Skye Rogers

Allegories

Can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in? I believe we can. Wark begins his analysis with a description of Benjamin. “Benjamin gets up in the morning. He goes to the toilet. He leaves the seat up. He showers and fixes breakfast. He reads the paper. He finds a job — as a Test Subject — starting tomorrow. It’s not much, but times are hard. He reads a book, and then another. He fixes lunch, naps, reads again. He goes to bed. He gets up. Toilet, shower, breakfast again. He does not make his bed. He goes to work. He comes home, prepares another meal. He talks to his roommate Bert a bit. Hannah drops by. He flirts with her some. He goes to bed, gets up, does the whole thing all over again.” The way he sets up the description gives a sense of realness for the reader. While I read I sensed relatedness to Benjamin and the mundane trials of ordinary life. But soon after we get to know Benjamin we realize that he is not real, but a video game character. To me an allegory has always been a story that had a hidden meaning trapped between the lines of the fine print. In this game the Sims you are an avatar that you get to design just about everything in their life from head to toe. You can design their body type to the house they will reside in without much hassle. Your only real goal in this game is to keep this imaginary you happy and alive. The allegory, for me, begins when your avatar starts to become unhappy. This image of an unhappy avatar is parallel to our society today. To first elaborate on this, let’s go over the basics of what can make your avatar unhappy. When you are hungry, bored, grown tired of your job, have no friends, have no significant other, and you don’t have enough material items such as furniture, cars, and a large home. Sound familiar? All these things that can make an avatar’s “health” deteriorate, are all things that we as people resonate with why we are unhappy. But will all of those material goods truly make us happy and full? According to the game’s designer, Will Wright, we can’t: “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.”

Comparison

While looking at all these projects, I noticed that all had a significant detail that makes their websites easy to read; organization. First I will start with “Subin’s Multimodal Argument.” In his project he had three different games he had to interpret. I could easily tell what and where were categories as I looked for them. He did a great job of separating his games and making them easy to find. His first narrative was based on Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, a war based game. His short yet vivid description captured my attention even though I am not an avid video gamer. The second narrative was based on GTA 4, a mob based game. In his description of this game he related the actions to his characters to the actions of what many immigrants must do when they arrive in the US. I thought the way he moved the story line and the progression of the main characters thieving abilities was a very unique turn.  In his last narrative once again he managed to interest me with his short yet descriptive sentences.

 In “Multimodal project-Sarah Hicklin,” she separates her narratives by tabs and as you open each tab you see a great description on what the game entails. The author’s intentions are clearly stated in the titles of the website and beyond that in the interpretation of the games. Their argument mostly centered the relevance of archetypes on today’s society. Her narratives were extremely detailed. For example the second narrative was based on the game “Escaping the Prison,” where her goal was to escape from the prison based on tools that were given to her. She went through every tool that she was offered and explained the outcome of using it. I found the information very interesting but at the same time I felt like the game had been ruined for me to interpret due to her extensive detail on every step of the game. If I were her I would be as detailed as possible but leave some information out for the future gamer to find them.

In conclusion the arguments made by these websites were pretty clear cut and understandable the only thing that truly set these two sites apart is presentation. The first website by Subin was short sweet and to the point but still gave excellent insight as to what the games had to offer as far as allegories. It also did this while giving great visual entertainment. On the other hand Sarah’s was a little longer and visually unappealing. The first rule of creating a website is making it so it will be seen by others.

Carl Jung’s Interpretation of dreams

Carl Jung starts this article with, “Medical psychology differs from all other scientific discipline in that has to deal with the most complex problems without being able to rely on tested rules of procedure, on series of verifiable experiments and logically explicable factors.” I find this truly interesting because the mind is such a complex and intricate part of our body that we have only begun to explore. The dream unlike the mind has minimal science to back it up. Although you can never be certain of what dreams mean Jung believes that does not make them any less important. Carl Jung mentions that he believes dreams have deeper meaning to them. When I reflect on my dreams (the normal ones at least) I feel a sense of freedom because in that dream I did what I could not do in real life whether it was reading Japanese or flying believe that that is parallel with our project. First we must decide which game we will choose (why did we pick it?) and how we determine our actions throughout this game (why do we do what we do?).  According to Jung our dreams can be traced back to our past or be a glimpse of the future. By knowing this we can ask ourselves questions like: why was this prevalent in my dreams and what does it mean to me. I found this really entertaining because “psychics” and “visions” are so far away from the normal cut and dry of medical science. I think the possibility of having all knowing dreams is just a great way to explain that which we cannot understand.

Another thing that stood out to me was the mention of importance in dreams.  According to Jung “little dreams” are “are nightly fragments of fantasy coming from the subjective and personal spheres, and their meaning is limited to the affairs of every day.” He continues on about little dreams by mentioning that they are forgotten so easily because the meaning of it from day to day can fluctuate. On the other hand “big” dreams are significant and can be remembered for a lifetime. But what constitutes “big” for us and how do you explain children as young as 3 having such complex dreams? I found Jung’s response to this very important when it comes to what I will be doing for this project ”,I have examined many such dreams and often found In them a peculiarity which distinguishes them from other dreams: they contain symbolical images which we also come across in the mental history of mankind.” This whole statement made me think! As strange as a dream is subconsciously it makes tremendous sense and connects us as people.




Short Story Similarities

I chose the story “Ice House” by Kate Blakinger. I chose this story for many reasons.  Amongst those reasons are her uses of vivid imagery, her knack for capturing human emotion, and her sensibility and purposefulness when it came to repetition. This story told the story of a distressed woman and the emotions she felt as she started to realize her high school love was not the same and may not love her back. The female character, whose name was never mentioned, has just experienced her husbands near death experience. He was hit by a car and had lost much of his memory. The story continues with the internal struggle of this unnamed protagonist. Her details of her thoughts were so vivid as shown in the following excerpt from the piece, “At the hospital, I watched the woman cry and thought, What is wrong with my eyes? This woman had hit Mark as he crossed the street, and now she was sitting next to me crying about it while my eyes were dry. I pressed my fingers against the lids until the black swirled with purple and orange blobs. When I opened my eyes, I noticed how giant Mark looked in the small hospital bed, his big feet sticking ov the end, one sock blue, one sock gray. I wondered if he had been knocked right out of his shoes. They’d been placed in a neat pair by the wall. If he dies, I thought, they will give me his shoes and his wallet and his watch in a plastic bag. I traced the whorl of his ear with my index finger. Mark is handsome except for his big, fleshy ears; they are my favorite of his features.” This excerpt is such an accurate portrayal of what any person might think in this situation. Her fear for the future is shown when she mentions that she will receive his items in a bag but he would not return home with her. What really kept me reading this piece was just the great detail she gave us. I felt bad for her and wanted to see what would happen to this woman. Another technique was her use of repetition. She makes reference to her husband’s inability to say her name at first, and by the end of the story we see her basically pleading with him just to say her name, but he seems to not remember or be able to. I chose this story because it gave insight to another perspective on love. In my short story I use some of the same elements as Blakinger, repetition and vivid details. In my story I talk about love in a new and positive and wishful way, but what really sets this piece out from others is the realness of the story.  Like George Saunders said, you should make it appeal to human nature, and this story relates to the fear that many have of their significant other losing interest or even cheating on them.

In my short story I will be implementing the “surprise” structure. This structure uses the element of surprise to keep the reader hooked. I plan to start my story with a significant event, and end with the clarification of that event. I believe that leading with something as strong and shocking as I have in mind will both intrigue the reader and create a significantly stronger piece. So far I’ve hit quite a few speed bumps when writing this story.  For example, as of right now my story has many different plots. I believe they all connect and are all relevant but I don’t think that goal has been successfully executed thus far. I plan to spend time to either lessen the amount of plots I have or refine them more in order to have a greater impact on my story. The second obstacle I have hit so far is my inability to really come up with vivid details that will truly give the reader my emotions at the time of this story. When deciding what words to use I feel like a lot of the words don’t do me justice. I have been playing around with different sentence structure to see which will capture the raw emotions. Next one is determining what is important versus what can be spared. This goal is hard to successfully fulfill in my mind because it seems that to contradict the idea of having details in the story. I find myself writing more than what is needed for the sake of having details and painting a picture for the audience. Finally I find it hard to write an eventful and meaningful memoir when my dates are condensed to only three days. I feel like I had to sacrifice a lot of meaningful moments for the sake of abiding of the three day rule of memoirs.  In conclusion I will be using the surprise structure to orient my story in a way that is easy and interesting to the audience while still bringing the details will make the story be relived.

Comparison of two students

Taking the time to critique these two awesome and creative websites have provided with me insight on this project. I found inspiration for ideas for my use of the critical parts of our project like the narratives, the archetypes, the theme, the motifs, and of course the dream journal. To commence I should start by saying that these two websites are incredibly helpful because they are so different from each other which gives a wide range of variety for use in my project.

To start off, I really enjoyed reading Grayson’s dream diary I found it incredibly vivid in detail and the way he described his experiences, captured my attention.  I found that what he told us really did have significant meaning and the way he reported the experience made it seem like an actual dream.  His interpretations are so well constructed. The first few sentences of his paragraph like his dream diary appealed to my senses, “Sometimes we go to strange places when we dream, often unfamiliar worlds and we still can associate our lives to the similarities, as if we have seen a place before. “I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid” Lowry says in The Giver. Automatically our brains think of real-world associations to make our minds comfortable with a new place. Instead of feeling “strange and stupid” like Lowry suggests, our dreams are another comfort zone entirely, a surreal world where everything is our way.”  On another note I really enjoyed the archetype tab. He clarified on five archetypes and was incredibly detailed regarding what they meant as far as Skyrim. I also liked his use of quotes from other sources. I noticed that he constantly is answering major questions on themes and motifs. I also enjoyed the video footage that gave more of an insight to the main purpose of the game. I really liked the simple set up I thought it brought more attention to the words versus the animations.

The second page was very different from the first. I found this one very boring. I found the organization of their site kind of confusing and I just was uninterested in continuing my tour. With that being said I pushed through it and read through the site and found that despite its lack of creativity it was very well executed. I enjoyed the language and the sentence structure. The essential questions and goals of this project were more than answered in the narratives. On a side note I wished that the video would not start on its own it was like a bombardment of sounds before my page was completely loaded.

I found these websites to be pretty impressive and set a standard for what I hope to accomplish with mine. They both seemed to surpass to expectations and did a great job of conveying the purpose of this project. The main thing I realized although the layout was a tad boring the most important things like the interpretation and archetypes were as bright and vivid as any amazing back drop for this website.

These articles all seemed pretty close in meaning. I found it interesting that we didn’t read anything that might help us interpret but it kind of touched on the fact that video games do have an impact on us as a society. Looking back at Mackenzie Wark's website about Gamer Theory we see how dreams can have hidden meaning while the Define real moron was elaborating what it was to be a game. Long read but not that bad.

   4/2

To start off the quote by Mark Twain was very relevant. I think the quote is a great set up for the rest of the article. I read the quote without knowing that it was one. It kind of shows that reality and the game world can be a lot more similar than what we think it can be. The introduction basically gave a quick summary of the future chapters. Looking at this in regards to how I can use this toward my project, I see many possibilities. Firstly (I am just thinking out loud for all of this) I like the idea of having an introduction in general. Technically it would be the home page where I can give a brief and concise account of what my site has to offer. I also like that the introduction has an interactive feel to them, and by that I mean the way it asks questions about its subject. Secondly I really appreciate how the argument is stated pretty clearly and early on in the work. I feel by having this argument or purpose already stated, readers don’t have to necessarily interpret what they think the message is. Another highlight to that is that it gives a reader something to refer back to while reading this article.

“Azeroth in game world history” it first starts off comparing world of Warcraft to other MMOG (massively multiplayer online games). I believe that they are first comparing landscape of the games. Besides comparing world of Warcraft to other multiplayer games they are comparing the older games to the newer ones on many different levels, such as game mechanics, gameplay and social aspects.  They discussed how in the past three decades we have developed more technologically and thus making it easier to be more “social and interactive” with others who also play. Interestingly enough years ago you would be lucky to get a couple hundred gamers on a single server and now we are pushing past the thousands. I found it interesting that the article focused on how it was making the game I guess “consumer-friendly.” It went on to say how the creators looked at what their competitors had done and picked out the things they didn’t like and kept the things they found to be useful. One of the examples was how in other games the group mission created animosity and distrust between the players because if one player happened to die the whole group was punished. I found this article surprisingly interesting and easy to read. Definitely one of the more useful links.