Alexis Madrigal talks a lot about how the saying “you had to be there” applies especially so in this age of the internet, and how future historians may not even understand our internet and the way that we interact with it. This made me think a lot about my relationship with the internet in general,…
In this class I have been challenged to analyze the way games like Undertale and Stanley Parable give players “choices” that may not actually be choices and the way games like Assassin’s’ Creed are able to represent minorities and how that representation can be either good or bad. I think the question of representation is…
So the semester is finally over! And so is our class. Sadly, I think, so are my video game-playing days. Something that I’ve realized is crucial when playing video games, something that I think I lack, is patience. I’m thinking about playing Assassin’s Creed: Liberation and how long it took me to complete the tasks I…
A couple of weeks ago, I attended Coming To You From the Indigenous Future: A Showcase of Indigenous Women’s Digital media. My experiences at there really meshed with a lot of class discussions, particularly the one we had about the representation of slavery in Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. The showcase presented a wide array of…
For the Stencyl project, my group mates and I decided to make a game based on accessibility. The game has the player play as a bee traversing through different environments until it finally reaches its hive at the end. The game contains no enemies and it is impossible to die. The only thing the player…
Getting to play every group’s game and hearing them talk about their project was a really fun way to end the course. It was interesting to see how many different directions we all went in–for everything from interface to storyline to art design. One of the most memorable parts of class to me was when…
This question was raised in class, and immediately followed by a discussion about the terms of interactivity for a game. They were defined as Making narrative choices (changes game) Engaging gameplay challenges (changes you) Experiencing world (movement through game) If we apply those standards for interaction to Reddit, it should pass–users contribute content that changes…
Whenever a game is shared between two or more people over the internet, it is usually hosted on a server. The server will collect information from all parties, send information back, and generally allow you all to play together with minimal delay. Usually, when a game is released with online play, the developers will dedicate…
Reading “Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet” put me through a whirlwind of emotions, which changed (almost) as quickly as the temperature on a spring day in Amherst. At first, I was sad and disappointed– we won’t be able to preserve our experiences for future generations? People who live a thousand years from now…
In her article, “Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet, and That’s Okay”, Alexis Madrigal explores the feasibility of archiving digital platforms such as social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). She provides an example where Twitter offered their public tweets to the Library of Congress to archive. One LOC librarian excitedly said, “It boggles my mind…
After reading the brief piece, “You Had to Be There” and thinking about all the video game related experiences with which I could relate that same thought, I realized just how much my gaming experiences are all about “being there” well after it has happened. Whether it is through replaying old NES and SNES games…
As an assignment for this class, I read Mystery of The Maya, a Choose Your Own Adventure novel about a young man who travels to Mexico to find his missing friend and encounters many supernatural things along the way. Because it is a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, there are multiple places throughout the book…
Reading “You Had to Be There” gave me intense flashbacks to my thesis. My thesis was about the contemporary revival of Confucianism in China. Comparing the Confucian revival to other religious and nationalist revivals around the world — including the boom of spirituality in the West since the 1980s– I conclude that they all stem…
In Ian Bogost’s “Video Games are Better Without Characters,” he states that games can be “non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves” when referring to the realization he came to when playing SimCity for the first time. He notes that although no one would consider it a good idea to make someone mayor simply because…
Stencyl was the struggle! Simply programming your character to walk was actually quite difficult for me. Sure it was a simple thing to do, but I remember asking myself: how do I do it? At first, I thought I only needed to add action animations to make my character move, but I was wrong. I…
