MMO Adventure Take:2

After recieving no help at all from blizzard support I decided to stop wasting time trying to fix Worlf of Warcraft (WoW) and to turn to another online game. I had already tried Secondlife and I found it painfully boring, buggy and pointless.

It turns out that quite a few people in my tutorial group and some more people in my seminar group started playing a game called Seal Online.



This is an MMORPG (you may find me calling these "Muh-Mor-Per-Gur's"), like WoW, apart from it is much more basic. Although the gameplay is much more simplifed (as i write this my character is fishing with out any input needed by me), the interaction seems to be a little higher.

In WoW you will rairly find people in the starting areas, and if you do they tend not to be very chatty or want to group with you. This is probably due to the fact that the early levels are boring and the fastest way to level past them and into more intresting areas is to do solo quests as fast as you can. I'd be intrested to see how interaction develops in SealO as you level up.

"Se"XBOX - My Thoughts on Fox News Journalism

After watching this segment from Fox News, about a new computer game called Mass Effect, I felt I had to respond to how poorly the news is delivered to the public. First of all the person on the against side has no background experience in the effects that computer games or any other media types have on people. The soul reason for her being there is to plug her new book.

Secondly the supposidly neutral journalist sides on the against team almost instantly. During the intro of the segment she talks about the game "In some parts of the game it features full digital nudity" which is not the case at all as there are no graphical scenes in the game.

Cooper Lawrence, who has also not played the game, starts her argument saying that this game has damaging effects on the development of adolecent males because it protrays women as objects and because you're in controll of the character it means that they feel they would be in controll over women in real life. Geoff Keighley rebuttles by stating you can play either a male or female character in the game. Also he goes on to say that the featured "sex" scene in the game lasts for two miniutes, where as the whole game lasts somewhere around thirty hours long, meaning that that one scene is very insignificant. This doesn't stop the missinformed ignorant journalist and aparent pshycological specialist from talking about the game as if it is based on that miniture part of it.
Cooper brings up some research from a university in the United States and quotes them saying "boy that play video games can not tell the diffrence between what they're seeing in the real world and a video game if they don't have the real experience". Unless that came from the University of "I'm going to talk shit and pretend it's fact" (from which Cooper probably graduated with a first) I'd have to say that she was lying or was just terribly missinformed. There is no proof at all that shows a violent video game caused someone who played it to do something violent in real life.

Even if there was a case where one unstable person choose to do something violent due to playing a violent video game then that would be one case out of the hundreds of millions of people that have played a violent game.

At the end of the segment they go to a panel of 4 people each has no experience in the effects of video games on people, let alone experience of games at all. The journalist keeps repeating that it's games like Mass Effect that make parenting even harder than it already is. This in my opinion has no relivence as the game has been cencored "M" for maturity which means no one under the age of fifteen is legally allowed to buy or play that game.

I'd rather let my hypothetical children play a violent game with partial nudity than let them watch Fox News.

By the way this isn't just a one off from the fox news team:

Spring Break Serial Killer - A segment on a serial killer at large in Florida. The picture in picture frame are clips of people on spring break which is pretty much just people drinking alchohol and women in bikinis. It has nothing to do with the story at all.


9/11 Tribute Show: Lube Wresteling - This segment is from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly's 9/11th Tribute show. Almost half of this segment has lube wresteling full screen, not really in keeping with a tribute to thousands of people who died in that tragidy.


If you want more extreme right wing, stupidity journalism I recommend you check out this extreme left wing fanatic's youtube page http://youtube.com/user/jsjkim

LOOK OUT! COLOUR AND LIGHT!

We were asked in tutorial to post a picture that we've taken ourselfs and which screams colour and light. I decided to use a picture that i'd already taken. This is a picture of one of the times I went fishing at home in Cornwall. I was concerned at first about using this picture because the only rich vibrent colour in it is blue. But I think it still works well considering that our task was "Colour and Light" and not Colours and light.

INSPRA-FUXING-RATION!

I thought it would be a good idea to post some videos on my blog that have inspired me to make a machinema.

The Grind - Halloween Special


Illegal Danish - Super Snacks


Jimmy: The World of Warcraft Story

A Screeching Hault

As part of the Identities modual we were asked to join an online community which had it's own virtual world. My first thought was to make a machinema film about online communites using the game World of Warcraft.

Things were going well when I managed to knock out around two pages of dialog. Things came to a sudden hault last wednesday though. Blizzard, the companie behind World of Warcraft (WoW), released a patch for the game. Something in that patch must have corrupted some files somewhere because now I can no longer log into my account and play the game.

I left multiple posts on the Tech Support Forum they have set up but nothing has worked so far. I feel I might have to abandon using WoW for my machinema and try something else.

Interactive Narative The Flash Process

I'd never used any version of Flash before so I didn't expected the process of making my interactive narrative to be an easy task. I started quite well finding placing my frames in the template provided with out any major kind of problem.

I was not able to complete my project though as I had quite a lot of trouble with organising the buttons for how to start the game and proceed though it. I'm sure I'm just facing small obstacles that can be sorted out easily during a surgery session. So I aim to have it finished and online quite soon.

Here's a few snippets from what I got so far:

The First Frame


The Second Frame


Game Lost Frame

Interactive Narative

My idea for an interactive narrative is a type of play along music game in which the player needs to pick the correct segment of music that needs to go next. I decided to use the song The Devil Went Down To Georgia as a music video by Primus inspired me.



I thought the song was very catchy and would appeal to a wide audience therefore more people would want to play my game. Also the song has a clear narrative throughout.

You play the role of Johnny, who is a young fiddle player who accepts a challenge set by the devil. If the devil wins then he gets your soul and you have to reset the game. But if you win then you win a fiddle made of gold.

I decided to call my game "Let's Go To Hell" because it I think that name makes it funnier than something like "You're Going To Hell" which sounds more like a statement, whereas my version makes it sound like going to hell is a good idea sort of like "Let's Go Get Ice Cream" or "Let's Go To Disney Land". In truth I stol.... borrowed this idea from a film I like called Let's Go To Prison