I am actually really excited about this. I was thinking today how hard I worked on my paper, and was wishing people would take a look at it. I read through Casey’s paper the other day, which was really great (yet it was posted WELL before I was done struggling through mine which was a little intimidating haha), and so now I’m glad Chad has called out for everyone else’s. Here is what I had, let me know what you think.
After reading some drafts of others’ papers, hearing all the ideas, and then going through the painful yet rewarding process of writing my own paper, I realized something. It would almost be a shame for me to NOT read everyone’s final paper. I have learned so much from hearing other people’s perspectives and ideas this semester that I crave some more. Maybe that sounds loony but so be it. Or perhaps some others feel the same.
In any case, this is a call to everyone to share their papers here. Casey has already put his up, and mine can be downloaded here. I look forward to seeing some great perspectives!
I just feel that this word has not only described this class and everyone in it, but I am also posting a link to the paper I am wanting to submit (but there is no drop box for it yet), so here’s a link, and happy reading!
The Hopefully Epic Paper, with epic meaning here: “good enough to get my ideas across to the reader and have them see what I have seen.”
(^^)V
Hey guys. So unfortunately I am way behind schedule on pumping out this paper (I’ll admit it). I left it for last out of the three big ones. Anyway, I have a pretty rough outline that I’m working with right now, and I could use some suggestions on theories that you think apply well or examples of video game power ups that do not fit well within a game would be great. Unfortunately, my outline format got really messed up in the transfer, but hopefully it is still understandable. Thanks guys!
Research question: What makes this power-up such a fun and appropriate addition to the Super Mario Bros Game line?
Thesis: The propeller power-up in the New Super Mario Bros Wii game is an entertaining and appropriate addition to the Super Mario Brother’s game line because it is effectively phenomenological in its effortlessness. Read the rest of this entry »
So I finally got a draft done – and nowhere near done, by the way, so please don’t feel intimidated as to where you are or where I am. I just want to get some thoughts out there as to your thoughts about what I am saying and any expectations one might have when reading my central claim. Oh yeah, this will be edited, reorganized, and images will be added as well.
Thanks a ton. Here’s the link:
First Draft
(^^)V
I struggled a lot selecting a digital interaction for my final paper. I’ve been perusing all the blog postings and comments every other day to get some ideas based on what others are doing. I had originally started doing a phenomenological analysis of the innovative interactive technology used by the restaurant in London I talked about in my latest posting. However, I felt that I didn’t have a strong claim. Then, after realizing that everybody else is going for semiotics I recognized the importance of putting into practice these new concepts and decided to use a semiotics approach as well.
Then, as I was doing Xmas shopping I came across with something which I considered quite interesting: videogames for toddlers. Probably they have been around for many years; I’m not an expert on this particular market segment. However, what it immediately caught my attention was all the semiotic texts used in the product boxes for parents to buy the product (I guess that the reality is that after taking Jeff’s class we will see any product in a very different way). In general, it seems to me that videogames for kids are establishing a discourse: they seem to be using features from “real” videogames; they seem to claim having an educational focus; they seem to claim that kids will be actively engaged with them; and that kids will have lots of fun playing with them.
I did rudimentary analysis, and got some insights too. But I feel like my insights are all over the place, and I’m having a hard time to synthesize them into a killer thesis. The following are my lists of evidence and insights, and some half-baked thesis. If you have time to read my post and give some feedback, I’d really appreciate it, especially during this stressful end of semester.
The avatar:
Users can personalize their avatar. It is part of identity construction. People use their favorite anime characters, own drawings, and show their personal tastes in avatar. They change avatar often too.
QQ respects and preserves a rich identity as possible. Compare to MSN, where avatar is reduced to an email address when a person is not online, QQ still shows the avatar, nickname and the personal signature or status when a person is offline.
(social) boyfriend and girlfriend often use a pair of avatars. The collection of avatar pairs are shared on the college forum, or xiaonei(like facebook). The changing of avatar, especially the paired ones, will prompt a conversation.
The profile:
The profile is organized as a card, which is opened by clicking avatar. The information on the card is organized into tabs, containing all kinds of information from birthday, lunar birthday, horoscope, etc. There is also status area and personal description area people change all the time. There is also a area where people can describe you. And all the descriptions are presented as a colorful word clouds.
The profile is also a self-identity construction. People show their favorite quotes, lyrics, or their beliefs in the personal description. Other people help you construct identity too. Because it is not anonymous, the descriptions of others are mostly positive or humorous.
People secretly explore the profile of others a lot. Especially when one crashes on somebody, he/she will check the other person’s profile all the time to see the updates on status or descriptions(there are posts on college forum talking about this) and also will look up the horoscope to see if they match, or infer personalities from the horoscope.
Status/signature:
The words people can see without opening the profile card.
It is part of self-identity construction too.
Compare to Twitter, it is not for public conversation, but rather private self-expression. However, the change of status often prompts online conversations. It is also a source of gossip. People often write something personal but ambiguous, their friends often infer what is happening in their real life.
Dialogue window:
When you get a message, unlike gtalk, it won’t directly popup. It protects privacy in dorms since people look over shoulders all the time.
The customization of your text is also part of self-expression. You can change typeface, font, and color as you like.
There are lots of built-in emoticons, and supports imported emoticons. I suspect the emoticons are influenced by anime a lot.
Seen as invisible:
You can choose to appear as invisible. You can also choose appear invisible as soon as the person is online. Or appear as invisible except to who and who. This reflects the complex interpersonal relationship.
People ask each other are you there very often. If people are asked this when they appearing invisible, they will assume it is something urgent or important.
1 to 1 chat:
1 to 1 chat is exclusive, can get into very personal
People use it together with group chat to plan out strategy of how to behave in group chat.
Sometimes two people are chatting with the same person, and the middle is usually helping one to get some information/thoughts of the other one, or some other mediating work.
Group chat:
It is used for group meeting, announcement, and group chat. It replaces emails, physical meeting.
People build temporal group just to gossip…
Chat record:
Help with gossip, people copy paste record and share with others
Sentimental value: people often go back to see some deep conversations, even several years later.
The block, Delete function:
Reflect real-world relationship, but does not do so as obvious as facebook, where if I got delete, I won’t be able to see the person’s profile…that hurts.
The sound, flashy jumping avatar:
When you get a message, the avatar jumps, and be-be-be make sound non-stop until you open it. Hard to ignore a message, it is like saying “heyhey, I’m talking to you”
Bond with cellphone:
There is a function for you to bond QQ with cellphone so that you can access QQ from your cell phone. This shows how people are addicted, attached, dependent on it.
Icon of QQ:
It is a cute penguin, Casual, not for workspace, young people
Insights:
QQ constructs a rich social space.
QQ allows rich presentation of personal identity
QQ has huge impact on real-world face-to-face interaction
QQ is where interesting social interaction going on while people are actually silent at the surface and not co-located in the same place.
QQ provides a space where people can interact others in a certain way that they cannot in real-world.
thesis: QQ constructs a rich social space with its various functions, but at the same time the paralleled social space-face-to-face interpersonal interaction is silenced by QQ, in a typical Chinese college campus culture.
Well, thesis…thesis…thesis..any idea? Please?
This is a beast of a post (although not as long as some others). I am attempting to make some sense of my argument for my paper, so I am being thorough in the hope that I can get some good feedback. Thanks in advance if you read all this. 
Enjoy the journey: Read the rest of this entry »
For my final paper I’m looking at the Spore Creature Creator, which is pretty fun and awesome. What’s even more fun and awesome is you can download the Creature Creator for freezies. Go ahead and take a break, play it, get obsessed, and flunk out of school. Don’t worry, I’m already leading the charge on this one.
Spore is a game created by Maxis and that awesome Will Wright dude that lets you build your own creature, and then release it into the world to eat, fight or make friends with other creatures. The game lets you do a lot of other stuff too, like evolve your creature to a tribal phase, then up through civilization, and soon nuke every other species on your planet with atomic weapons thereby freeing you to conquer the stars and ruin other planets and solar systems with your newfound terraforming abilities… but really, the best part of Spore is the creature stage, and mostly the creature creation stage.
So really, I’m attempting to critique the most awesome of the most awesome… which may actually be more difficult than critiquing something that truly sucks.
What constitutes a creature?
Through its interface, the Creature Creator in Spore constructs its own definition of what constitutes a life form. A “creature” consists minimally of a body, which can be shaped and moulded like clay, with at least a single vertebrate. The player is then able to “accessorize” this body with body parts such as arms, legs, mouths, eyes and horns. This flat accessory paradigm allows the player incredible latitude and creative freedom in designing their own creatures, but certain rules must be followed:
- Graspers (or hands) and feet cannot be attached to the creature arbitrarily, and can only be attached at the ends of legs and arms. Similarly, graspers and feet can only be attached in the same plane as the arm or leg. You cannot rotate them such that the foot is on backwards or the hand appears broken, for example.
- Likewise, arms and legs can only be attached to the body. They cannot be affixed to accessories like horns or wings, and they cannot be attached to other arms and legs. However, any body part, including eyes, ears and even mouths, can be attached to the end of arms and legs.
- Feet must always touch the ground. If feet are attached to a pair of arms, those arms will suddenly extend downwards to connect the new foot with the ground.
One could describe the Creature Creator as a language system, with its own unique grammar and syntax. Any body part that can be attached at any given spot is a paradigm, whereas any grammatically correct combination of parts is a syntagm. The completed creature, which may consist of multiple syntagms, is a text resulting from this unique language system.
Embracing bilateral symmetry along the axis of motion.
The Creature Creator deliberately subscribes to bilateral symmetry in its construction of life. Most animals, including birds, lizards, mammals and humans, possess bilateral symmetry, whereby a plane drawn through the middle of the organism along its axis of motion will visually divide it into two mirror halves.
As a result of this reflective symmetry, the user is prevented from haphazardly creating an imbalanced creature. Body parts can only be attached as single parts down the middle of the creature, or as mirrored parts on opposite sides of the creature. Likewise, the body of the creature can be molded and manipulated in amazing ways, but all changes are constrained by bilateral symmetry and must be mirrored along the creature’s axis of motion.
Perhaps this isn’t 3D at all…
Given the forced symmetrical nature of the Creature Creator, one could argue that what Spore offers is not a 3D modeling program at all, but rather a 2D graphics program cleverly disguised as 3D.
If anyone recalls the original Doom, I spent much of my youth building levels for that game. The most shocking discovery in Doom level-editing was that the vertical 3D nature of the game was entirely an illusion, in that it was barely more sophisticated than Wolfenstein 3D. Unlike Quake, which came a few years later, in Doom no spaces could overlap one another. The vertical dimension and visual height of walls, stairs, platforms and windows were simply a function of texturing, transparency and impassibility.
A wall was a vertical plane that was fully textured and impassible. A stair was a plane that was textured on the bottom, to form the front of the step, but transparent in the middle, so you could walk through it. The vertical plane of a window was textured on the top and bottom to form its frame, but not in the middle, so you could see through it.
Determining front and back, or “What, are you coming or going?”
The definition of “Front” and “Back” of a creature in the Creature Creator is, surprisingly, not tied to any part of the creature, but rather to its orientation in space. The backbone of the body does not have a front or a back, and the player is free to grab, bend, curl and distort it in dizzying ways. Rather, a stone arrow in the otherwise circular platform on which the player is constructing their creature indicates both the “Front” of the creature, as well as its axis of motion and thereby its plane of reflection. Thus, the creature is necessarily embodied in space, deriving its meaning and orientation from its existence in the environment.
Whoa, that’s quite a bong hit, there, ain’t it? Allow me to illustrate:
Here you can see a new creature body, with the stone arrow indicating the “front” of the creature:
When you add legs to the body, they always point to the front and are aligned with the arrow. This cannot be changed, even as you move the body around. The axis of the body, likewise, cannot be rotated, and is always aligned with the arrow:
Arms align with the front of the creature as well.
Front and back orientation concerns the axis of symmetry and motion of the creature, and little more. For instance, it is grammatically acceptable to construct a face on is the back of the creature:
The spine of the body has nothing to do with which side of the creature is considered the front and the back. Thus, you can construct creatures that have a vertical spine and are bipedal, or are quadrupeds (or more, or less) and horizontal. Thus, even when you grab the body of the creature and flip it upside down, the arms and legs remain spatially aligned with the arrow:
Thus, I can even point both ends of the spine toward the back of the creature, and the game still determines the front and back, as well as the plane of symmetry, based on the environmentally-situated axis of motion:
Leveraging your emotional sensibilities.
As the player constructs their creature, it begins to emotionally respond. It may look around, laugh, shrug, or even protest when a body part is taken away. Furthermore, in the Test Drive feature of the Creature Creator, the user takes control of their creature, and is able to make it demonstrate such emotional responses as happiness, sadness, fear and anger. The interpretations of these emotions are phenomenologically embodied, and it’s incredible how the game leverages our highly-developed ability to sense and respond to emotions even in wildly different lifeforms.
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