Sara Freeman

Similar Short Story 
Isaac Babel’s “You Must Know Everything” gave me some inspiration to write my short story also about my grandmother. Babel wrote about going to visit his grandmother one afternoon. He starts off describing his hometown using very detailed language. For example, Babel writes of a store sign and it’s “scratch in the left hand corner”. This detailed description of his hometown sets the scene for the story. Babel uses descriptive words not only for imagery, but also for smells, sounds, and tastes. This helps the audience to be able to feel like they are really there. Babel also uses figurative language to portray his personal feelings. For example he talks about his hometown saying, “I know it as one knows the fragrance of one’s mother’s skin”. This tells the audience that he is very familiar with the town and that there is a lot of emotion associated with it. His family and memories were all there so naturally he has a lot of emotion towards the town. Babel describes how his grandmother is always cold so she always keeps her room so hot. This makes him miserable and he mentions wanting to escape from it. This shows the audience that he does not want to go to his grandmother’s room to spend time with her. Something must have happened previously to make him feel this resentment towards her. Babel uses good structure in this story. He seems to have every detail placed correctly to make the story flow well; he never loses the attention of the audience. This story takes place all in one day but Babel enhances the story and gives the audience some insight by talking about why or how things are the way they are in the story. Using all of the background information and details about the landscape and people also makes this commonplace story uncommon. Babel tells us that this happened when he was a boy so some of the audience can relate to this by also remembering their childhood.               This text will help me to revise my paper because it is a similar story. This text also has similar structure.
 I would like to start out introducing the audience to a broader subject, like the town, and then narrow in on a particular story at a particular time. I would also like to use some of the same techniques like the extreme detail. This will help my story to be more interesting and relatable. For example, instead of just simply saying “the basketball goal”, I could say “the old, rusty basketball goal with the hoop hanging on by a string”. I need to use better concrete language in my story. I would also like to improve my structure to be more similar to Babel’s by reorganizing where I place the details and when I reveal certain details. This could change the tone and the way my story unfolds.

Strategy 

I am choosing the story structure of curiosity to make my story more interesting. By entering curiosity, the reader will be more engaged and will be stuck wondering what will happen or will keep reading to find out more details. To employ the curiosity method, I will first need to put a significant event early in the story but withhold exactly what the event is. The audience will be curious because I will talk about the event using concrete, specific language without actually saying what the event is. The reader will know that I am leaving something out which will spark curiosity. Even later in the story, I will withhold information about the event. I will reveal more and more detailed information as the story goes on so that the readers can figure out what the event is on their own without me having to reveal it bluntly. Readers enjoy the curiosity and then a resolution. To add to my story, I will try to incorporate the method of curiosity by giving details of things that go on at Nana’s that day or things in her house that would reveal that my Papa is no longer alive. I will also discuss people’s actions towards the topic or people’s reactions towards items in her house that might remind them of Papa. For example, I could write about the heart trinket on the coffee table that says “Nana and Papa”. I could write about how seeing this makes me feel sad. I could then describe a picture of Papa saying that I never knew him. This could be challenging, though, to talk about my feelings towards the objects without revealing the topic of my Papa no longer being alive. I have found it hard to make the paper flow going from topic to topic.

Wark's Allegory 

Video games are allegories for the world we live in. When we play video games we are putting ourselves into a different world. This could be because we want to forget what’s going on in the real world. In a game like Sims, we can even make our ideal world. The characters in Sims dream just like we do of houses and furniture, as Wark says, “Benjamin and his friends dream of things. Things make them happy. They find a nice sofa so much more relaxing than a cheap one.” The characters are just like us. Benjamin found a nice sofa more relaxing than a cheap one just like we all dream of nicer lives than the one we already have. The Sims have routines just as we do everyday. Wark describes Benjamin’s daily tasks. My question is, in the game, you control what your characters do, so why would you make their lives boring like yours? Wouldn’t we want to make it more exciting, to take your mind off of our own boring, repetitive lives? As you keep reading about Benjamin’s life you can see how it develops. He starts at the bottom with a boring, low paying job but works his way to what he really wants to do. He also acquires more friends along the way and makes more money. All of this makes Benjamin happier. This game, or this situation at least, instills hope in our real lives. If we can make Benjamin, a character in a video game, develop in his life and reach his goals in work and happiness, why couldn’t we do that in our own lives?

            Wark quotes Walter Benjamin saying, “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.” You can make anybody you want to make do anything you want them to do. It doesn’t have to be a typical world in Sims. Everything in this game can be whatever you make it to be. Anything that doesn’t make sense in the real world can make perfect sense in a video game. People can create whatever they want to create without any rules or consequences.

            Wark states, “To be a gamer is a slightly different persona to being a reader or a viewer.” When we read things in a book or a newspaper or watch TV, we can’t control anything that is happening but when we create or play a video game, we have the power to do anything we want. This is what makes video games allegorical for our world, they come from our own heads.

Critique 

The sample by “lewatle” is very well organized and the website is designed so that it is appealing which I think is important to consider. If the webpage was disorganized and boring then I wouldn’t be as interesting in what this person’s opinion was. This person is trying to portray that video games are corrupting our world and making people turn to a dark side of themselves. This person makes this point very clear and uses good examples from the video games that she played, which were all violence based. In contrast, Reid’s website was very disorganized and was not designed very well which made it a lot less interesting to read. Although Reid had a lot of information in his narrative sections, most of it was unnecessary and very irrelevant to the project.  I think I am going to try to do opposite of what Reid did and not describe every move that happened in my gaming experience but try to insert the video onto the page so that the reader can just watch without me having to describe it.

Sarah is trying to portray that dreams tell us information about ourselves. She says, “If games are like dreams, then what do these games tell me?” Her point is that games tell me things about ourselves that we didn’t know before. In contrast, Tyler says that reoccurring dreams are trying to portray something unknown, not about ourselves, but about what is going to happen in the future. Tyler says that confronting dreams can help us to better understand the true meaning of occurrences. I think that I will include a section about my thoughts on dreams and how they relate to video games because I think that they do connect. I think that dreams can affect what we think which, in turn, affects what we dream. It has always been said that what we think about right before we go to sleep is what we will dream about. Is this true?

Many of the authors of the sample websites picked similar games to play like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. A similar idea in these samples was that games like these were hard to relate to real life. These games consist of violence and warfare that most people don’t often see in their lifetime at all or especially at the college age. To find these games to be allegories you would have to look for a much deeper meaning than just the superficial.

Dream Interpretation 

“Every interpretation of a dream is a psychological statement about certain of its contents”, Jung says. When you interpret a dream, you are pulling ideas from your psyche that what you are understanding from the dream is, in fact, the truth. According to Jung, this isn’t always true. This can also be applied when interpreting the happenings of a video game. The only part of the interpretation that we don’t know in a video game is what was going through the makers head; what he or she was trying to portray with the video game. Which leads me into another topic that Jung mentioned: you can’t know the meaning of the dream without knowing the dreamer’s thoughts. He referenced an example of a man dreaming of a table but you wouldn’t know the meaning of the table without the dreamer’s thoughts.

Jung states, “The dream not only fails to obey our will but very often stands in striking opposition to our conscious purposes.” When we dream it is usually not what we want to dream, especially when it comes to nightmares. So why do we dream what we dream? Why are video games made the way that they are? Why do they make us think a certain way? If we have a dream about something bad happening, that doesn’t mean that we want it to happen, it is similar with video games. Playing a video game about shooting people doesn’t mean that we want to shoot people. Does playing the video game change our mindset?

“But even if we know the conscious situation we know nothing of the attitude of the unconscious.” We know what is happening in our dreams but we usually aren’t sure why it is happening. In video games, we know what is happening but we don’t always know how it affects our unconscious and there is no way to prove that. Our interpretation of the video game could come from our unconscious. There might be something to learn about ourselves as well; how we respond to certain situations and what we think about the situations in the game.

March 13 Critique Assignment 

I think that Eliza should have introduced each narrative with the name of the game, what the game was about, and just some general background information about the game. She talks about differences between good and evil which is a big moral debate in our society. The characters in the game are related to modern day people, not specifically, but in the sense of having people who are considered good and people who are considered evil. Eliza mentions that the protagonist does some things that could be considered evil which she also relates to today’s society making it more literal, “man ruins the environment, man creates violence, man has greed and gluttony and puts it out into the world. However, in the game, it takes on a more literal meaning as well.” A common theme that Eliza uses is good vs. evil, which she mentions again in her second narrative. “This is the point in the game that relates back to the idea of good versus evil. Is the rebellion the evil entity in the game, or the Honourable Leader? Is evil going against your government, or taking control of your citizens' lives?” She puts herself into the shoes of the character saying that everything is relying on her and whatever she decides to do the complete the task is a decision between good and evil. Overall, I thought that Eliza’s organization of the website was very accessible and the music and sounds made the information more exciting.

On the first page of Grayson’s website he included a section that described what each page of the site was about. He described the purpose and some background info about the site, which would be helpful to someone who was not familiar with the project. In his conclusion, Grayson talks about the connection of video games to society on two levels; personal and cultural. This is a deep, thorough explanation. The descriptions of the dreams/video games were very detailed which made the imagery good. Grayson explained the whole plot of the different times that he played the games. I like how he put the description and interpretation in different sections of the website because it makes it simpler to understand and better organized. Grayson is very descriptive in the whole website which shows that he is actually very passionate about this video game. He also named his site “Dreams of a Gamer” so we can make the assumption that he is a gamer. I think he should have put the footage not in a different section but put the video next to the corresponding description for more convenience to the reader. This way, the reader could make the visual connection much more quickly. I think he should have put his references in another section or down at the bottom of the page because they do not look good on the side of each page.  Grayson makes many great connections between the symbols, motifs, and archetypes in how they play a role in the game and in reality.

April 1 
These two articles both discuss video games and how they can be perceived, but there are differences in how they are perceived and by whom. Aarseth starts off with trying to define what a game is. 

        "The attempt to define or redefine a historical term theoretically is to instill something imprecise with faux-precise meaning, and these acts are wagers in a game of power, an attempt to change language and to steer meaning in a particular direction."

As he goes through all possibilities he comes to the conclusion that the meaning of a game should not be defined by how others see it but how the player see's the game. Aarseth pushes that a  game is defined by the player's relationship with the game and how it alters the player's emotions. He later focuses on how games can be misinterpreted by critics about what the game is trying to portray from the creator's point of view. The emotions and experience that the player has are called the Game play, according to Aarseth. Game play, or the player's experience, comes from the Game structure and the game world. The creator of the game makes a whole new world when making a game that can have a great affect on the player so the creator needs to be specific about what he is trying to portray. Video games can change people's values: 

                  "So the reason why we as players are able to enjoy symbolic killing is that the internal              value system of scoring points takes precedence over the violent symbolism of the external reference." (pg. 62)

When we play games with violence we come to find that we change our values in the game. We might not do these things in real life, but in a video game it suddenly becomes morally ok to kill people or blow things up. Video games have a great effect on our lives so the way that they are portrayed to the public and to individual players is important. 

eKevin VanOrd discusses a game, "The Sims Medieval" in a different way. Instead of referring to many games and how they are perceived, he focuses on this one game. VanOrd describes the basic plot of the game so that the reader of the article can become familiar with it. But, instead of focusing on public/critics views of the game, he focuses more on his opinion. VanOrd points out that in this game you can't have a relationship with the characters because you don't have as much control over what they do. Because of this, there is no room for the player's imagination. 

   “...instead of creating a family and living a dream, your sims are chained to specific deeds like slaves.”

I agree that imaginations need to be able to run free while playing a video game. The player needs to be able to take their mind to another world while playing a game so the perception of the game by the critics or the public doesn't mean as much as the value of the game to an individual.

4/2

This article starts off discussing how the technology of games has changed but that the social aspect has not changed. Players still play in the same way that they used to, either against the game or against each other. In the game he references, Everquest 2, the dynamic of the social aspect of the game changes as you can see other’s building and governing their towns which stimulates a competitive emotion in the player. You will want your town to be better off then theirs. This also draws you deeper into the game by making it not only about your enjoyment but adds a new goal of being better than the other players.

“Letting the flying passengers see not only the landscape but also other players busy with their little quests is a stroke of world-design genius, a means of making the world come alive that foreshadows the player’s own exploration and stimulates it immensely…”

With the combination of players all in one game also comes making teams. This can bring more emotion into the game and can cause realistic relationships to change as well. The dynamics of this game not only affect how you feel in the moment of playing the game but can also affect how you feel outside of playing the game.

“This mechanic causes heaps of frustration, distrust, guilt and animosity between players…”

This shows how games are changing society and how they can really alter players’ thinking.

This article helped me to interpret some cultural associations because it gives lots of detailed examples of what happens in the game and how the actions can be interpreted. For example, Aarseth discuses using mapwow.com to calculate the size of the gaming landscapes to make them more accessible and realistic. This is similar to the game I played for the project, The Sims 3, because when you are building a sim house, you have to map out the land and decide dimensions of the house, pool, garden etc. Another aspect of the article that helped me with my cultural associations was when he talked about how the game World of Warcraft was referred to as a “world”. This gives much credibility to the game showing that it is made well enough to engulf the player enough to where they feel like they are in a different world. This relates to The Sims 3 because the game is just like a real world with real families and emotions. This game allows you to create your ideal reality in a game. That is if your reality isn’t your ideal.



The Perfect Crime

This article is reflecting on the affects of movies being made about real life events and the media’s affect the community. The movie making not only affects the community but also affects the people in the community. For example, Paradise Lost was made about the murder of three boys in Arkansas. While the movie was being filmed a father of one of the victims was changed.

“Byers’s self-conscious alteration of his behavior amounts to an erasure of reality because it deliberately modifies his “real” persona…”

The filming of this movie is not just about making entertainment; it affects the people in the community where this tragedy occurred because the media brings the tragedy back to life. This shows how selfish the media is and how they don’t consider their affects on the community.

This film also brings up some aspects of the media that aren’t usually discussed like its affects on the community and the affects of sharing a tragic story like this one to the world.

“The film seems to imply that the media’s constant presence surrounding the case destroyed the reality of the community in which the crimes occurred…”

The media coming in to the community and being the prominent voice in how the tragedy is displayed in the movie has a great, negative effect on the society. The making of the movie brings back many bad memories and if the tragedy isn’t played out correctly it can severely upset the family and friends of the victims. 

            The argument that this article presents is very strong with affective examples. This article brings up point that wouldn’t normally be considered while watching a movie or making a movie. The arguments and examples are presented in a way that introduced ideas of the argument and gave the examples to relate to. This can help me with my paper by using the same structure, which presents ideas very clearly.