Jeff Grubb :(

Unfortunately Iwas not here to appreciate Jeff’s insights at class on Friday, as I was out of town, Im sure I would have enjoyed it thoroughly.

Week 4

To be entirely honest, I found the first half of the entire interview to be very dull and boring. Personally I dont care what this guys life as a kid was like, and I dont think it really in the end had much to do with what his greater point was. He also made a lot of jokes that werent really relevant to my generation so I think that really took away from my interest as a whole. He talked about about the different kinds of vision, which I found to also be very very boring, I didnt find it very insightful, that a lot of the things he were saying about comic books were painstakingly obvious. For example he talked about how there were 3 types of vision, but to me they were all just vision and vision incorporates all those things as a whole and is not 3 indvidual types, like they all are blended into one if that makes any sense.

As I said earlier I think that this presentation was geared towards an older generation and to be honest I think a lot of the information that was presented is either outdated now or just common knowledge to my generation. He talks about how as we move into a generation that will have technology users more and more intergrated into the technology that comic books and how their stories are told is going to evolve with it. Well to me that is obvious, as anything advances in complexity and has expansions as to what can be done with the medium there is going to be obvious evolution. Yes its great that now comics can be put on an ifinite canvas that obiously gives them more depth and more realism that people can connect to regardless of what genre of comic they may be interested in. I know I sound like a bitter person but this presentation just didnt really do it for me and I think it really would have been better if it had been more interesting and relevant to our time.

Week 2 Run Lola Run

Run Lola, Run. Where do I even begin with this film? I think first and foremost I will give it a short review. I really liked the movie, in particular I enjoyed that it gave you so many different alternate ways things could have happened. They weren’t exactly alternate endings because I think they all really were like “corrections” each time fixing things that went wrong in the previous incarnation of the sequence of events that took place. This was extremely interesting, almost like every time the sequence of events ended in a way that was a “negative” outcome, the movie restarted or “respawned” like you would in a videogame because you got the GAME OVER screen. I think that this really gave the movie an interesting style and definitely gave the film a resemblance to Lola being the heroine of some video game crime story.

The things that I didn’t really like about the movie, and yes I am going to complain about this, were the subtitles! I really really really really don’t like reading when I am watching a movie! For two reasons. 1. It distracts you from the movie and whats going on in the picture! 2. If I wanted to read I would have enjoyed a book! Those things aside I think the film was visually interesting and had an interesting take in how the characters should dress, look, and behave.

If I were to have filmed this film, I would have taken it a completely different direction. I would have added way more action and more changes to each of the “runs”. The ones that happened in the film were good and very interesting, but it would have added a lot more depth to the film in my opinion if they had been more frequent and more varied in their respective good and bad outcomes. Like someone mentioned in class I also would have added more story with her family, like her mother and father, than were present in the movie. I also feel like this movie needed way more guns and way more explosions and also a lot more references to video games and videogame culture. Otherwise I enjoyed the film and look forward to seeing others of its kind to be made.

DICE video

Awesome. First and foremost I agree with almost 90% of the things that this guy, Jesse Schell, has said. Not only did I agree with what he said, but I really enjoyed his unorthodox method of presenting. I myself am a Facebook user, and I cannot possibly understand nor would I have expected for games like Farmville, Fishville, Mafia, you get the picture, to be entertaining to so many people. Not only do almost all my friends play these, in my opinion pointless games, but they religiously play them. I kid you not I have friends that read strategy guides as to what is the most effective crops to plant in Farmville for maximum money gain. The insanity of it all doesn’t end there though, I have born witness to my friends cell phone timer going off and listening to the phrase “oh shit I need a computer to harvest my strawberries” not once, but on multiple occasions from separate people. What’s even more odd is that these are my friends that “Halo is god” 20+ hours a week core gamers, and then also people like my Aunt Julie who is 36 and a mother of 3 casual gamer. What the hell? I haven’t even made an account after constantly getting invited to that crap. Maybe you have to play it to understand but nothing in my mind sounds more boring! IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE GOOD GRAPHICS! What is so great about it?

Even more confusing to me is Club Penguin. Facebook games were bad enough in the blowing my mind department but this game, Club Penguin which only became familiar to me after taking classes in the Fall and Winter quarters at UWB, rocked my mind as I strolled through target to buy something. What started out as a normal day turned into craziness and laughter as I stood in the checkout line and saw “Club Penguin in game money/time card” or something like that? No way had I thought to myself. What is the world coming to? When we played Club Penguin in class I thought that it was a cute little game that kids could play and never in any parents’ right mind convince to buy game credit for items or whatever. I was soooooooo wrong. In front of me two little kids had grabbed these cards out of the “candy” isle thing and handed them to their mother who bought them…. These things were like 7 bucks I think. When it was my turn I asked the cashier so how many of those do you guys sell, and she said they needed to replace those cards almost daily…. I was stupefied. In my family I was lucky to get to play on the family computer at that age, and use the internet, not even factoring in spending any money on it. Have people just changed? Is the internet really a medium kids should be spending money on or having their parents spend money on it? I think not, unless it is closely watched.

Lastly the video really spoke to me on the idea of having a point system for life! At first it sounds silly but when you really think about it I think it would actually work. Being an extremely competitive person I can see on my phone a “leader board” that is connected to all my friends’ phones and is just relays all the points we have all accumulated for our every day mundane tasks. Not only would this motivate me to do a lot of things that I may not usually do, I think it would motivate others. Imagine getting like an extremely large amount of points for sky diving or swimming with sharks, awesome things that you wouldn’t normally do but you want those points to beat your friends! Getting the most points for the things you do would become an obsession for me and probably most of the people I know. I think that it would be fun. He also talked about achievements, and I think they would be even more effective in real life than in games. Personally I’ve never been fond of achievements in game because they don’t really mean anything significant unless they are really difficult to attain. If life had achievements for say completing college or doing something awesome like driving a race car, I would be hooked instantly. Who wouldn’t want to have on their resume “oh check out my sick achievement list” this puts me ahead of my competitors! All in all I really enjoyed the presentation.