We looked at terms from the paper. We then applied the terms to a movie clip we watched.
Then we watched a youtube clip about a touch interaction, and applied the terms from the Lacey paper.
Then we had a discussion about novel interactions and symbolism, and a wee bit ‘o speculation about how to think about new systems.
P.S. If someone else has notes, please feel free to add them. You can either add them as a comment or create an entirely new post; however, it might be nice to have all of the notes in this section.
Chung-Ching and Jen ARE AWESOME! Thanks for the discussion.
So most people know that I love the Clerks movies, so I wanted to try and see what types of signs I could find in there, to exercise the reading for Thursday’s class. This is from the sequel to the movie, and, of course, has some epic R-rated language, but it makes me laugh, and we’re adults, so I hope this is OK for posting. So here we go…
The first thing that struck me was a sign of the title of this video. I thought this was where Jay rapped his signature rap, as it was referenced in the his own movie (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), but this version of the rap is different, and is indicative of the time he has spent in jail and cleaning his life around. It’s also not as loaded with as many epithets as his usual mouth, but it’s a sign that the rehab program he was in has started to change his thinking. It’s even more interesting to see Silent Bob’s expression as Jay is rapping, as he sort of shies away – it’s not Jay’s best, and it doesn’t sound really good. This might be a sign of how he really feels for Jay – either concerned for him, or embarrassed that he still hangs out with Jay.
Where Jay and Silent Bob are standing is also very interesting – they are standing in front of a Mooby’s fast food restaurant in Leonardo, New Jersey (a place that has been established to be a “waste pit” in other movies). The Mooby’s is also a reference to McDonald’s, because it’s everywhere in the View Askew universe (the set of movies Kevin Smith has directed with these characters), a sign of its omnipresence and hold over the lives of people who can’t get a “real job” (aka Dante and Randal, and Jay and Silent Bob usually end up wherever Dante and Randal go, maybe a sign of fate?). The bricks behind them are quite apparent, even though the Mooby’s logo is perfectly written on there and the paint looks really good. It’s an interesting sign because the stereotype of New Jersey is that it is a dump and that large buildings like this usually receive a lot of graffiti (which ends up happening later). It’s an interesting sign at the possibility of hope of life for Dante, Randal, Jay, and Silent Bob. Now that’s something I didn’t see when I saw the movie the first time around.
I also appreciated the fact that not only did this scene point to and reference other movies (the Buddy Christ shirt is from Dogma), but it also pointed to what our commonsense notion of what a drug dealer and a reborn Christian talks and acts like. Even though Jay and Silent Bob have gone through jail, they both still have the same posture and the same types of conversations of when they were drug dealers (could be signifying that rehab doesn’t work fully?), but that the experience was worthwhile for them, as they now found the Bible, and Jay wants to do something with his life now. It’s even more of a sign of how the experience of jail worked on them, because their language is still roughly the same as when they were standing in front of the Quick Stop. Another “cue”/sign here is that Silent Bob is in the scene, as he’s the director and the character, but he holds up the Bible to the camera when Jay references it, potentially showing us a view they may/may not have in terms of faith and religion in modern day society (could be parodying this type of people, which I could see).
I couldn’t really find too many more signs of the change of Jay and Silent Bob (other than than the lack of music going on – since it is silent – Jay usually raps with non-diegetic music – it seems to signify something has changed about his lifeworld), but their costumes are a little bit cleaner and worn on them as well, signifying their use in jail, along with the hard lives they have been leading until this point. The costumes of the people who want to buy drugs from them also were done well enough (including their posture), to signal that they were also down on their luck and they think that weed will help them, but the audience ends up being surprised that the main reason they choose this dealer is that he makes them laugh – a sign for the audience to laugh, as it is unexpected.
Please feel free to add on – I would like to see what other signs I take for granted in this scene, as I know these characters pretty well (or at least I would like to think so).
So I would like to do a breakdown of the mise-en-scene of one of my favorite video games: Skies of Arcadia: Legends (GCN). I will try and use the definitions on pp6 of the Lacey reading.
Temporal Aspects to Keep in Mind
There are a couple of things to keep in mind while trying to do an accurate job at looking at the scene here: this battle is usually taken on later in the game, and has happened three times before, each of varying difficulty. This is the end of a sidequest and story that makes the party especially powerful when completed – the boss is worth a level of experience when defeated (most enemies aren’t – a lot of grinding has to go on to be able to complete this battle!)
Some Visual Aspects
The player is treated to a typical RPG menu overlay on top of the camera work. The spirit points, the gauge as to what types of special moves or magic can be used, is displayed at the top of the screen, and the main menu of commands are also displayed in the lower left corner, accompanied by a set of icons to make it easier to see what the possible choices are for the player. Also, whenever a move, magic, or attack is done, it is shown on the top of the screen as the actor plays this part of the scene, which allows the player to not only confirm what has been selected, but to help prepare for what should be done next round.
The battle takes place on an imperial battleship, complete with a bridge and “quad”-laser that’ll take out demigods with ease. The battleship is huge, has multiple floors, and is made out of metal (I believe). The battle takes place on the front deck of the ship, only after this imperial battleship docks with a very small boat that the antagonist pilots. The battle also allows the player to be in a small amount of control of the camera, as he/she can move the camera during the “turn preparation” (before the scene, aka turn, has happened) – this isn’t shown as well. Also, the camera pretty much is satisfied to circle over the action for most of the battle, until it zooms in on a player or computer, when their turn is taken. Then the camera programmatically repeats this until the battle is over.
Aural Components
This is the best part of the scene, as this is the part of the experience I cue into the most while playing an RPG (besides focusing in on the action). The sounds used for all menu operations are very small, quick, and pretty much to-the-point. They become musically and a cue for one to get to the actions one wants to take, and are very helpful in this way. What’s missing is the sounds of the control stick and the button presses on the GameCube controller.
The main reason why the experience of playing this game is so epic is due to the boss music. The first whoosh that occurs is a sign of an upcoming boss fight, cued by the signature boss music itself. The music is also reactive to the context of the boss fight as well: when the main character dies, the music segues to an uphappy and distressing tune, to let the player know that the fight is not going in their favor, and must do something to turn the battle around. There’s also the segue to the epic happy music when the player is winning, and happens later in the video, as this cues the player that he/she is winning and needs to keep pouring it on to achieve victory. It is also possibly to get the most epic segue, from getting it to go from the bad music all the way up to the win music in one blow – it’ll blow your mind, and make the hair stand up on the back of your neck (that’s why I keep playing this game! – I even prolong the boss fights to hear the music more, too). The music also has more cues as well, as one can hear the death knell from the bell in the beginning of the cutscene, showing the player that this is going to be tough (and it is a tough fight, believe me). There’s also the happy post-battle music too, along with the posing and victory chants as well too, and I hum this as well along with the video.
The Performance of the Actors
There are 6 character actors here in this battle (unless one wants to count the ship, as it is pretty vital to this battle). They are: (protagonists) Vyse (main character in blue), Aika (girl with orange ponytails), Fina (girl dressed in all white and veil), and Enrique (the other guy, who’s pretty epic); (antagonists) Piastol (a secret boss – this is the 4th encounter), and her puppy. Each character has their own set of moves, namely attacking, adding spirit points (the thing on the top of the screen used to determine special moves) or using a special move. Most of the acting in this battle is determined by the player (except for the cutscene beforehand), and can be changed to do whatever he/she wants – this was just one way of acting this battle out. Each of these sets of actions has their own way of being acted out (namely, each animation is different, the way the battle is being acted). The player also gets to see the costumes each character has: Vyse is a sky pirate, so he wears blue denim, sky goggles, and has a double set of cutlasses; Aika is the girl next door type of character, so she wears a yellow skirt, tall boots, and uses a boomerang (she tries to get Vyse’s attention a lot, but not in this battle); Fina is a mage, so she gets to wear a white dress and veil, uses a very subdued and demure posture, and utilizes her magical pet Cupil as her weapon; Enrique is a prince, so he wears very formal and imperial clothing, stands tall and proud, and utilizes a rapier (a very fancy and refined sword). What’s super interesting here is that the acting is very repetitious (the typical RPG battle), even though it is a boss fight (the player utilizes each character’s “role” in order to achieve the “good” ending of this scene), even though the player of this movie could have done a different script to achieve the same ending, although not recommended by other players (I would have done this at a much later experience level, personally, and focused on speed of attack and the team’s special attack, not shown here, but causes the moon to come out of the sky and destroy the battlefield). The items also play a critical role here, as they not only help the team to victory, but they have their own animation (which can be bypassed if desired – but all enemy animations cannot be bypassed), which reinforces their role in the script of victory here.
I could go deeper, but I would like to start a conversation about this, so please jump on in!
So, as some of you may know, me and Casey go play DDR just about every Friday afternoon. As some of you might not know, Casey is insanely good at DDR.
It was funny last Friday, though… There were a couple of new interactions that happened. First, we gave the Pump it Up machine a try… It has 5 buttons instead of 4 like DDR. Later on, Casey gave Doubles on DDR a try. Doubles is where you use both pads and have to dance across the whole machine.
Now, Casey is insanely good at singles/versus DDR but I noticed that he was having trouble with the other two. So, we got into a short discussion…
Normally, Casey doesn’t even think about the DDR pad when he’s playing, but it was obvious that on the 5 button game and on the doubles he was having to look at his feet sometimes and and think about what he was doing.
This seems like a good example of going from Ready-at-hand and Present-at-hand. We disagreed on what it was that was becoming Present-at-hand though…
Was it his mindset/DDR knowlege? Or was it the pad? Or was it his feet? I argued that it was the pad because it was the tool he was using to play the game. Especially on the 5 button machine, he had to consciously focus on the buttons because he wasn’t used to where they were. But in the end, we weren’t too sure.
Spending my lovely Sunday afternoon wrapping up the essay outline and I had question for you. Basically because my interaction is with a consumer model camera it is starting to sound like a cnet.com review or something, only with a more technical vocabulary and resources to back up what I’m saying. Is this okay? I’m actually thinking it might be an extension of my own experiences in reading reviews of such devices.
So, to get it down to a particular I am saying a particular user, a dad, using a particular camera, my Polaroid HD DV, for a particular event, his child’s first birthday.
I’ve been walking around my apartment imagining what that would be like. Thinking about the elements of the party. What would the dad want his audience to see. What types of extensions of his own eyes will he want with the camera. My main argument is that because the camera has such poor quality and terrible ergonomics, it interrupts the extension of his visual understanding of the event because he must take time to make the artifact known, taking away from the natural flow of him recording the experience the way he is experiencing it.
I think that’s basically where I am right now. I have some resources sprinkled in there, read-to-hand, present-to-hand, lifeworld, flow, etc.
Let me know if anyone out there has any last second feedback or if you are experiencing similar things.
So I decided to look at a bit of machinima made from WoW clips set to the song “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down. It has been an interesting journey. It is incredible to think that some clips from World of Warcraft set to a cheesy late 90’s love-rock song could make me misty-eyed. I dare you to watch this video multiple times and not be moved at least a little bit.
So I asked this in class, but I wanted to open it up on the forums.
“Can we do semiotics, can we talk about it, without using phenomenology to explain our understanding of the text?”
Jeff’s comment was that’s how they thought about it in the 60’s but they realized there was a missing piece is assuming the signifier connected directly to the signified in an obvious way. But we now know that way is not so obvious. Yet, I believe there were some people who maybe disagree and that there is a bit of separation. If that’s true, please let me know because I’m having an impossible time of separating the two ideas in my head. I feel like at this point semiotics is just a way of looking at phenomenology, you know: things as symbols or representation that connect meaning and message from a supplier to a receiver. Like how UPS delivers my birthday ( november 12th ) cookies from my mom to my house.
If we were to create a cheat sheet for Interaction culture, what would it look like? (all the fancy terms, with a two line simple explanation and a bull’s eye example). I propose that all of us do this as a class.
Currently struggling to understand these three terms – structuralist view, hermeneutic view, phenomenological view! What’s the difference? How do they fit with each other? Please provide comments or feel free to add your own terms (with or without explanations). Let’s cheat!
Here is a video from one of my favorite movies – Ratatouille. For those of you who have not watched it yet (please do), Remy (the protoganist) makes ratatouille (a vegetable stew). Anton Ego is this big shot food critic who is a hard ass, extremely critical, hard to please and is very skeptical about the stew. The below scene is when he tastes it and is completely floored by the taste since it reminds him of his mother making him this dish during his childhood.
Now let’s try to put on different goggles and see this video again.
Structuralist goggles – The stew was good because it had tomatoes, carrots, beans, etc, cut and cooked perfectly. What is the ingredient? How do we identify it?
Non-phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is usually prepared during summer. This is because most of the standard ingredients grow during summer. No lifeworld involved.
Phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is considered as a poor man’s dish since most of the standard ingredients are not expensive.
Non-hermeneutic phenomenological goggles – Anton Ego’s experience is the perfect example for this. Tasting this stew transports him back to his memories.
So I often find I have many notes in the margins of our readings commenting on some statement or claim the author has made that I don’t agree with. But I do not get so bothered by them most of the time to feel the need to vent about them. For some reason I do feel that need with this piece (very possibly influenced by the knowledge that I have’t been on here for a while and need to post something). Sadly though I know I am not critiquing this piece in any sort of one vein, which would be good practice for class, but I just didn’t have quite that much time on my hands.
My first note (and realistically it is likely only this late because I was feeling over whelmed while reading before this) is on page 9, toward the end of the continuing paragraph from the previous page, when Davis notes as if its a second thought, something note very important at all, “right down to the very shape and bearing of the body itself.” Well of course. The way someone carries them self can nearly completely refute the feeling their clothes would give me, no matter what setting we/ I/ they are in. If I see a man in an expensive suit standing on a side walk corner, waiting for traffic to let him walk, standing aloof from the crowd around him, looking at his blackberry or snidely looking down at some begger down the block I will think a million degreee different from if I see the same man on that same corner in that same suit bending down and happily playing with/ petting some dog among the crowd while he engagingly talks to its owner. Bearing and manner speak volumes about people; as much or more than their clothes do.
The next note I have on the reading to complain about is probably very personally driven. On page 12, about in the middle of the first actual paragraph, Davis notes again as some sort of after thought (in parenthesis no less!) “some of whom truly are artisits,” refering to the people who design the fashions being discussed. Of course some of them are real artisits, really it should be said all of them are real artisits! There is no clothes designer one could sit by and watch them puzzle out some new idea or way to cut something, some new pattern to use in a novel way, that you could say is not an artist. How could you sit by someone who is sketching out idea after idea after idea (so very like any one of us) and say it is not their artistic process?
The next note is a very small one, but one that again was perhaps a particular sting because I felt it more personally; on page 15, again about half way into the first actual paragraph, Davis says that “our intuition says no,” referring to the tiny differences possible in clothing that can make it difference enough to be a fashion or not. Of course a tiny difference in a garment can make all the difference. Take a knee length skirt vs. a mini-skirt. Merely a difference in hem length, they can even be made of exactly the same fabric, same number of pleats, same colors, even standing right next to each other, even match them with the same shirt! And you will get a radically different feeling about them. The mini-skirt is flirting and suggestive, the knee length skirt is conservative and possibly strict feeling.
Maybe all these previous notes really woke me up, or just got me going, because on the last real page(s), 16nd 17 I have three complaints. I will do my best to wrap them up quickly though.
The first one is actual in the notes of pages 16 and 17, it was a complaint until I read the note on page 17 and now it has tuned into perhaps a smaller complaints about misunderstanding/ Davis being unclear. In the note on page 16 Davis notes that there was not fashion in civilizations of old, such as Egypt and China. This is either a gross point of not having done the homework/ research, for China had VERY stringent fashion rules, or else it is unclear to me how “fashion” is being used, for in the note on page 17 Davis calls a possible example of first fashion “an institutionalized fashion cycle.” So would the fashion rules of ancient China be merely an institution, or would it not have been as it is now, a communication method they would have used to note (if nothing else) how much they cared to pay attention to the fashion rules of court or the market place?
The second note on these last pages is on 17, bottom of the end of the paragraph from page 16, where Davis notes that we all “[share] a strong collective component.” The point in this paragraph seemed to be that people growing up in the same situations would end up being very similar as people. I have huge arguments with this idea. From my own life I have a perfect example: my cousin and I had nearly exactly mirroring situations in life, with very strong mothers, seemingly very loving fathers when we were young, then abrupt and violent divorces between our parents. I came out very much of the mind “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, Paul my cousin is the greatest victim of the world, it’s always out to get him. We often can’t stand each other because of this huge difference in our reactions to the same situation. So I find Davis’ point here very aggitating.
Finally, my last note on this reading in on page 17, toward the middle-end of the only complete paragraph on this page, when Davis is talking about how the designers of fashion do what they do to give us the populace a way of expressing our selves, how fashion sprouts from their minds as only their attempt to help us truly reflect and express how we really feel inside. What nonsense! Sure, I suppose some fashion may come from this vein, like the militant shoulder pad example used earlier in this piece, but I am not wearing my jeans with the holes in the knees because I feel the need to rebel against the sterility of new jeans, or that I wish to convey that I’m a rough and tumble sort and I wear my jeans out, I just think they get softer with all that wear, more comfortable, and I just think they look fun, with all the texture and roughness.
) cookies from my mom to my house.
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