Melinda Terry

Students Work Critique

 I thought that both of the students' websites for this project looked great. They both did a wonderful job by conveying the information from the video game playing and relating it to dream interpretations.  They also did a great job with answering the major questions and objectives of this project. Both students documented their experiences thoroughly and in great detail, presenting the information in a way that was easy to comprehend and visually appealing (a lot of graphics and videos). Each site was organized in its own way, but both were very well put together and very user-friendly! Grayson's page was awesome. I enjoyed the audio that he included on his pages. He had a lot of text on some pages with little to no pictures, I am a visual person so pictures really help me with understanding and grasping things. Therefore, I would have preferred more images. I also liked the placement of his videos. He did an excellent job arguing his positions. Elza’s website was also great! She provided a wonderful and extensive amount of narratives that greatly helped support her argument about what video games say about society and us. Elza’s work is visual; the background is mystical/abnormal, which I feel, fits well with this whole project.  She also provided many images and great videos to support her arguments. I found it very convenient that she place the sources to her research on the same page that she discusses it on. This was something unique that I have not seen anyone else do. She also separated the tabs by topic instead of game which I felt helped tie concepts together! Both did great work and I will definitely use these two examples as motivation for my own work. They helped me to better understand the objective of this project and were great examples of ways to properly format the website specifically for your gaming experience.

Allegory

An allegory is a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.  Before reading McKenzie Wark’s Allegory section on her Gamer Theory page, I am not so sure that I would have fully agreed that we can explore games as allegories for the world we live in.  I never thought much about gaming, but now that I have read more about it I am starting to see the connections.  Wark talks about The Sims game as an allegory and says, “Perhaps a game like The Sims could be an allegory for everyday life in gamespace. 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.”  Throughout video games there are all types of symbolic images and meanings that the average person playing may not tend to think too much about.  Wark used the example that in The Sims, you can buy the characters you have created new things such as clothes, furniture or even friends and when you do this they get happier.  They become more pleased as more and more of their materialistic items are nicer and expensive.  What can this say about society today?  Could this be an underlying hidden meaning from the creator of the game?  I think it is possible.  The game could be insinuating the materialistic behaviors and tendencies that society has today and how we always want more and something nicer or better.  In The Sims the characters also go about their same dull routine lives everyday.  You can make their day to day activities seem so realistic to how some American’s typical day might be.  Maybe the maker of The Sims sees society as bland and mundane.  There seems to be hidden meanings in much more than we may initially think.  These games were made with reasons behind them.  The colors, the actions, setting, characters all have a purpose.  Maybe to evoke an emotion.  Whatever the case may be, there is always more that meets the eye.

Critique

In all of the student works for Project 4 the author’s purpose is to argue how video games are allegories and are like dreams.  They have deep meanings built into them that can be derived and interpreted by comparing them to dreams.  This is obvious in all of the samples of student’s work.  Most of the students communicated their purpose by writing and explaining it on a link on their website.  What did differ throughout the student’s web pages was their set up.  Some of them had super high tech looking pages with all types of cool links to their writings and some had more basic (but very good!) pages with their links to their info simply put up.  Some students also had music playing when you opened their page which I found kind of fun!  On every page there was a tab for their argument and their reasons behind their argument.  I found this set up very helpful, clear cut and user-friendly.  On some of the pages I could not find the video upload of the actual game playing, which I actually enjoyed watching and found very helpful when I could find it.  Actually watching the game they played and reading how they interpreted it helped you understand their point of view a lot easier.  I think the most effective way that I saw the students were able to successfully get their point across was when they gave their interpretation and then immediately followed it with credible work to back up why they interpreted it that way.  It makes you more able to understand and more willing to believe that their opinion is more factual.  I personally don’t like the super crafty high-tech looking pages as much as the simpler, user-friendly ones.  It just seems like more of a hassle trying to find the information you want to read and avoiding all the extra fluff and design.  But I do think that there does need to be a fine line of coordination between the design of the website, the type of video game they played and their interpretations, which all students seemed to do very well.

Carl Jung

According to Jung, dreams are a way of communicating and acquainting yourself with the unconscious.  He believed that dream images reveal something about yourself, your relationships with others, and situations in your waking life. Jung also believes that a dream's content is just as significant and revealing as the latent content. By simply discussing what is currently going on in your life, it can help you interpret the images of your dreams. Jung's method of dream interpretation is placed more confidently on the dreamer. He believes that they possess the necessary tools to interpret their own dreams. There is no one correct way to interpret a dream. The meaning of your dreams is a personal judgment and is up to you on how to interpret them. Whatever interpretation feels right to you is most significant and more important than what someone else thinks or believes. They serve to guide the waking self to achieve wholeness and offer a solution to a problem you are facing in your waking life. Jung views the ego as your sense of self and how you portray yourself to the world. This can be used in interpreting games as well.  How you interpret the choices you made during the game can help you identify who you are as a person.  Also, maybe my reflecting on what is going on during your current state, you can better identify the meanings by which you made certain decisions throughout the gaming experience.  Jung also states that one way to arrive at a plausible meaning and rightfulness of the interpretation of the dream is by predicting the future happenings of the dreams by using a dream-book and to verify the interpretation by subsequent events, assuming that the meaning of the dream lies in their anticipation of the future.  Another way is by turning to the past and reconstructing former experiences from the occurrence of certain motifs in the dreams.  He also states that the meaning of most dreams is not in accord with the tendencies of the conscious mind but shows deviations, therefore we must assume that the unconscious has an independent function.

Assignment: Find a Similar Memoir

         I found a memoir titled, “Memoir: a Slightly Autobiographical Account of Contra Dancing,” by Kaiyuh Cornberg and thought it sounded interesting so I gave it a good read.  Throughout this memoir the author, Kaiyuh Rose Cornberg, did a wonderful job applying many of the techniques we have discussed in our English Composition class.  At the very beginning you can understand the author’s focus.  She states, “The most common introduction people receive in the world of contra dance is no introduction at all.”  This grabs the reader’s attention (at least it did mine) and blankly tells the reader that the passage is about her experience with contra dancing and her reflection of it.   She implies another technique by using an icebreaker.  One of her many humoring icebreakers was when the author wrote, “You arrive at the dance hall, realize, if you are a girl, that your skirt is too short (or too long) and that you forgot to bring another set of shoes.”  Many girls can just relate to this simply because we are always second-guessing our choice of outfit!  Another example of this inviting humor was, “Maybe you arrive early and await the dancehall doors to be opened, alone, hoping you don’t smell too much like the salmon you just ate for dinner. You check your breath in your own hand. (Does that even work? All you ever smell is hand.).”  I found this funny and relatable again, because this is something many people do but do not really talk much about.  Or even want to admit!  The author also wrote in first person, which made the story feel more personal and helped the reader to feel connected.  Many details were included in this memoir as well.  One of my two favorite lines in this short story was when the author said, “The other dancers start arriving. You are all strange moths drawn to this dance floor flame.”  I could really visualize this metaphor she gave, it allowed me to have a better picture of what everything looked and felt like.  She also stated some things she learned from the experience, “You have learned a few things at this point: there are no sorrys, if someone reaches his or her hand out you should take it, both partners must support each other for a swing to be swung. You cannot do this alone.”  I took a lot of insight from this memoir.  I realized that I needed to include more intriguing metaphors into my writing, something to capture the audience’s senses and make them feel as if they are experiencing my journey with me.  I also liked the way that the author had a sense of relatable humor added to her story.  I would love to add some more humor to my own memoir.  Humor about something everyone has felt or done, but something that is more hush-hush.  It is always fun and comforting to see or hear of others going through the same weird or funny things that you go through.  It adds a personal feel to the story.  This story has continued to open my mind a little more in how I can better my own memoir.


Structural Analysis:

In my memoir I would like to follow a format of suspense.  I will go about this format by giving my readers a chunk of information and then leaving them to wonder what the outcome is until the end.  Or maybe they will never hear of the outcome from me and have to imagine one of their own.  I kind of started to do this with how I began and ended my memoir.  I began my memoir with being in the present.  Talking about stepping onto the stage, getting ready to do my performance.  I discussed a few of my thoughts and emotions but then I cut the reader off in the last second.  I then took it back to a day prior, working my way through my experiences leading up to that moment I had briefly mentioned.  I feel this would keep them suspenseful in trying to figure out what happened and why I was feeling the way that I was.  But for them to know and understand this they have to read the story!  I think I could add more suspense into my story, maybe by being more vague about some moments and coming clean about them later in my story.  I felt I held good suspense and curiosity in the ending of my memoir though.  I included every wakening emotion that was pouring through me at that time as I anticipated my turn to dance.  I also included my feeling of dwindled confidence right before going on stage, allowing the audience to second-guess how the performance would actually go.  I skipped through the actual dance, not explaining how it went but jumping straight to the audience’s reaction.  This could allow the audience to think one of two things.  One being that an audience usually always claps after a performance, be it good or bad.  And two, I just did an absolutely wonderful job and the audience loved it.  Either way, the audience is left a little curious.

"The Sims Medieval" by Kevin VanOrd and Espen Aarseth's article, "Define Real, Moron!"

     Aarseth, VanOrd and Wark all make great points when discussing gaming and what it means. They all coincide in a way as well. In Espen Aarseth's article "Define Real, Moron!" he talks about the ways in which we can define games and whether or not games should be considered as real life. Kevin VanOrd's essay "The Sims Medieval" he critiques the The Sims Medieval game. McKenzie Wark's "Gamer Theory"she describes many of the allegories that tended to appear in The Sims Medieval game that VanOrd talks about.  VanOrd's and Wark's arguments and discussions are both centered around The Sims games, but way they interpret the games very differently. McKenzie Wark talks about the fact that the player is a "God" type figure in her "Gamer Theory".  The Sims rely on the gamer when they need food or any other daily necessities. Without the player the sim is and has nothing. The gamer has all control and gets to decide whether or not the sim eats, if the sim will be happy or sad that day, if the sim will make friends. This, in a way, resembles the player as a "ruler" or as the role of God throughout the game.  VanOrd also briefly talks about the fact that the typical Sims game gives the player the feeling like they are God and are in control of everything in the game. VanOrd is critiquing the game throughout his writing about The Sims Medieval.  In his writing he goes into detail about all the features of the game. VanOrd gives his impression of the game after playing it and describes why he feels the way he does about certain instances during his game playing.  He starts off by saying the game lacks imagination. He describes the features of the game to not give the player much creativity. Both authors go about making the same assertion in different ways that the gamer is a type of God figure throughout The Sims games. VanOrd describes his gaming experience and then draws conclusions while Wark discusses the different allegories found in the game, coming to the conclusion that the gamer acts like a God to the Sims. Christians seek God when in desperation or thankfulness just as the Sim looks to the gamer when they are in need or when they are happy and want to express it. Overall, I think the meaning of the game and the "realness" of the game is solely up to the player. I personally feel like games reflect interests and circumstances in society but do not find myself so wrapped up in it, feeling as though it is more of a life than just a game.

April 2nd Assignment

     The article talks about how technological enhancements of games have changed over time but the social aspect to gaming has not changed much, if at all. Players now, just like twenty years ago, have two option; play against the game itself, or play against other players. The article goes into detail about how the dynamic of social aspects within the game change as the players are able to see others succeed and do better or create better things, evoking a competitive emotion within the gamers. This can lead to the gamer becoming more obsessed with not only playing the game but becoming more successful than other players within the game. Having real players within the game that the gamer is able to interact with can create more realistic emotions and relationships to build. Allowing the gamer to communicate with real people, making alliances and teams, which can lead to a stronger sense of devotion. This article helped me interpret some cultural associations in my own video game playing with the aid of examples provided showing events happening within the game and how the actions can be interpreted and related to reality. For example, the article that helped me with my cultural associations for Grand Theft Auto V by discussing the game World of Warcraft and how it was referred to as its own world. Both games are made so well and realistically (graphic wise) that the player can almost become consumed in this virtual reality of game playing. In my game I am dealing with friends, families, emotions, choices and much more. You can decide to better your life or make not so great decisions.

"The Perfect Crime"

            Peter Bozzo’s essay was assigned to help us see how an argumentative essay functions and flows.  Since Project 5 is an argumentative research paper, this essay was very helpful in doing so.  The structure of Peter Bozzo’s argumentative essay is pretty easy to read and straight forward. He begins the essay talking about the film, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, and the effects of media. He goes deeper into discussing and comparing the public sphere and the pathological sphere and the significance of both. The focus of his argument shifts through specific happenings in the film that support his argument that was the film gives the accused teenagers a sense of innocence instead of allowing the audience to decide based on the evidence like it was supposedly said to be. Bozzo’s essay had a number of concrete instances, which made his argument a lot more credible. I also felt he did a good job at posing both sides of the argument. I also enjoyed the thought of stimulating the reader’s mind, making them think about what is going to happen next.  Kind of going back to what we did at the beginning of the semester with the thought that “everyone is an author.”

         I will use Bozzo’s essay to be an example in making sure that my research paper is conveying to the reader my purpose.  To make sure that every written detail is to move towards and benefit the purpose of writing the paper.  I will use his work as an example of proper flow to my essay. I will also strive to make sure everything in my paper has a reason or purpose and aids in supporting my final argument.