Ryan

Cathy’s Book fulfills my fantasy of being a successful detective, especially because of the handful of clues provided at the beginning, the random phone numbers, and links to websites. As a child, I wanted to become part of the experience to solve Nancy Drew’s mysteries, or at least for them to happen more in real life. This book satisfied this desire for me, but in a reassuring way because it did not overcomplicate the mystery or make the participant go out of his/her comfort zone.  read more »

The other night I went to the Hippodrome to see an improv group perform. They came into the intimate room with folding chairs, sat down and then asked the audience for a historic event. A member of the audience suggested, “When Florida beat Ohio State in the first national championship.” Everyone laughed. The lights immediately turned off so we could barely see the outline of their bodies. The show began.

The narrators started yelling the Gator chant and then impersonating characters from the UF and Ohio State teams. Within thirty seconds, the story changed to something completely different, maybe about a robot or people in war. The story continued to shift from one event to something completely different, but always came back to elaborate on each event later in the performance. As we could not see their faces or characterizations, the narrative propelled our mind to see images. For instance, when one actor pretended to be a gay soldier, we all thought of what a gay soldier might look like and so on and so forth.  read more »

After reading Nikki_00's blog "going beyond internal interactivity", I couldn't help being reminded of almost every game on the Game Boy Advanced (GBA). In the GBA, when you start up, it is extremely easy to change the date/time, since you normally start in the main menu (this can be changed by the users preference, but it can still be easily accessed). With most of the games running time-based, it seems really easy to cheat. For instance, in "The Sims 2" (I don’t recommend playing it), you run a hotel and there are certain things you can only do once a day, and the rest of your time is spent cleaning (I Really don’t recommend playing it). Well, if you are like me and want your money ASAP, you may be tempted to well, "Time travel" as it’s called, by pushing the GBA's date forward one day. In doing this, 90% of the time, some sort of consequence happens (i've had times where the consequences didn’t happen, I’m not sure why). In "the sims 2", the bus boy calls you a cheater, and an alien invasion comes and you have to get rid of them (which is Very annoying), and you cant do what you wanted to do in the first place; collect your money.  read more »

I am twenty-two and just played Doom for the first time in my life. It is one of the few violent games I have ever played and I feel slightly disappointed. I started out slowly moving through the maze of walls and then learned to go faster and pick up tools to help me survive. Although I realize that Doom is the first first-person shooting game and therefore the graphics are basic and unrealistic, I did not feel pleasure or glee when playing this game. The demons did elicit emotions of fear in me, but mostly because they looked gruesome and moved rapidly towards me.  read more »

Earlier this week, I beat Photopia. It took me many hours to do this because before this class, my experience with videogames only included Mario Brothers and occasionally watching guys play Halo or MLB baseball.

Every game has rules and also as I found out, limitations. Sometimes I would write, “Pick up shovel,” and the game responded with, “do not know that verb.” Instead, I needed to say, “Take shovel. Dig.” Other times, to amuse myself, I ‘played’ with the game by giving the game instructions such as, “Sit.” The game would humorously retort something to the effect of, “You cannot sit on Alley. You are an adult.” I found that there were a lot of things I was not allowed to do, like eat on any occasion or in outer space.  read more »

I'm not a huge fan of anime, but sometimes watching a Japanese cartoon in Japanese (with subtitles, of course) can really make you think.
I recently saw the movie Paprika, an anime movie that won some sort of Oscar, and it was amazing. The plot mainly focused around the differences and relationships between the imagination (dreams) and reality.
In the movie, there were several dreams that recurred in the minds of the main characters, with many different conflicts happening in each of them, until finally, the dream took over even the reality of the city in which the main characters were living, leading to a final battle in which dreams and reality are pitted against each other to see which one wins out.
Just in case you haven't seen it and you want to, I won't tell you the end, but the movie definitely made m think, especially in relationship to Photopia and Ryan's discussion of fiction and nonfiction.  read more »