Brooke Beidler

             The Perfect Crime- Peter Bozzo

            For our last blog post, we were required to read an article by Peter Bozzo called “The Perfect Crime”.  The purpose of reading this article is giving us practice with creating an effective argument.  While reading this essay we had to think critically, and analyze the content making sure to look for key argumentative characteristics and skills.

            This article is about the documentary called Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.  This documentary follows the story of the murder of three 8-year-old boys “and the ensuring media spectacle that surrounded the trial of three local teenagers who were accused of the crimes”.  In Bozzo’s essay he talks about how the “filmmakers call into question the “reality” of the footage they portray, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction.”  

Later on in the essay Bozzo talks about another film titled Paradise Lost.  When he discusses this film he presents his argument.  Here is a quote that I think captures his arguments: “Paradise Lost serves to critique the media for inducing a state of ‘Hyperreality” within society”.  Immediately after this argument is presented we are presented with a counterargument: “The filmmakers cannot effectively accuse the media of destroying reality without discrediting (or at least criticizing) their own portrayal of events”.  Basically the argument is that the media has changed the way reality is perceived.  The people who are supposed to just be living their reality, as in the parents of the children, act differently in the presence of the camera.  Therefore films aren’t and accurate portrayal of reality:  “Everyone involved behaves as they are expected to behave, their actions, even their emotions dictated by the constant presence of the camera”.

            This pattern of presenting an argument and then immediately following it up with a counterargument makes the argument even stronger.  This shows credibility and shows the reader that you are able to think critically and fairly about all angles of your argument.  One must know every side of the argument in order to find all flaws.  This is an important skill to have and one that I will try to use with in my own argumentative research paper.  The filmmakers said that they wanted their “audiences to have the experience of being like a jury, perceiving the two sides of the story and coming up with their own conclusions”.  I thought that this quote was great advice for creating an effective argument.  It is essential to include the audience in the process of making the decision of which side to pick. 

             

"Define Real, Moron"& "Sims Medieval"& "Gamer Theory"

One of the main points of "Define Real, Moron" is the meaning of the word game.  This is a very complex thing to do as I learned while reading this article.  I am currently taking a PRTM class where we have spent the whole semester defining what play is, so I can understand the complexity that it takes to define a word like game.  What brings about this complexity is that every person experiences things differently. Aarseth describes this better than I can:

"Any definition would have to reduce the demarcation to something less than games in general, and because defining games is not really necessary; we know what a game is even if we can’t express it clearly, just as we, in Wittgenstein’s poetic example, know how a clarinet sounds, even if we are not able to say it." 

What I began to wonder as I read this article is why is it important for us to try and define what a game is.  There are so many ways to define it, but why does this matter.  What is the purpose of exploring the meaning of games?  Aarseth takes on a point of view that doesn't seek a concretion one sided answer, he is more concerned about the exploration that will occur by seeking to define game in a broad sense.  He uses the term "game ontology".  I  had never heard of this term before and was confused at first but Aarseth does a good job of explaining this:

"The word ‘ontology’ can have several meanings. It can refer to the

most general branch of metaphysics, concerned with the study of being and existence."

"They describe what games are (and what they are made of): the fundamental building blocks and their relations. However, as we shall see, a game ontology can also address the philosophical questions of being and existence, such as the relationship between, real, virtual and fictional phenomena in games"

In summary, game ontology is a way of exploring games and all the elements that make games, games.

Sims Medieval and Gamer Theory take a different approach to talking about games.  They aren't talking on a broad spectrum of all games, they both specifically talk about one game, The Sims.  But within both of these articles, they talk differently about this one game, which only furthers what Aarseth was talking about.  There can be such complexity and variety in what people think about games, even the same one.

In Sims Medieval, VanOrd disects the game with freedom like Aarseth described.  He talks about the aspects that he likes, and dislikes.  For example he doesn't like the limitation of creativity that occurs.  Aarseth talks about a link between real life and this game life, and I think that VanOrd criticized the Sims Medieval so much because the gap between reality and virtual reality was to vast.  In Gamer Theory, Wark focus on the things that actually happen in The Sims and how it can be related back to reality.  He tries to close this gap VanOrd describes by finding connections.  All of these articles relate back to each other in how they breakdown gaming.  Is gaming a way to create a new reality?  Is it a way to describe or symbolize reality?  These questions are things that motivate people to play and define games for themselves.  

 

Link to My Website:

http://brookerb123.wix.com/brooke-beidler
 



Are Games Allegories?          

 After reading MacKenzie Wark’s CyberBook on Gamer Theory, it raised an important question in my mind; can we view games as a way to interpret the real world we live in?  Wark played the game The Sims, in this game you create a person, their personalities, their home, their hobbies, and every aspect of their lives.  This game at a shallow level seems to be just a mockery of every day life but Wark questions this.  Wark quotes Walter Benjamin in order to further explain how gaming can be an allegory: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else”.  In the game The Sims, one can see the game as “a parody of everyday life in ‘consumer society’”.  What this quote is saying is that The Sims almost mocks society and how we allow our possessions to consume every aspect and motivation in our lives.  Will Wright, the game designer explains this even more:

“If you sit there and build a big mansion that’s all full of stuff, without cheating, you realize that all these objects end up sucking up all your time, when all these objects had been promising to save you time. … And it’s actually kind of a parody of consumerism, in which at some point your stuff takes over your life.”

So once the reader decides that yes, you can view video games like The Sims as an allegory where everything symbolizes something, one may ponder if this is possible with every type of video game?  I never would have thought to view games as something with hidden meaning, to me you just played a game to escape the real world.  But Wark brings about good questions.  I now can see that games have more meaning and that yes they do allow the reader to escape to a different alternative world, but these worlds don’t exist for any reason.  These worlds mean something. 

Wark quotes Walter Benjamin to again further explain how a game like The Sims can be an allegory of the real world:

““It is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.” For Benjamin, the fragmenting of the modern world by technique, the profusion of commodities that well up in the absence of a coherent whole, finds its expression in allegory, which fragments things still further, shattering the illusion of bourgeois order, revealing the means by which it is made.”

To Walter Benjamin and Wark, The Sims is not just a game where the gamer makes a new world, this game has hidden meanings about our world.  Based off of this quote and all of Wark’s words, our lives and all the things we find valuable have no real importance.  Life as we know it isn’t as important as we think.  When we get married, or find a new job, or lose a job, or lose a close friend, none of these things make a huge impact on the world.  Wark begs to question whether our lives are also just like the lives of the characters on The Sims.  We create them, and we destroy them, and nothing truly changes.  

Project 4 Critiques 

I first viewed Reid’s website and read about his experience playing a game called “Pirates: Tides of Fortune”.  I immediately found something I would change about his website, the color of the background.  I found the red to be very distracting and made it hard for me to concentrate on what I was reading and more on how bad my eyes hurt.  This may be a very shallow and nitpicky critique but it is important to appeal to the reader.

Once I put aside this initial thought and focused on his actual words I found some other things I would change but also I found some good ideas of how to effectively complete my project. Reid took a long time talking about the game in great detail, more so than he actually analyzed the game.  This project is about relating the games to our day-to-day life and how the games can be interpreted to have a deeper meaning.  If this was my project I would want to go into further detail about how this game can explain/interpret real life. 

As I continued to explore Reid’s website I found that he did in fact go into more detail about the meanings of not only the game “Pirates: Tide of Fortune” but also two other games.  He had three different pages each talking about the game, the gaming experience, and a little bit about how he interpreted the games.  He also had a page solely dedicated to interpreting the games.

I really liked this page and the detail that he went into explaining the deeper meanings within these three games.  In three separate paragraphs he explained the games deeper meanings and in a closing paragraph he made connections between all of them.  I really liked this aspect of his page, how he brought unity between more than one games.

Another student took a different approach than Reid by not having a separate page dedicated to analyzing the games.  I didn’t think that this page was quite as effective.  It was better for me as a reader to have more pages to look at because there wasn’t this overwhelming amount of reading within each tab. 

As I continued to look at the different websites, I found that ones like Reid’s were more appealing to me as the reader.  Subin was another student who I think effectively organized his website to make it user friendly.  He also have separate pages with appropriate amounts of reading that explained the games and gaming experience along with a brief interpretation of the games.  He then had an argument page that went into specific deals just like Reid’s did.  This format was effective to me.

Dream Interpretation 

I loved how Carl Jung described the human mind, “For the psyche is perhaps the most baffling and unapproachable phenomenon with which the scien- tific mind has ever had to deal”.  He straight off the bat explains how the human mind and our dreams are so complex that sometimes even a scientific explanation can’t explain why we dream and what they mean if they truly have meaning.

Jung explains that the study of dreams is a very complex task that involves a lifelong work that requires a group effort.  He defines dreams as “A fragment of involuntary psychic activity, just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state”.  I found it interesting how he found such importance in working with the dreamer and being sensitive to them.  Jung made it known that he didn’t want to make the dreamer feel like everything he said was right and that they had no say in what they believed their dreams meant.  This was neat to me because it shows that he wants to allow the dreamer to also be a part of interpretations, and not only the “scientists”. 

Jung applies to the reader by asking this question: “Is it worth while in any individual case to look for the meaning of a dream— supposing that dreams have any meaning at all and that this meaning can be proved?”  He questions everything that he is arguing in order to appeal to the reader and show them that he too has the same questions we have.

As I continued to read, he explains different types of dreams and how they cause one to believe they have meaning.  For example he talks about reoccurring dreams and how because they happen more than once the dreamer comes to the conclusion that indeed dreams must have some meaning, for why else would one have the same dream over? 

Jung next goes into detail about how to interpret dreams.  One can either try to use dreams to explain things that are to come about in the future.  Or on the contrary one could view their own past and see how the past may have affected the dreams.  Jung agrees with Freud that is great importance in working with the dreamer.  They both say that without working with the dreamer that no interpretation can properly be done.

The main thing I took from this reading written by Carl Jung can be summed up in this quote; “ The words composing a dream narrative have not just one meaning, but many meanings.”  One has to view the dreams openly and in different ways.  This is an aspect that I will try to accomplish within my own project.

Short Story Analysis

The short story I found is called Butterflies by Roger Dean Kiser.  This is a very short story about an orphan boy.  I picked this story because my story is about my time working at an orphanage in Haiti over Christmas break.  I hoped that this story would help me find writing techniques that would strengthen my story and character development.  Unfortunately this was a very short, short story so there wasn’t a whole lot of character development, but the author did find a way to show some kind of change.

            The storyline was about an orphan boy who watched his house parent kill butterflies so that he can have them mounted on a piece of wood.  One aspect of this story that I think was affective was that even though this story was short you do still see a change in the character of the boy.  In the beginning he describes himself as someone who still thought, “Beauty meant something special” but then in just the next sentences he says that the orphanage changed him into an old man.  This shows that the story would reveal how his experiences changed him from a little boy who found beauty in the world, to an old man who didn’t have time to enjoy beauty. 

            I really like how these two sentences opened up the story and showed the reader clearly that the character was going to change within the story.  I want to do this in my story too.  The hard part is deciding how bluntly I want to state the change that my character goes through.  Is this change something I want to openly state, or is it something I want to leave open for the reader to define?

            Another aspect of this short story I found affective was the fact that things were left simple.  There were not many characters, in fact there really was only the orphan, his house parent, and the butterflies.  This allowed the reader to follow and keep up with this short story.  It’s an appropriate amount of characters for the length of the piece.  Also by having less characters I will be able to develop the ones I do have at a deeper level versus having many shallow characters. 

            The whole story takes place in about a days time if even that. This one day had such an effect on the little boy that at the end of the story he says how every year from then on he would shoo the butterflies away because they didn’t know how bad of a place the orphanage was to live.  The little boy reflects on this one day where he witnessed his house parent killing butterflies for his own pleasure.  This small amount of time left a mark on his memory and it allowed him to see the that even butterflies couldn’t be happy there.  I want to make sure that I keep my story in a short time frame yet my character reflects and takes something away from my experience.

 Story Structure

The structure that I am incorporating into my piece is simple linear structure.  The characteristics are “one or more characters engage in a series of action that follow logically from one to the next”, “characters motivations are revealed in text”, and “logical conclusion / resolution / outcome”.  In other words, a short story with a simple linear structure is one that is very logical and straightforward. 

            My story is already told in chronological order from the beginning of my last day in Haiti until late that afternoon.  So thankfully I won’t have to revise the order drastically.  My story revolves around me and my thoughts as I go through the day.  I do have a few other characters that I develop somewhat, but the focus is mainly on one character.  Focusing on one character will help make my story easier for the reader to follow and will allow me to develop this one character at a deeper level. 

            To show the characters motivations clearly within my story I am telling it in 1^st person so my thoughts can easily be understood by the reader.  Using dialogue along with internal thoughts also help to make the reader understand.  I know that in many works the authors leave a lot of things unanswered so that the reader has to fill in the gaps but I don’t want to connect to my readers that way.  I think it will be more effective to bluntly state what my character is thinking and using great detail to put the reading into the story. 

            I know as I have been reading short stories as I work on my own, the most effective stories have been the ones that truly paint the scene and made me feel like I was there.  That is what I want to accomplish in my short story.  Keep things simple and easy to relate to, yet very detailed and with complex reflections.