Reading Response #4 (Media280)

Video Games and Computer Holding Power by Sherry Turkle

Turkle discusses about the game attachment in her essay and says that children are get attached to games more than adults, because they grew up with playing video games but not adults. Adults consider any game as "cute and funny" like the arcade game with which they grew up. I do not quite agree with this theory: I more believe that there are other reasons for this, which are skills, accomplishment, and quality of the narrative and graphic.

The skills are definitely required to engage with the game especially today. The reason is that since the video games are getting more complicated and difficult today, it is not easy to complete the games without any skill. Even though an only tool is a controller, it is not easy at all to finish the game in the modern games without the skills. My friend is very attached to a game, called Modern Warfare. It is basically just a shooting game, and it is a simple game: you just need to kill other players with guns. When I saw the frined playing, it looked very easy, so I played it with him. However, I did not do well at all. The game was for Play Station (PS) 3 and I used to play PS when I was child; therefore, I had the PS experience and am already used to use the controller, but it was not enough to enjoy the game. I am still unsure what technique I was missing. The friend who is attached to the game likes video games in general. He never grew up in any environment of playing game, but he now plays a lot of video games, so that he has the skills, and the skills makes him enjoy playing game. Thus, the skills are very important to enjoy playing video games.

The skills not only make the player enjoy playing the games but also bring a joy of achievement: once you have the skills, you can complete a game, and it brings you accomplishment feeling, and that is the other thing to make the player to be attracted to the game. I used to play video games when I was child, and whenever I finished the game, I felt very good about it and it made me want to play more and more. This is why I think that the achievement is also an important fact that makes the player attracted to the game.

One more fact that brings the player to the game more is better quality in the modern video games. Today, video games are getting more and more complicated in terms of narrative, and graphic is getting clearer and looks more real. Today's game such as Final Fantasy series and the first video game like Spacewar, which we have seen in the class discussion, are definitely a way too different.

As one of the classmates said, watching the cut-scenes in the modern game is like more watching movie. In addition to it, the narrative in the modern game is more complicated and has a deep meaning in it. Even there are the movies, which are based on the video games like the Resident Evil; therefore, the narrative of the modern game has as good quality as movie.

Thereupon, I do not agree with the Turkle’s point that children grew up with playing video games and that is a reason that they are more attached to games than adults: I believe that the modern games make people attached more than the old games in terms of the quality of graphic and narrative. If the game is interesting, people play the game, and eventually they get the skills. Once the player obtained the skills, it brings a feeling of accomplishment, and it also makes the player more and more attracted to it. I believe that the number of the children who are attached to the video games is higher than the number of adults. I think this is because children are easier to be influenced by anything than adults, such as television, movie, or whatever they see. This fact has even proven in many researches. That is why children are easier to be attached to the video games than adults. Thus, I do not agree with the Turkle’s point.

Reading Response #3 (Media 280)

Protocol Politics by Laura Denardis

What I believe is that anything is perfect and definitely comes with some issues, and Internet protocol issues are good examples of this. The Internet is now one of the necessities in our lives, and many jobs require the Internet use. My job is one of them. I work in a television production company as an intern. My position is TV coordinator/researcher; therefore, the Internet is required to do research. Even for school works, I use the Internet; however, as the reading, Protocol Politics by Laura Denardis and the class discussion regarding her article, the Internet is causing the privacy issues, and one of the examples is Facebook. I totally agree with Facebook is no longer safe anymore. It is huge today and everyone all over the world can sign up as long as they have e-mail address. I do not trust Facebook at all; therefore I block the access to see my tagged pictures and I never accept any friend request except people I know.

The Facebook issue is now even featured in movie, for example, Catfish. I saw this movie a couple weeks ago, and I liked it, especially the fact that the movie is documentary. The story is that a young man who lives in New York, Nev, receives a painting from a girl, Abby, who is still in elementary school and they become friends on Facebook. Then he also becomes friends with Abby’s mother, Angela, and her sister, Megan. Nev and Megan start having interests each other, and Nev decides to go to see her; however, what Nev finds out there is that Megan actually does not exist: Angela was Megan and kept touch with him. In addition, Abby is not a painter: she was a normal young girl. Angela is the one who paints and mailed one of her paintings to Nev by saying Abby drew it.

The movie basically shows that people can lie easily online. It kind of freaks me out that the people like Angela exist. I do not blame Angela, because she was psychologically unhealthy and is unhappy with her personality and life, so that meeting new people on Facebook is one of her enjoyments in her life. The scaring thing is that some people are using Facebook in the wrong way like the movie. Since Angela has many Facebook accounts under different names, including Megan, she copies pictures of somebody who she does not even know on Facebook and using it as Megan, and the other people. Facebook now has a huge number of users, so that the people whose pictures were used by her did not realize it at all. I thought that this movie shows me how danger my privacy is on Facebook.

As we talked in the class, the Internet developers are putting so much effort to solve the privacy issue and working on switching IPv4 to IPv6, but it is not easy at all because the Internet is now globalized and too huge. Denardis addresses the different solution, “users understand the possible threats to individual privacy searching the Internet” (75). The technological solution, which is switching to IPv6 from IPv4, seems like difficult and takes more time, but being aware of the possible identity threats on the Internet is the easiest way and the Internet users can do immediately. This is the first thing we should do against this issue.

Catfish Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFKe75Q6eVw

Reading Response #2 (Media 280)

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

The idea of memex is very interesting. At the same time, it is very amazing that Bush came up with this idea of memex in the 1940s when was before this new technology era. Since technology has been developed a lot, pretty much everything is possible to do and to come up with practical idea like this; however Bush came up with the idea and calculated everything how it would work before this technology era. I think that it is very amazing.

If you look at the drawing of inside of memex from Bush’s article, you see so many similarities from computers today: it has a keyboard and you can find a data stored in the computer by using it, and I thought that today’s computer is designed based on memex. Moreover, it gave us a basic idea of hypertext as we have discussed in class, which is the idea of jumping from one item to another. To have a sense of how hypertext works, we went to Wikipedia and tried where we would reach to with clicking 10 references. We started from J.P Morgan and ended up with the totally different term. Throughout this, I thought that the idea of hypertext is similar to traveling: you may just go straightforward to your destination, or you may stop by some places on a way to the destination. You may not be able reach to your destination without stopping by few places. It is very interesting to think about.

This traveling-like idea helped the development of hypertext and it has been helpful in our lives. I liked the statement what Bush makes in his article: “Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately in hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important” (47). Because we have hypertext now, it is possible to find the same item again easily: the idea of memex created the re-accessibility is and the easiness to do it. In addition to it, it also created “immediateness” to stored item. I think that this immediateness is the most different thing from human’s mind. Bush says that the human’s mind does not work in the way that memex does. I think that the human’s brain has an ability to leap one memory to another, however it cannot do that as smooth and immediate as hypertext does, because the human’s brain does not work mechanically. We forget memory sometimes and just remember it all of the sudden: there is no absoluteness that the human’s brain draws out stored memory anytime we need.

The statement made me thought that we rely on technology to redeem unsatisfactory features in the cerebral mechanism. There is a limit to restore everything we have found or learned in human’s brain. The capacity is depending on how intelligent the person is, but no one can remember everything that they have learned. Today, we redesigned the idea with the developed electronic technology, and we rely on it. Memex as a machine is outdated; however the concept of it is still alive and is helping us as an external part of our brains.

Reading Response #1 (Media 280)

The Medium Is the Message

After the discussion about the reading, The Medium Is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, I have been thinking about new media, which involve new technologies, surrounding us today, and I think that they make our lives much better and easier. Thus, we are relying on them a lot: they are a huge part of our lives today. As one of the classmates said, we need new technologies even to study in college at least here in the States, for example, Internet. Internet help me a lot to study and do class assignments, especially research papers. I do not need to go to library to find books and read all of them for my research for the paper. I can just google to find books that have what I am looking for, and I can read some of the books online, such as on google book search. Google is amazing. If I type key words that I am looking for in the book, google automatically find the pages that have the key words. In the clip we saw in the class, one of the students raises a paper, saying that she went to online instead of reading textbooks and learned the same thing. It made me think that we could learn anything, even what we are learning in school, from the Internet. Internet has all answer we want to know. This is amazing. However, I have less trust any information that I found on the Internet than in books or newspapers: every time when I discover something new on the Internet, I do not trust it completely; however, I never doubt anything written in books or newspapers even if they are hardly believe. This is interesting. I think that this is what McLuhan says in his essay that contents are never changed no matter what kinds of media they have been broadcasted on; however it is tend to be considered that the content has changed. In other words, people tend to think that new media change the contents even though they did not change. I do not say that I think new media are bad or they always wrong, but this is sure that I have less trust on new media than old media, such as books, newspapers, etc. The reason is that new media allow more people to get involved. Internet is a good example of this. Everyone can get to have own website and write anything basically they want to. On the other hand, books and newspapers are different. Authors do enough research of what they are going to write in their books or articles. In addition to it, humans have been reading newspapers to get more information and news since the 17th century. Books have a longer history than that. Therefore, people have a long history with books and newspapers, and that history creates readers’ trusts. On the other hand, Internet has popularized recently, and humans do not have any long history with new technologies, so that they cannot believe as much as paper media, such as books and newspapers, I believe. I do not think that all the information on the Internet is wrong: most of websites have information came from something official materials. Even Wikipedia has note section that have all links to where the information came from, therefore we can look them up to see if the information is right or wrong. However, even if the information came from an official material, it is still harder to believe for me than getting the information by reading books, even if the contents are exactly the same. I though that it is very interesting.

Blog #5

I came a long way to finish this course since last semester when I took MEDP 150. what I had learned in MEDP 150 was basics, and 160 was more advanced based on that. MEDP160 was more interesting and I had more fun than in 150. However what I though is that we did not have enough time to work on every assignment: I was always running out of time to finish all projects, and I wish we had more time. But taking this course was now one of my good experiences in college. The most memorable thing in the class is the short film assignment. I never expected that this assignment would be so fun and interesting. What I learned from this assignment is planing everything before we actually start filming is important. My partner, Shawn, and I discussed a lot in class and planed everything out before we went to filming, so that everything went smooth in the filming. Just what I should have cared more was to hold a camera more stably, because we cannot do anything with shaky shots in editing. That is what I realized in the editing process. It was my first time to edit and use final cut. Once I got used to using final cut, it was easy. However, editing itself was very difficult and took a lot more time than I imagined. It was because that there are so many things that we should think about in terms of "continuity". If I cut a shot even a second earlier than it's supposed to be, the "continuity" will be gone, and it creates totally different feelings on the shot. It was interesting, but tiring at the same time. If we had more time to edit, I would edit sounds and put some music as well as putting a title in the beginning. It was the toughest assignment throughout this course, but I had so much fun overall.

Hopefully, I will extend what I learned in this course and continue studying it further.

Blog #4

Animation is always what children like, and I used to watch it a lot when I was a kid.

As people grown up, everybody stops watching it. What I concern is that it is because animation is lack of reality: characters look mechanical, anything does not look real. However, 3D animation

broke these issues. 3D is a animation style that has been popular more and more today, and many animation movies are 3D. What I like about 3D animation is that it is more realistic than other types of animation. That is why I think that characters in 3D animations are liveliness.

My favorite 3D animation production company is Disney- Pixar. Their works are always my favorite, such as Monsters Inc.,Mr. Incredible, etc. All characters in Pixar's animations are lovable and liveness. The best work of them is Toy Story as I concern.

When the fist Toy Story came out, I was very amazed because all characters which are toys look like real.

For example, the main character, Woody. Woody is a cow boy doll, whose face made of wood, body is cotton, and cloth is a piece of cloth. His face is coated, so it is luster. Audience can know that because they can see how light is reflected on the surface of his face. Unlike it, his costume is made of a piece of cloth, and it does not reflect light, but we see the texture of it, and it looks like it is made of cotton. Like this, we see the details of texture of any objects in 3D animation that we do not see in other types of animation.

Another thing that attract me is the movements of the characters. Most of characters are toys, and they, of course, are not supposed to move by itself when humans are around: toys are supposed to be moved by them. Therefore, they are lifeless when humans are around. But whenever humans are gone, the toys are totally different from how they were before: they talk. run, dance, etc, like humans. Difference is that since they are toy, some of the toys can remove parts of their bodies, like Potato Head. These toys' movements, even human characters', in the animation look very similar to our movements in real life. These characters' movements make them very lifelike and made me think them as humans, not toys.

Like these, Pixar succeeded to use 3D, which enable to show details, to make the animation more believable. They also give these toy characters realistic movements. Including of all these, Toy Story is one of the significant 3D animations, and it is one of my favorites all the time.

Toy Story3 Video Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_FfHA5whXc

Blog #3: A Filmmaker, Teresa Almada.

Teresa Almada's films made me realized that color and brightness affect feeling of film a lot. The first film that we saw at the workshop, All Water Has a Perfect Memory, gave me a feeling of something special. I thought that it was because the color of the film was whitish and bright overall. The story was about a tragedy that happened to Teresa's personal life: the loss of her family member, and the overall color in the film created a memorable feeling, and it made me feel like that what I saw in the film was something special. That is also Teresa's feeling toward this tragedy. Another effect of the use of this whitish, bright color is that it made me feel like that this story of the film is fading away, and it created a concept of film that is seeing a part of somebody's memory/flashback. That is why the use of this color gave me a feeling of memorableness, and it made audience feel like that the story featured in the film is something special. Unlike All Water Has a Perfect Memory, the other films of Teresa that we saw at her presentation had different type of color. In both films, the color looked sharper than All Water Has a Perfect Memory, and the color was just like what we usually see in everyday life. The color made me think that what is happening in the films are real and it is about today, not about past. Also, it gave me a feeling of that the happenings in the films are something actually happening in my life. These different type of colors in Teresa's films made me realized that color affects a lot on what kind of feelings film gives the audience, and messages/themes of the film is also influenced dynamically depending on the use of color. It was very interesting.