Rationale.

Networked Media Production – Project A Question 2: A Rationale...

R18+ Australia

I chose to make a reference page or site to present the current affairs topic of R18+ video games in Australia. I felt that this was a good opportunity to present a topic that is very relevant to myself (being an avid gamer), but also find out more information about the topic and properly inform other people.

The reason why I created a website is that most people that would be interested in this topic are very computer literate, they would be looking on the internet for information about this topic and that I felt a webpage was the best vehicle to reach my target market.

I initially started looking at other websites not only for information, but layout styles, how up to date they were, general content, colour scheme and basically how easy they are to navigate. In my searches I found a lot of content that was more or less people ranting about why there isn’t an R18+ classification for video games, and news articles about games that have recently been banned. Although it wasn’t particularly hard to find good informing webpage’s about the topic, it did actually require you to go past page 1 in a Google search. I eventually did find multiple pages that ranged from helpful and informing to average to poor. But I will concentrate on three specific websites:

· http://everyoneplays.org.au/ A website set up by retailer Game which is a very informing website, easy to navigate and generally aesthetically pleasing. It contains a brief but informative ‘about’ section and is generally geared towards encouraging people to sign a petition to support the proposed R18+ classification.

· http://www.r18games.com.au/ This is the website where I spent a lot of my time reading and gathering information. It contains more in depth information about the topic and was fairly easy to navigate. It has very up to date news, the colour scheme works well. Once again this website is less about reporting and more subjective. Main criticism is that the pages are overfilled with text.

· http://www.r18gamesaustralia.com/ This website is a blog that has been created in wordpress. It mostly contains news updates and a very brief ‘about’ section that isn’t particularly informing. The layout of the site is very ‘bloggy’ and the navigation bar was a bit hard to find. This website is very one sided, it almost felt like the creator was trying to recruit followers for a cause. Felt like a bit of a propaganda campaign.

When looking at these websites I thought that they were for the most part really good. They had a simple but effective layout, easy to read, easy to navigate, very aesthetically pleasing and the colour scheme didn’t conflict. Although most of these attributes were shared across the board, there was another attribute that these websites had in common. Subjectivity. They were all less about informing, and more about a call to arms via signing a petition. So I felt the need to produce an informing website that wasn’t biased and contained useful information about Australia’s current situation regarding R18+ video games, what had been banned in the past, recent news updates, how someone could help and if we do release R18+ rated video games, how we will stop underage gamers from getting their hands on these games.

So I set out to create a reference page/site. I chose to do a webpage format not dissimilar to that found on the http://everyoneplays.org.au/ and http://www.r18games.com.au/ websites. Their layouts worked really well and I wanted to incorporate that into my site. The only main modification I made from those layouts was to have a navigation bar on the top left hand side of the page, were it was obvious and couldn’t be lost. But the main thing I wanted which none of the other websites had was unbiased content. I wanted to inform rather than argue one side of an argument.

I made the site using Dreamweaver, I have used it before and it was really great being able to modify code and play with the design side of things. The only downside was that for some reason it kept on throwing the frames out of position, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get them to stay still. I thought that I networked to other media quite well; I included websites as a source of news and recent developments, and also a youtube video from the ABC which would help the viewer build their own picture and view on this subject.