Gaming: Present & Future

I'm posting this a little late...I am generally behind because I have been sick quite a bit. No matter, I wanted to post this regardless because gaming is certainly the topic in this course most pertinent to me. I have been a gamer ever since I was very young, and I have been an aspiring game developer since early high school. I read a few of the gaming articles, so I'll address a couple of different points raised:

Games are for kids: The actual argument in the article was that games are not, in fact, just for kids anymore, and I am inclined to agree. As the gaming generation grows up, they are not willing to grow out of a major source of entertainment. The same people that grew up playing Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog are now developing games so that they can keep on playing. There is an entire genre of games clearly aimed at more mature audiences (there are more and more titles that recieve the dreaded "M" rating by the ESRB every year). In addition, games are getting deeper than the basic premise of "get the high score" or "beat the final level."

Violence in games: I have had this argument with a dozen people and I still hold that violence in games doesn't make kids violent. Playing Doom and Halo never made me want to pick up a gun and shoot someone with it. Playing Grand Theft Auto never made me want to steal cars and run over people. I don't necessarily believe that this means that everything goes in video games; there should still be a certain standard of ethics and morality that the development community adheres to. However it's not because I think the content of the games radically damages our society; it's simply because I believe that there are things we don't need in video games.

Kuma War: This game kind of disturbed me when I first saw it earlier this year, and while I still don't particularly like the premise, my impressions have changed. At first it felt like the game was making light of war and the fact that people are dying every day, but in retrospect, this is really just as true of any war simulation game. The problem, however, is that it DOES make people take the current situation less seriously than they should, which is a problem because in life, there is no reset button. The game is also too eager to propogate current American stereotypes of the "face of the enemy," and can only really serve to heighten the already paranoid sense of anxiety about Arab-Americans.

It's a Small World After All

Well, I was definitely laughing out loud while watching the Small World clip, which is probably a first for a homework assignment at Stanford. The general gist of the clip is that with social networks like Freindster, the entire concept of relationship is becoming thouroughly distorted. I found the analysis interesting and found myself agreeing on almost every count. As a matter of fact, I have been having the discussion with several people about theFacebook.com and how (in my mind) who your friends on the facebook are means absolutely nothing. I find it interesting that there are actually people who pride themselves in being able to say, "I have 300+ friends on the facebook!" I have been asked more than once by RL friends if they should accept a friend request; why does it matter? Who cares? The facebook and similar systems are nothing more than databases on some server somewhere with a bunch of rows and columns that happen to have real people's names associated with them. I've also found it interesting that the facebook keeps expanding what it can be used for, now having support for small, exclusive groups that are only open by invitation. Awesome...now we have cliques somehow embedded in the aforementioned database. The coolest two features of the facebook in my opinion are a) that it functions as a more easily navigated phone book, allowing you to reunite with long-lost friends, and b) that it shows the degrees of separation with people that you find on the facebook, actually proving that it is indeed a small, small world.

Hypertext: The Future of Written Discourse

It's actually more the present of discourse than the future. Already, it is more common to find people searching the web for dictionary and/or encyclopedia entries than that turning to their bookshelves to dust off the ol' Encyclopedia Brittanica. If you ask someone the capital of some obscure country, they aren't going to look at an atlas, but they'll probably type " capital" into Google search and have their information in seconds. And now, in a college-level writing class, rather than writing a research paper the old fashion way, we are presenting research using a hypertext site of our own design. This weeks readings were all about the design aspects of those hypertexts and how they change the way we process information.

Cripps had an entire lexia of his site devoted to the discussion of multiliniearity; in a normal written paper, all of the information is presented in a linear fashion because we read left to right, top to bottom. In a hypertext, information is separated into blocks that Cripps calls nodes or lexia (what the average user would probably prefer to call pages =/), and the order in which those nodes can be acessed is partially influenced by the writer but ultimately determined by the reader. Where a writer chooses to use hyperlinks can determine how a hypertext can be read, and the order in which it is read will have a profound effect on how the information is processed.

I obviously agree with everything that Cripps says; in fact I've generally taken all of his points for granted. What is interesting is how much more responsible the concept of multilinearity makes the writer. At first glance, a hypertext research project seems a lot easier because I don't have to think about the transitions between ideas. However, quite to the contrary, not only do I have to develop transitions that go from one idea to the next, but I now feel responsible for developing a single transition that could flow into one of any x threads, where x is a number I decide based on how I choose to hyperlink my site.

In all of my previous experiences with web development, I have been in a business environment, and so I have been designing sites with the intention of allowing a user to access any piece of information that they are looking for very quickly. However, in a hypertext discourse, that is not necessarily the goal. In order to effectively argue a point, I need to be able to not only provide factual information, but tie facts to conclusions without putting too many words on a page. Tough work indeed.

PowerPoint: Medium vs. Message

In reading the articles for this week, I've come across theories that PowerPoint is evil, the devil, and makes us stupid. The level of overstatement in all of the articles almost made me laugh. Seriously though, what are these people talking about?

I will agree with the idea that PowerPoint can be meaningless and extraneous. David Byrne's mockery of the PowerPoint arrows actually made me think; people who are inexperienced in the use of the application tend to go crazy with useless word art, neon-colored arrows, and random clip art simply because the audience probably likes to look at pretty colors. And even more to the point, there are people who will look at one of those presentations and think it was good simply because it used every imaginable feature the application has to offer. However the confusion that has arisen is a result of mixing up the medium with the message, which PowerPoint certainly makes it a lot easier to do. However a bad speaker putting together a nice PowerPoint presentation does not suddenly revolutionize their abilities and it certainly doesn't make their argument come across any stronger. While people may make the mistake of the presentation seeming more professional, it doesn't mean they are going to be any more convinced by the actual content of the speech.

Julia Keller's anecdote about the football coach is similar; a good coach is not going to use PowerPoint to motivate his players at halftime. PowerPoint might be a great tool for scouting (showing your players what the other team looks like offensively and defensively) or for replacing the standard "chalkboard talk," and a good coach is going to understand the difference.

The basic theme of my opinion is that PowerPoint and all of its features are tools in the same way that hand motion, use of non-PowerPoint visual aids, and something as simple as intonation are tools. PowerPoint has as much potential to make a presentation more poingant as it does to ruin the effect. PowerPoint isn't evil and it doesn't make us stupid, but some of the people that use it need just a little more work.

The First of Many

Well this is going to be my E-Rhetorics blog. If you have any interest in me or my friends, feel free to check out my other blog at http://imperfect-enigma.blogspot.com.

One way I can tell that I'm going to enjoy this class is that about ten minutes into my first class session, I already had some ideas about what to write my research paper on.

Topic the first: As a background, I am an avid forum-goer, and I post on two or three forums regularly at any given time. In addition, I read at least twice as many as I post on. Forum culture to me is amazing, especially in that the environment and personality of two forums on very similar topics and even having several of the same people can be entirely different. Doing some research on the history of internet discussion boards (with some history of BBS included) would be an interesting endeavor, and I think it would be a personally relevant topic. I don't really have an idea for a specific question as of yet, but I'll be thinking.

Topic the second: One of the most interesting forms of online communication is also the oldest: IRC. The most freeform, unregulated place to meet and talk to complete strangers. It can be a great place if you want to spill your life's story to a bunch of people you don't know, and it can actually prove to be an incredibly valuable source of information. The best part is that it is completely anonymous, and you can even change your name every five minutes if you so desire. If you want to see some of the best conversations ever conducted on IRC, I highly recommend visiting www.bash.org. Anyway, I think another interesting topic would be to spend some time researching the progression of the IRC community and analyzing the effect of anonymity on it.

Topic the third: This is sort of an overarching idea that combines the other two topics and focuses on a specific aspect: the anonymity. In a discussion forum, you have some sense of anonymity, but because people tend to be associated with a single user name, you still develop a reputation and a forum persona that doesn't go away. I like to call this "limited anonymity." In the IRC world, there is no limitation on how often you change your identity and/or personality, so you effectively have "complete anonymity." The two medium of communication are completely different, and I think it could be exciting to take a look at the effects of different levels of anonymity on the community at large.