I thought that the Alexis C. Madrical article “You Had to Be There” was very interesting. She writes that there are experiences people have that younger people would not understand because they never experienced it. These experiences people have are powerful because you are able to see how that experience changes over time due to…
I really enjoyed the interface project and had a lot of fun playing the games. However, while walking around and trying out other people’s games, I realized how hard some of the games were. The games itself, while using the controls on the computer, would have been relatively easy and in many cases beatable. But,…
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Michael Koloch’s The Old Man Club can help us understand the costs of certain representations. After reading The Old Man and the Sea I realized that there was some gendering in regards to animals and oceans. Typically, old man Santiago, the protagonist, would refer to the sea…
Jonathan Harrison, in his TED talk titled ‘How video games can empower real world success’ (link), debunks the commonly held notion that games are a luxury that have little real world benefit. Instead, he talks about the skills gamers develop that transfer to real world settings. One real world benefit he briefly mentioned that I…
Wednesday April 11th, 2018, I attended an event called: “Coming To You From the Indigenous Future: A Showcase of Indigenous Women’s Digital media.” At the event I was introduced to the virtual reality (VR) headset. I found that it served as great mechanism to tell the story of Ramona Wilson (click here for documentary), a young native girl…
In David Leonard’s article “Live In Your World, Play In Ours”, he talks about the problem of racial deployment in video games, and how games must be careful not to push racial stereotypes or enforce racism in their attempt to be more diverse. He starts with Grand Theft Auto and the reinforcement of racism that…
Our final class was one of the most memorable experiences I have had in an Amherst class. The Stencyl games I tried out were engaging and impressive, given the timeframe in which we had to complete them. Most fascinating where the various interfaces groups created and incorporated into their games. Enormous card box surfaces placed…
Did anyone else feel an increasing sense of paranoia while reading Pasquale’s The Black Box Society? I always viewed privacy “rights” we are granted as citizens as ways we can prevent a tyrannical government. In the simplest sense, I compare these rights to how parents gradually grant their kids more and more freedom. As they are…
Over the course of this class, we have looked at many different types of video games and how they have progressed over time. We have moved from simple Atari games to Triple A games, and we have enjoyed playing most to all of these games. The question I want to ask is: which type of game…
It was interesting reading Allana Akhtar’s article Is Pokémon Go Racist?, as she points out a potential flaw in the game. She found there to be more PokéStops in predominantly white neighborhoods than that of predominantly black neighborhoods, and argues that both Hispanics and African Americans are both under appreciated and under represented in technological work spaces (for…
