Intrinsic Values: On Photo Mode

Gaming, for all it intents and purposes, is valued almost solely intrinsically. There's not much more you can get from it. The physical disk is worth money, but as games grow like technology, they end up being worth dirt as short as 4-6 months later.

I say "almost" because lots of people have heard of selling online characters for thousands of dollars online. But even then, your only selling and buying time.

So developers and gamers have a huge interest in what games can offer their consumers. So under this label of Intrinsic Values, I'll cover all things sought after in video games by gamers. There is a huge range of things to talk about. But I think this will also offer a peak inside of what drives gamers to play.

So to start off, I'll mention the latest thing that I've had a lot of fun with in the past couple of years: Photo Mode. This applies more so to console gamers because PC gamers have always had a way to screen shot their games: the Print Screen key (and I won't even get started on video capture).

Master Chief from Halo 3

But to us 25 and older console gamers, long gone are the polaroids and shaky home video footage with horizontal refresh lines. Now developers are starting tap into the consumers a little more to ask them what they want. As a result, a way to record and save images and footage is now being introduced. The PS2 started it all off with Gran Turismo 4, a racing sim. The built-in, full featured camera had all the complicated settings as any $400 camera on the market. And after you've tuned the picture to your hearts content, you could save it to a usb flash drive and put it anywhere your digital heart desired. I must have taken tons of pictures with that thing. To me, it was like Photography 101. I learned so much about camera settings, being able to see the effects live instead of taking a photo and waiting to get home.

The latest round of photo friendly games have bumped up the technology a bit and allowed you to share the photos online right from the game. Forza 2 for the Xbox 360 included the ability to have an account on the Forza 2 website and send pictures to it. Basically it just took the usb drive out of the equation, but if you were an active member constantly customizing paint jobs and taking action photos, it couldn't have been much easier.

Halo 3 is the newest game to offer photo mode inside of game replays. A first for a non-racing game if I'm correct (and I may be). Halo 3 records your last entire session of running and gunning and lets you go back through and take pictures. But not only that, it lets you "detach" the camera and move it anywhere around the level you want, sometimes spanning miles of virtual map space. It's even a tactic some people used to find hidden items buried in the levels.

I just created a Flickr account and Flickr group for Video game photos. Enjoy!