A little about me: I am number 10 of 12 brothers and sisters in my family. All from the same parents, with a half-sister making thirteen from my father's previous marriage. I was born in Ohio and moved to Florida when I was 11 years old with the rest of my family. Because of the age gap from oldest to youngest many of my siblings were married and having kids when I came to Florida in 1982 or just getting married and starting out. I waited till I was 31 to get married and have been happily married for 6 1/2 years.
I started my gaming career at a very early age. The first game that we had was PONG, yeah I know, but it was great fun to a little kid after school. Moving up the ladder to the Atari system which I never had one but a good friend did and we used up a lot of free time after school on that thing, my friend still has it and all the games he had as a kid. My progression went up from there, with Mario Bros. and the Nintendo systems. My friend and two of my brothers played Mario Bros. all day and sometimes all night until we beat it over a couple of weeks. Currently I have Playstations 2 and 3, which I play whenever I find the time. Video games are not the only interests I have had over the years though. I have worked in the manufacturing industry over the past fifteen years or so building stainless steel rails, ladders, and many other accessories for many boat manufacturers and I am currently in sales. Some of my favorite things to do are: going fishing, playing basketball, weight lifting and exercise ( though I haven't done those for a while), swimming, and almost anything to do outdoors. I like to do a lot of things but don't need to bore you anymore with that. Through the years I have never lost my love of video games and seeing and enjoying the new advances that have been developed since my days with PONG. I am like a little kid waiting for the next big thing to come out so I can try it.
Thats all for now.
Read Bogost Chapter 1/Wild Card Blog: write what you like, but connect it to an insight, idea, or example from chapter one of Persuasive Gaming.
I have finished reading the entire chapter, and the example on retail customer service (pages 5 and 6) apply to me this past week. It was about the person who purchased the DVD player late at night and leads a busy life and let it sit for over two weeks before trying it and realizing it was broke. After another week he took it back to the store and found out the store has a 14 day return policy and he was over that time frame so he was able to haggle, reason, plead with the customer service representative to take the DVD player back (break procedure or creating new procedures). The example then tells how if the man would have ordered the DVD player online and waited that long after receiving it and tried to return it to the online store (business) a machine would be the one who would process the return. The retailer's website software would handle the return and deny the request to return the DVD player, no face-to-face interaction takes place so the man is out of luck.
As the eample applies to me: Last week I went to class and was confused and excited about ENC 3310 and this concept of posting on a wiki all of our assignments. After class I came home explored a little bit and then went on to something else. Then as the days rolled along I created my hub page on Sunday, and as the week got busier I didn't return untill today to complete some of the assignments and I am still having a hard time figuring out what exactly I am supposed to be doing on here. Just as the man having to log into the website and confront the website software for his return, I find myself loggin into the wiki and reading all the things we need to do on here and not knowing exactly how to complete those things. However, I am finding that the more I play around on the wiki the more I understand how to do some of these things, it just takes time to get used to this style and idea of a nonlinear classroom and new procedures. Motto: Don't let life get so busy that you can't take a look around the world that surrounds you.
Definitional Argument
McDonald's Game Thoughts:
The McDonald's game was challenging. I had to use harmful by-products to acheive the goals, but I never succeeded, that was the challenge for me. I wanted to succeed without using those things. Everytime I played ended in bankruptcy, but I understand the principles behind the game, big businesses use horrible practices to attain their ultimate goals. I personally don't eat at McDonald's anymore and I agree with Kristie about how they prepare their food. A quick story, while in high school a friend of mine worked at a McDonald's and one of the managers would make the grill people use the hamburgers that would fall off the grill onto the dirty floor. They would scoop them back up and put them back on the grill, he believed in not wasting the food, it would have given him a bad record because of the food they threw away at the end of the night. I guess that McDonalds counted that against the manager, I dont know. Anyway, when he was found out they didn't fire him, he was reprimanded and they shipped him to a different store, mmmm isn't that just so nice of McDonalds. I also think Jacob makes a great point about how the game is getting the word out to larger audiences.
Paul
McCloud Chapter 1,2 and 3:
Chapter 1
I found the chapter very interesting. I have never read a text book in the way that McCloud presents his material, plus the history about comics and their origin was unknown to me prior to reading the chapter. It was interesting to see how people viewed the comic genre over the years and how they viewed them as"crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap disposable kiddie fare". But McCloud tries to show us that there is much more to them than that and gives them a proper definition as mentioned above in Jacob's post: "juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence." I hope the rest of the book is as enlightening as the first chapter. - Paul
Chapter 2
This chapter really opened my eyes about how we perceive the world around us. For instance in the beginning of the chapter McCloud goes from simple vocabulary words to different categories of icons and then into picture icons that resemble the subjects. As he goes on he shows how a picture of a person's face can go through stages and end up as a circle with two dots and a line and we still see it as a face that is acceptable as the real picture. It just amazes me how the mind works this way and how much these icon's are imbedded into our view of the world. It reminds me of someone doing a caricature of you, it resembles you and yet it is abstract and simplified from what you really look like. I also thought it was interesting that McCloud showed basic examples of how we see ourselves in everything around us; cars, a cheese can, a simple circle with two dots and a line for a mouth. He also makes a good point that it is easy to get into a cartoon because you don't see it as someone else you can see yourself in it. He states "The cartoon is a Vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled...An empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We dont just observe the cartoon we BECOME it!". It was also interesting to see how he represents the Pictorial Vocabulary of comics and any visual art as a triangle and showing some recognizable characters on that triangle over the years.
Chapter 3
The chapter once again explains how we perceive the world. Closure is everywhere around us, in our everyday lives, I just didn't think about how much it is in our lives until reading this chapter. I thought the example of the guy with the ax and the man who is screaming No! No! explained how closure is used to create your own idea of what is in the "gutter" of the comic. We become involved in the comic, we decide where the ax is going and how that person dies, pretty intense. I never realized that before it was explained in the chapter. I liked the examples McCloud uses to show the six different transitions comic artists use closure to create their comics. It was pretty neat to see the different transitions that are used by other countries especially Japan, how radically different they are from American comics.
The Grading for the Definitional Arguements Unit One
First Person: Cyberdrama Essay
I chose Ken Perlin's essay: Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story. I can relate to his concept that in a movie we can relate to a protagonist when something happens to them. The movie tugs at our emotions and we start to have feelings about what is happening to the character, what they are thinking, or what will be their next move. We let the narrative take control and take us where it wants to go (we give up our agency-the right to make choices). Perlin focuses on "The Novel" and its parts that are literally played out such as staged theater, cinema, and figurative animation because they have the closest connection to computer games. Games do not require us to give up our agency though, they need us to make choices so the game can be played out. We don't feel as connected with the character in the game because they are basically a token and we control everything that happens with them. So when you take a break from the game you don't feel as connected to that character because what you experienced while playing was your own agency (choices). Perlin would like to essentially merge a linear narrative and interactive game together so that our agency and the agency of an entity is merged, creating an intermediate agency. The Sims (or God-games) is the example he uses to to get his point across that is while we control the virtual people, they are merely going through a sequence of linear behavior to simulate the actions we want them to do. It seems more simulation than an actual world of feeling beings. You instruct the character to do something and they do it, then you instruct them to do a continuation of that task and they do the same steps that the first task took then they go ahead from there to complete the second task. However, the essay does mention that small steps are being made that are starting to bring games closer to intermediate agency. Perlin states that in order to create a psychological suspension of disbelief in visual narratives there must be three elements: writing, directing, and acting. Computer games are missing the acting element and therefore is unable to create this psychological suspension of disbelief. The essay makes note that there are many people working to create an intermediate agency that will help us find a way to care about these computer game characters. Personally I have found that I don't really connect with the characters of a game that much either. When I walk away I don't think about the characters so much as I may think about the tasks I need to do.
Would like to know: Are there games out there now that have an intermediate agency now? Since the book was written in 2004, just wondering if a game like WOW would meet this criteria.
Causal Assignment
Midterm Reflection
Peer Reviews for Unit Two - Causal Assignment
Peer Grades for Unit Two by Paul M
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Comments (1)
Anonymous said
at 11:10 pm on Jan 29, 2009
wow big family... my grandparents had 10 kids and my grandpa's dad had 13! but im just one out of 3
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