Author Archives: trip333

Here’s our final project: The League
Youtube is still doing weird things to the movie so we’ve got a download link on the website. It’s very large but once Youtube is done processing I’ll embed it as well.
We hope you enjoy it!
– Hannah (and Brennen)

Not Sophie. Sophie is not on the very long list of things I liked about this class. Just about everything else is. Every project we did gave me a little handle on a piece of internet production which is important to the digital world I interact with. Though, of course, I’ve listened to podcasts, seen HTML sites, and watched Youtube videos, the “making of” part of that experience was largely left out of my experience. I feel like that has been the most important function of this class, to fill in much of the backgrounding which is foundational to my use of the internet and digital media. The video project was my favorite because I felt like I was accomplishing the most during it, but had the HTML project been a little bit more guided and comprehensive, I think that I could easily have enjoyed it as much. The Sophie project was obviously my least favorite, followed distantly by the audio project, which I didn’t mind, but wasn’t particularly excited about either, though again I am happy to understand the work behind a podcast better. Overall, I felt like the projects required a little bit of uneven work, but were uniformly spaced and weighted which was a little bit weird, but they were all useful to my understanding of the class.

Thanks Professor Fitzpatrick!!!

So for our final project, we are making a movie, and we decided to give the Pitzer Production Center a try and it is AMAZING. We borrowed more than $4000 dollars of equipment for the week like it was nothing, and have access to the best software and tools available in the production rooms for editing. Basically, when we heard the talk about the PPC, I was skeptical about how willing I would be to walk to Pitzer for the sake of some nice equipment. I am no longer skeptical. (Also, their dining hall has good lunch, so when I’ve come out of my three to seven hour editing sessions, I get good food. 🙂

In the vain of both copyright and Apple, two of our favorite topics, the release of a dissection of the new iPhone which was accidentally left at a bar has lead to some pretty serious legal repercussions. Because California defines the iPhone as stolen property, the guy who bought the phone from the finder, Jason Chen, had his house searched and his computers and gadgets seized because he was committing “industrial espionage.” While I think the process was pretty sleezy, I also feel like that’s a pretty terrifying result for what seems to be a normal geek fantasy. The new phone is also pretty sweet… check it out at gizmodo.com via ongoing industrial espionage.

As a gamer, I really liked a lot of what Wark was saying in Gamer Theory. The whole concept that real life is a game is the weirdest though. In trying to express to non-gamers why I play a game which simulates real life, I’ve always said things like “you don’t level up with a certain amount of experience in real life, so you can’t measure your progress, and being able to work and progress so systematically is really appealing” while real life cannot work like this, some businesses are starting to tap into the appeal. They rank the progress of their employees on a point system and there are rewards for achieving certain ranks. I feel like Wark was really trying to both explain and understand the gamer and the appeal of gaming, which I really appreciate.

So Facebook just added a feature so that it’s “like” button will be showing up all over the internet, and has started integrating its social networking features into the friend groups on these other sites. This is kind of what friend feed was built to do but way bigger (probably why Facebook acquired friend feed for $4.7 million). I think this is how Facebook has to continue to expand to maintain relevance and keep making money, but the growth of the internet giants is also some cause for concern. Google already knows everything about you, now Facebook will too.

So, because they have had a rash of bad gaming new releases (the worst of which was two parents letting their infant starve to death because they were too busy raising a virtual baby on their computer), South Korea is instituting a pretty strict set of regulations on gamers, including cutting internet access for those games off at midnight for school-aged kids and drastically decreasing bandwidth after a certain number of hours played. While I’m certainly glad these weren’t imposed on me when I was younger, but it seems like it might be necessary in the country with the fastest internet.

The coolest part of reading this piece is to think about all of the interactions I have had with these gaming systems and the role I have played as an operator in an art form. I had never thought of a video game as a potential vehicle for literature, but as I read the article, I found the proposition more and more appealing. Imagine a video game in which complex ideas are explored as a part of the operator’s interaction with the interface, it’s an ideal process for immersion in a “text” of sorts. The operator gets to explore the content in their own way, though they can be guided by the system, and could be given an extra dimension on which to have complexities explained and problems explored.

I am not suggesting some cheesy game where books open and diagrams appear and any self-respecting gamer immediately shuts off the system, but am instead suggesting that in the process of completing entertaining objectives and participating in normal gameplay, a user might become a part of a literary experience. One example I can think of would be if the Campaign of Gears of War had explored Levinas’ description of a relationship to the other through the fighting between the enemies and the friendlies, there would have been ways to understand the philosophy without a negative impact on gameplay. What a cool idea.

So there’s this video thats starting to go viral about these male cheerleaders at some high school, and they’re actually really good and entertaining…
Check ’em out.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4cvs10SxJI[/youtube/]