Video Game Writing

With the full onset of winter always comes the winter blues. Not having lots of sunlight makes me cranky and apathetic in equal measure, which is not a good combination for me or anyone that has to be around me. Lately I've noticed that Logan also seems to be getting the winter blues, despite his normal aversion to sunlight, and I made it a mission to figure out something that could cheer us both up.

I've always found that being creative gets me out of my funks, and suggested to Logan that he find something creative to do, either with or without me. After a few days of thinking about what he'd like to take on, he thought it would be cool to make a video game. He's made really short games before and had a good time, so I agreed that it was a great idea.

Then he asked me if I could write it.

And I was all like

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Because of this recent occurrence, I found Nate's presentation on games as literature extra fascinating that I normally would have. Telling stories through video games is so different than what I'm used to, and I'm stoked to stretch myself in this new direction!

Klout

Well, I created a Klout account. After hearing Kelsey and Ashley's presentation, I just had to try it out.

So far, nothing interesting has happened, since it's just updating to include my multitude of accounts. I hadn't realized how many things I'm involved in until I had to include them on my Klout profile. I was surprised that Pinterest isn't an option, and bummed that Ravelry isn't. Not that the Ravelry thing surprises me.

Speaking of, when adding topics to my list on there, I was sad to see that "yarn" wasn't an option. Knitting and crochet were represented, but not yarn. I love talking about yarn! Super bummer.

Whatever, Klout. Yarn is totally an awesome topic. Here's a picture to prove it. By the way, if anyone wanted to get me anything from the shop linked in the caption below, I'd love it.

I don't care if you work with yarn or not, this stuff is pretty! Image from Alcidina on Etsy.

Live-Tweeting -- Does It Have to Be New?

Even though I use it fairly regularly, I still don't 100% "get" Twitter. Of course, I don't think anyone really does. It's too new and different from everything else.

Something that I'm currently struggling with is the concept of live-tweeting, something that was explored by my classmates Ryan and Ranee during Writing for the Digital Age.  I get that it's tweeting about something in real time, but I'm having trouble putting it into practice.

Let me give you my example.

I'm currently playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. For those of you who don't know, I'm very late to the party on this, because the game came out a long time ago. Nevertheless, I'm currently playing it and I'd like to tweet about my reactions to it in real time, but I'm wondering if that's incorrect Twitter etiquette.

Is it ok to live-tweet something that isn't current to the world at large if it's current to me? This is not a rhetorical question -- please give me your thoughts/opinions/suggestions in the comments section!

The Emotional Significance of Pictures

My classmate Hannah Hearn's final presentation for Writing for the Digital Age was about emotions through drawings. She asked some people she knew to draw four pictures, one for happy, one for sad, one for angry, and one for neutral. She then gave the pictures to other people and asked them to tell her what emotion they thought the picture represented. It was interesting to see how some of the drawings were so perfect for their respective emotion that everyone guessed correctly, and how some were completely off the mark.

Hannah's presentation reminded me of a game I played a couple of years ago called Dixit. It's a tabletop game a lot like Apples to Apples except the cards are all pictures instead of words. One person comes up with a word or phrase for one of the cards in his/her hand, then everyone lays a card face-down on the table. The cards are shuffled, and everyone tries to guess which was the dealer's card.

The art is gorgeous and though it sometimes gets silly, I feel that Dixit can get surprisingly insightful. It's fascinating to see how people attach meaning to pictures and how that meaning changes once words are assigned to the pictures. I feel like it would be right up Hannah's alley!

Blogging as a Class

My Writing for the Digital Age class has started giving our final presentations, and I'll be posting up some blog entries about the various subjects brought up.

Today I'd like to talk about Jordan's presentation. Jordan chose to reflect on our class and point out what she thought worked about its format and what didn't. I agreed with her on many points, but most of all on her point about our blogs. 

Though we were all required to keep a personal blog about whatever we wanted, we weren't required to read each others's blogs. I know that not everybody is as gung-ho about the whole blog thing as I am, but I read each and every one of my classmates's blogs, and I'm so glad that I did.

Because we were allowed to post about whatever we wanted and not just about class readings, I feel that I've learned a lot about my classmates from their individual blogs. I feel that I know everyone in my class much better than any other class I've ever taken, purely because I paid attention to what they had to say online.

I think Jordan's suggestion that future sections of this course be required to comment on each others's blogs is a very good one. Interaction and interconnectivity between peers is an excellent thing, and is made all the more so when it turns your peers from just students into complex individuals with lives outside of the classroom.

Why vs. How in Digital Communication

Today, I'd like to talk about a quote I found in the article "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century."

The goal was to allow students to set and complete their own tasks with the focus almost entirely on the production process. Little effort was made to give youth a context for thinking about these changes or to reflect on the new responsibilities and challenges they faced as participants in the digital culture.

This quote is interesting to me because it brings up two main points.
1. Teaching in the digital age is focused on production.
2. There is little context for thinking critically about digital culture itself.

In my experience, it is much easier to learn how to produce something on your own than it is to understand how something works. For example, trying to explain why blogging is interesting in the digital world and what it means to be a blogger is much more difficult than acutally going out and just writing up a blog post or two. But we still focus on teaching production.

Now, I'm not saying that we should stop teaching production. It's important to be able to make things competantly and confidently, but it's more important to focus on why we make the things we do rather than on how to do so.

But there isn't really a space for us to talk about this new "responisibility" and the "challenges" it creates. And I don't mean actual space -- obviously I'm talking about it right now. I mean a space in our social order. We don't give our forms of communication as much thought as we probably should. We don't take the time to figure out how and why something works before we go and start using it or making assumptions about it. It's time to change that.

A BETTER PENCIL Chapter 8: Writing on Screen

This is going to be a review of a chapter of our textbook for my Writing for the Digital Age class. I'm just warning you so if you aren't interested you can just skip this one and come back tomorrow or Saturday for a post about something fun.

Considering the only person who's probably left at this point is Dr. Alberti, I'm just going to write this one for you. Hi, Dr. Alberti!

First off, I'd like to thank you for requiring the Baron book over something else, because I actually find it enjoyable to read. Not only do I not dread my reading for this class, I kind of look forward to it in an ultra-nerdy kind of way.

Now, about chapter 8 specifically, there's a quote near the beginning that I would like to discuss. When talking about computer generated texts, Baron says that their

value and reliability go unquestioned by their enthusiastic practitioners, but which prompt serious objections from the vociferous technophobes who still long for an imaginary 'good old days,' a golden age that never really was, when texts were simpler and more reliable.

I think this sentiment of non-existent "good old days" is interesting not only in the context of technological texts but also with print texts. We, in general, are mistrusting of new technologies because we get stuck in a rut. We get comfortable with certain ways of doing things, and altering those patterns is hard and kind of scary because there's a potential for things to get worse instead of better.

But when it comes to reading books, and I'm talking traditional paper books here, we're the same way. We are always claiming that literature isn't what it used to be and writers aren't as good as they once were and that pop fiction and fads such as the current zombie craze are going to ruin literature forever. They really aren't. I mean, good stories are good stories, and good writers will always exist to tell those stories, regardless of what's popular at the time. And who's to say that zombie books and paranormal romance are always bad things? Look at Frankenstein and Dracula.

I guess what I'm driving at is that I understand this yearning for the non-existent, "better" past, and I recognize that I'm guilty of those same irrational desires, but that we shouldn't feel this way. New technologies, modes of delivery, and types of writing are not going to ruin literature, reading, and the language as we know it. Change it, yes, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.