McGonigal and her Games

"In fact, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, 'The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression.'" (McGonigal, Pg 28, 2011)

Many gamers and none gamers out there probably would not have known that work in fact is not the opposite to play. The majority of gamers out there believe that when they leave their work and come home and play their video games that this is an escape from what they believe is the enemy, work. This however from reading McGonigal's text is not the case, in fact we as gamers are actually looking for harder work out of a video game, work that challenges our brains and puts us to our maximum potentials to complete task that keep us active. We as gamers are not trying to escape work, we are trying to escape the boredom of tasks that are too easy and that can lead us into depression where as video games give us harder and more entertaining challenges that allow our brains to expand more and be free from boredom. This information is useful to gamers as they are slated fro being lazy just because they enjoy challenging gaming experiences over the boredom of tasks set out for them that do not stimulate their brains enough. (McGonigal, Pg 28, 2011)

"When you strip away the genre differences and technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation." (McGonigal, Pg 21, 2011)

From this quote McGonigal is trying to tell us that not all different types of games are that different after all. For example this may sound a bit far fetched but we could compare the video game Call Of Duty and its Search and Destroy mode to a game of golf. In the Search and Destroy mode the goal is to find the enemies bomb and blow it up, the rules are simple, each player has one life and only one player can carry the bomb at once, in the feedback system it tells us how many players are left and how long we have left on the time limit. Golf has got all these defining traits, the goal is to get a ball in a hole, the rules are that you must stand so far back and hit the ball with golf clubs and the feedback system is seeing how many shots it takes to get the ball in the hole. With this quote and text McGonigal could change the way people view games altogether.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, The Penguin Press, 2011

Infinity Ward, 2003-2013, Call of Duty, Video Games, Activision.

HYPERMEDIACY

Hypermediacy is a logic which is about how a certain type of media represents itself in a way that reminds the viewer of the medium. It is also where video graphics, audio and hyperlinks intertwine, like on a website where there would be many different texts, images and videos all on the one page for you to look at. "It is a media that offers random access"(Bolter, Pg 31, 2000), from this texts the theorist is trying to point out that the media has changed from the command-line interface to the graphical interface. Command-line interfaces consisted of text only and there was no random access about it because text was simply the only thing in it where as a graphical interface can consist of many things like text, video, audio and hyperlinks or a lot of the time they consist of all of these which makes the interface look like it is not there so that browsing these sites feels more natural and flowing rather than stiff and rigid(Bolter, Pg 31, 2000).

Hypermediacy is an example of our overall interest in the medium itself. "an entirely new kind of media experience born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies."(Bolter, Pg 31, 2000) We have become so fascinated in the medium that it spreads all over our media, like in the film "True lies" where a man has a double life, one as a normal guy in an office and then the other as a spy which is nearly surreal and us as an audience love this which shows our expression of desire to be the likes of spy. Video games are another source to which we show our extreme fascination of the media in and as new games come out that are better and more crisp than the last, it becomes even harder to put the controller down. Take the game "The Last Of Us" for example, Naughty Dog were well known for their compelling stories in the Uncharted series but no one expected them to create a game like this, it had more drama and close to tears moments than most films and the story and graphics were so good, that you could of mistaken it for a film and this is an example of how people can be so fascinated by the media.

Machines

"We have always...been prosthetic bodies"(D.Shaw, Pg 81, 2008) 

This quote was not said by Shaw but merely quoted in his book Technoculture. It was said by a man who goes by the name of Stelarc, he was a futurism performance artist who's focus was on how he thought the human body was "obsolete". He see's the human body as needing technology to go forward in life and to discover more about itself and in many cases he is right. He thinks that us as humans are no less machines than the machines we make and that we can not live separate lives from the machine, rather we live together as one. Today more than ever has our lives been so close to that of the machine, we consume products made by machines everyday and it can only become a closer bond the more we invest in our technologies which is not necessarily a bad thing. 

"Information technologies, applied to understanding, visualizing and manipulating the human body have problematized the distinction between 'us', other species and machines". (D.Shaw, Pg 101, 2008) 

What Shaw is saying here is that the more we keep upgrading and making our machine methods easier to communicate with and understand, the smaller the boundaries get between us as humans and them as machines. We tend to forget how easy it is today to get involved with our machines compared to many years ago, we now have robotic toy animals that our kids begin to love rather than a real dog or cat and the likes of games consoles becoming virtual reality makes us feel immersed in new worlds and have new abilities that our own human bodies could not possibly do, thus we could definitely see these technologies as enhancements to our everyday lives.

One unit in our planet that is constantly called a machine is our military system. Know for following rules and obeying commands they would be the easiest people to point at if you thought anyone was like machines. "A well disciplined army, in fact, can be compared to a well oiled machine"(D.Shaw, Pg 82, 2008). With this quote I can strongly agree that the military operate like a machine, military follow and obey orders like a machine, if the military loss a soldier they get another one just like a component getting broke in a machine, it will get fixed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shaw, D. (2008) Technoculture: The Key Concepts; Oxford Berg Press (P.81-102)

Digital Cultures Glen Creeber

"Modernism is the umbrella term we give to the way that human society responded to the changes that took place during the industrial revolution"(Creeber, 2009, Pg 11). Modernism happened at the end of the 19th century and with it's "belief in scientific inevitability of progress" modernism created an atmosphere that would see people believe that it would improve the human life as we know it for the better(Creeber, 2009, Pg 11). Although many people believed modernism was the way forward there still was people that blamed it for the first two world wars.

Industrialization, a word that did not go down well with many modernists as they seen it as the "enemy of free thought and individuality"(Creeber, 2009, Pg 12). In many cases this was true and Industrialization would go on to bring more profit to production companies rather than individual artists, and a good example of this from Creeber's book Digital Cultures is Henry Ford. Henry Ford used Industrialization as a mains to make the production and staff cheaper and to created a single T.Ford multiple times in less time and this now a days is done by nearly every auto mobile company in the world. As always not everyone was in favour of this mass production line, The Frankfurt School was part of these people and perceived "media as a standardized product of industrialization"(Creeber, 2009, Pg 12), Theodor Adorno was part of the Frankfurt School and believed that music was getting abused by mass production and just getting repeated. 

Post-modernism was what came after the industrial revolution, we seen a shift in the economy to a service based one from it's original manufacturing based economy which inevitably saw the drop in sales and products from the "heavy industry"(Creeber, 2009, Pg 15).  Consumers of the media had changed, interactivity is upon us and it is like us as consumers no long just consume the media but we control it as well. "Reality and unreality are not mixed like oil and water; rather they are dissolved like two acids"(Creeber, 2009, Pg 17), this statement would refer to television programs and social networking sites that allow many ways in which you can interact with them like voting on who should leave a certain show and this means that the audience can change the landscapes of their own media without being in the media. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Creeber, G and Martin R. 2009, Digital Cultures, Open University Press. 

Manovich-What New Media Is and Isn't.

From this extract from Manovich's book The Language Of New Media Manovich strongly emphasis's that New Media is all about computers doing the "distribution or exhibition, rather than the production."(Manovich, Pg 43, 2002) of the Media. In terms of New media, we see examples of it everywhere in our everyday lives like Computer design, Internet, Blu-Ray, Video Games, 3D and Smart TV's etc. But Obviously New Media forms could not be here today without the Older Media which there is also a lot of too and that are still popular like Newspapers, Normal TV, Radio and Films etc.

Computers have changed a lot over the years, from just being big calculators, to punch card machines, to basically being the centre of all media in the world, that is quite a large step forward for the computer right? (Manovich, Pg 48, 2002) The Computer separates itself from other Media forms as it is so much more powerful and can do so much more stuff than any TV or video camera could ever do and it is this factor that makes it what New Media revolves around. A Computer (with the help of internet) is changing the way we watch and consume TV programs. We are now able to watch what we want when we want because of all new types of channel streaming websites and apps that let us enjoy our programs at our fingertips in the comfort of our own beds. "New media is interactive." (Manovich, Pg 66, 2002) As Manovich stated because of Computers we can now interact with are programs like never before with such programs like Big Brother and The Million Pound Drop allowing viewers to play along or answer questions about the show via their computer or tablet.

"Do we want, or need, such freedom?" (Manovich, Pg62, 2002) In this statement Manovich is questioning whether or not the general public should have the ability to change and manipulate Old Media to make it New Media. There should not even be questions over this as this ability that the public have overshadows a lot of Media industry work and shows what potential everyone out there has and this set of skills for the public only came about with a Computer and the New Media.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Book: L.Manovich, The Language Of New Media, 2002, MIT Press.

Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins states in his book Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide that it "is about the relationship between three concepts-media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence"(H.Jenkins 2006 Pg 2). Each of these three concepts are thoroughly looked over through his introduction to his book but there is one in particular that he seems to cling onto more and that is media convergence.

Media convergence is not old media getting thrown away and never seen again because we love the new media so much, in fact it is nothing of the sort. It is like the old media is staying and helping the new media develop, we are not losing the old media at all, we are just simply receiving it in different ways with new tools that are helping shape the ongoing media convergence. Jenkins describes convergence as "the flow of content across multiple media platforms"(H.Jenkins 2006 Pg 2) but then he goes on to state that "sooner or later, the argument goes, all media is going to flow through a single black box"(H.Jenkins 2006 Pg 14). So is that the case that we will end up consuming all our media through one black box? Gaming, news, TV, communication etc all rolled into one device? The closest devices to this black box theory are the newest mobile phones and upcoming games consoles. Mobile phones these days are being created to do everything and it seems like their main function in making and receiving calls is only a small added extra where as their ability to surf the internet and play games is more important and a stronger selling point.

The Media convergence is happening and it is all around us and if we do not accept it we will be left behind.

REFERENCES:
Convergence Culture: Where Old And New Media Collide, Jenkins H, 2006, New York University Press.