games graphics as stated in my pitch. This was shared in the first post of the series was made due to the fact I wanted the opportunity for my research to be more in depth to have greater value for the gaming industry and believed I could not achieve this when researching two elements of the game. Another factor in this decision was the believe that the graphics in contrast to controlling have greatly increased between the time period of 2008 – 2022, with this progression also having more of an impact on the game and players then its controlling systems. From this adjustment I learnt the significance in changing my artefact as it progresses to better align with what you would like it to achieve.

Another iteration that was made to my DA, was created due to audience interaction, where for the first blog post I was left feeling underwhelmed, this provided me with the opportunity to identify areas for progression and make some early iterations. With many blogs and online articles offering audio options as well, my first post did not despite offering visuals and in-text links it was also four minutes to read in total, which I felt may have deterred potential readers from visiting the article. To see if my audience would prefer audio for the next post, I decided to create a poll through my twitter account which had also been promoting the series and providing updates.

Unfortunately the poll recieved zero engagement, but I made the intrinsic choice to include audio for the remainder of the series. This resulted in the second post and also three and four receiving higher viewership, with no other changes to the articles format, I believe that through adding audio it helped increase the viewership of the series.

From this, I learnt the importance of continuing to make changes to the series in order to make it easier for it to reach its audience. Where after this I was also trying to find areas of the articles to improve to make engagement increase.

Another change I made throughout the creation of my artefact, came after the second blog post of the series, another iteration to the artefact felt necessary due to the feeling that my reach was still not were it could be. The next change I made to the artefact was centred around its promotion with both blogs one and two only being shared on my twitter account once. I decided to increase the sharing of the blogs three and four to twice in order to increase its reach.

Despite an increase of the sharing via my twitter, blog post three and four unfortunately received the same and less viewing in comparison to the second blog.

Even though this change, did not progress the series overall reach, it did provide me an important lesson regarding the need to analysis my artefact and to always try ways to develop it.

Value/ Utility

My aim when starting this artefact was to be able to create something of value to the games industry community. Although my it may not have appealed to a large majority within the community, I believe it provided great value to those who enjoy FIFA, Esports graphics and gamings progression over the recent decade. Regardless of low views I still think the value of this series can be found in the quality of research that each article provides and the work that I have put into it.

Moving forward with the artefact I am unsure what its next direction will be, in order to gain more of an understanding for areas of improvement I posted a poll via twitter which can be seen below.

Even though the future of this artefact is still uncertain, I think it still needs further iterations to help it progress. Overall I found the creation of this DA to be very rewarding and a learning curve in how to better develop one in the future.

Reference

• Clarke, J, 2016, History Of Gaming: EA Sports FIFA Then and Now. Available at: https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/ea-sports-fifa-then-and-now (Accessed 11th October 2022)
• Baerg, Andrew 2014. ‘Sports’, The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies. Routledge: New York 267 – 274. (Accessed 11th October 2022)

#gamemedia #FIFA #graphics #digitalartefact