Gamergate

Brief overview of Gamergate:

“#GamerGate” is an online movement ostensibly concerned with ethics in game journalism and with protecting the “gamer” identity.

Many involved with the Gamergate hashtag have said that they are concerned with ethics in video game journalism; members launched a campaign to convince ad providers to pull support from sites critical of Gamergate. This campaign and others like it have been widely criticized in the media as evidence that the ethics concerns are a front for a culture war against the diversification of video game demographics. The old guys want to lockout the young bucks.

One of the articles said that it is mainly old white men who are engineering the games.  It didn’t say whether or not those are the game’s creator, but knowing that is a bit of a controversy in itself.  People that have an ability to think like the generation following theirs are rare.  That said, old engineers are likely not as in touch with the new games as we “kids” would like them to be.  Young game designers are popping up, but big companies employing these guys will keep the young kids at odds who are trying to come up to the big stage and engineer these games.

The next issue: are games damaging my kid’s future?

 Imagine that teenagers who were too shy or awkward to say a word to their peers and too apathetic to say a word to their parents spent hours and hours every night watching these newfangled movies. We might have questions. What weird things were happening in their brains, with all of this violent make-believe?  We really don’t know.  Grand Theft Auto has been proven to incite violence.  Is that the game we are talking about though?  We know shooting games aren’t the best, but RPG games could add values to kids who won’t find them elsewhere.

Playing sports gives you teamwork and membership.  RPG can do the same thing.  There aren’t a ton of avenues for those abilities.  Gaming is very different from Gamergate, but these values are understood by the young bucks who are being discriminated against in Gamergate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrDJOiFX4aA

Gamergate seems to be a group of young individuals pissed off about people that hold power over them.  What’s new kids?  It’s difficult when you know you have the ability but you aren’t handed the job because they trust the people they have.  The older guys working in  conjunction with these corporate game makers are given the benefit of the doubt, while we still have to fight to gain credibility.  Someday the table will turn and we will be the ones who don’t understand the next generation.  What would you do?  Would you get out of the way?

The 2004 election dawned a new era of Presidential elections.  It was labeled the inaugural ‘digital age’ election.  One writer was quoted asking when the first video game simulating an election would come out.  The contributors to this article came up with the video game before the writer had pondered when such a game would hit the stores.

Howard Dean was a Governor of Vermont and attempted to become the Democratic nomination for President.  He failed, as many of us know.  John Kerry eventually lost the election, despite winning the popular vote, to George W. Bush.  Dean’s methods were new-age and that is mainly what this piece is about… thus New Media Writing.  It sparked use of technology.

“Dean was incredibly successful in changing the way political campaigns of all types are carried out. Dean supporters made extensive use of new media tools such as e-mail, Web sites, and blogs to foster support from the grassroots. Howard Dean was also the first candidate to use a video game as endorsed political speech.”  The guy used a video game to market his election— not sure that has ever been done again.

As big of a joke as the game seemed initially, it actually reached a good chunk of voters.  “It was very successful in terms of audience: it reached 100,000 plays in the month before the Iowa caucus, a very respectable number considering its novelty and the fact that it was launched during the holidays.”  Timing is everything isn’t it?  Really makes you think.  Like don’t ya just hate it when you put out a Facebook post and then you see that the post put up seconds after yours published is way funnier or reaches a better audience… ughhhh.

Okay back to politics and writing.  Here is how the game worked.

“This effectiveness was based on the player’s performance in each minigame; a better score meant a more efficient supporter. Because supporters could not be “reset” once placed, this encouraged players to perform their best each time they played a minigame. After having set the effectiveness of a supporter through one of the minigames, that supporter worked nonstop, enacting “virtual outreach” to win over other virtual Iowans. In the main map screen, more effective virtual supporters worked more quickly in their region; a circular gauge showed their progress. When the gauge filled, a new supporter spawned, ready for the player to place for additional outreach.”

I wouldn’t want my Presidential candidate to do video games as part of his election.  Generally, it’s only kids that play video games and no kids want to play video games that are about an election.  Or if they do play that game it means that they are already voting, because they are the kids who care enough to play a lame game about an election.  Sometimes the truth is harsh.  It’s not the way to appeal to your people, because it is such a sad attempt and kids won’t go for it.  E-mail and rallies seem like the best use of time and it will be that way for an awfully long time.

From Work To Play

I agree that there is a consensus for change growing among some of those concerned with creative work in digital media.  It is ever changing with new sites popping up every hour.  There may not be enough money in digital media.  It is not evenly distributed.  It is a make it or suffer the consequences of living paycheck to paycheck business.

I am involved in that business now with the Fox News affiliate in town.  I see it everyday how poorly the money is distributed.  Fox’s billion dollar business doesn’t extend to its private owners of various news stations.

If you know the money won’t be distributed equally in digital media, then why not have fun with it.  Maybe a positive outlook will make you rise or spark someone else to rise near you.  It may look like All Work No Play, but I would have to argue that is completely wrong to a trained eye.

An untrained eye sees senseless Youtube videos being distributed around digital media, but a trained eye sees its true meaning, which is networking.  This generation can’t be judged on the outside looking in.

Networks have to be maintained.  Like recruiting in college sports an individual can chose to opt out of an agreement unless they sign documents declaring their full commitment.  These private owners in digital media will fight and fight against each other until best wins.  The truest science will run its course and that’s evolution.

This is where the divide begins.  When you lose those relationships you needed to maintain you are back to eating ramen for lunch 2-3 days a week.  When this happens you have to keep fully committed or you have to jump ship and scrap what you can.  The old cliche ‘you won’t know until you try’ is so harshly true sometimes.

“If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.”

You need to take chances and do things for yourself.  The ball won’t start talking. It’s the only way to find out if you can do it.

1wknotech essay

The girl that broke her phone during 1WkNoTech was pretty comical.  I thought fear of missing out and rationalization were the 2 most challenging things for me.  I could have had a tougher time if the week had come at a time where I knew I had to watch a specific football game.

It was new and kind of fun at first, but as time went on I thought ‘oh, well I really want to check in on social media or watch a game on TV.’  As the days went on I also thought well that’s not really technology.  The first day it was the toaster was technology and the last day it wasn’t.  Things changed pretty quickly I will admit.

The people that kept their furnace off for 1wknotech got my award for most dedicated.  Unfortunately I couldn’t commit to the week as strongly as I had set out to.  Very fun opportunity.  The definition started as whatever is essential to your day and getting the job done wasn’t “technology” but then it changed.

The addiction to technology is real.  They say all the time how things aren’t addictive, but I would counter saying that everything could be if you like it.  Your mind is what tells you if something is addicting or that you need a certain thing again.

Our lives are so connected. Technology is our greatest ally, but is it also our greatest foe? Does a constant state of “connection” cause us to be truly disconnected from what matters most?  I tried to reconnect with what is real and right in front of me.  My relationship, my schoolwork, and other stuff.

My laptop wouldn’t load the screen grab pictures but I will do my best to cite.

 

Friends weren’t visibly upset that you forgot their birthdays.  Due to 1wknotech. You could tell that you were sacrificing kindness for class.  Respect felt lost at times with posts like these.  Others seconded this feeling.

In all seriousness I don’t think I learned much.  I knew it would be a struggle.  It was more of a struggle for others than myself I thought.  It was what it was.  Fun activity, but things like this you can never tell who is really maintaining integrity or spewing you bullsh*t, which maybe was a lesson learned thru this week without technology.

There were plenty of clever folks participating.

 

People like this made it fun.  The sarcasm started to max out and die after this with poor attempts.  It’s funny it seems like once you raise the bar on social media everyone will try to recreate what you have done.  They may think it’s a little funny or they may think like I do.  Things shouldn’t be recreated.  When they remake movies I want to puke and shoot the producer.

I liked the this theme a lot.  People talked about how life would be enriched, if we could just shut down from technology.  We never specified how long we would, but if somehow corporate businesses agreed to shut down for a month and the world didn’t end right then and there it would really be a beautiful world we live in.

Our appreciation for things is torn down by technology.  We’re all guilty.  “Honey, dinner is ready…. Okay Mom.. I need to finish this level in my video game and I will be right up.”  You don’t rush to dinner that your family slaved over, because video games has captured your attention.  There are countless examples and we can all understand or relate.

Some of us went back to being kids.  Technology can make us think we are so sophisticated and mature at times.  I have to admit I feel that way when I read a book on my iPad, but it really felt like this took us back to our childhood at times when things like social media didn’t matter.  The Land Before Time was such a defining moment for a lot of us.

I love those damn movies.

The hard thing about the week of no tech was going the entire week.  If the opportunity arose again I think I would have made it thru by only using the essential technology.

I know better how to explain things after no tech.  You can’t duplicate someones joke.  You won’t feel good about it and you reaping any benefits without credit given is kinda slimey.  I think taking that idea and giving it a new look is just how things go.  Fun project.  I’d say integrity is something you can’t be helped with.  Honesty may be viewable by others, but we are never sure.

Reflection narrative fiction

This was very different from the basic write a research paper projects we are given in other writing studies classes.  I thought this put us in a realistic position of what we would be doing as professional writers, oppose to the research papers that could be seen as basic reporting.  I have written a few short stories for fun that haven’t really been that amazing by any means, but you have to start somewhere.  I thought I successfully seeded some things into this story I wrote for class, which felt like a small victory in a long road of uphill battles— as an aspiring professional writer.

Truthfully I didn’t think I used too much of the research we did in class to write my narrative fiction piece.  What did help me was Netprov TV because it made me understand that your characters in writing have to be consistent with who you want them to be from the beginning.  Unless some large, drastic twist occurs in the story your character really shouldn’t change.  One of my characters was just spontaneous in nature, so that would account for his ever changing personality.

I remember you telling us that it’s good to write about what you know.  I tried to write my characters as real people that I have encountered in my life.  Goodness, there have been some crazy ones in this life.  I’m often guilty of overanalyzing situations, but it comes in handy in my writing because I feel like I know the character better as a result of that.  It felt like things got a lot easier after the brainstorming was done and I knew what characters I wanted in my story.

Some people you meet are so polarizing and confident in the way they go about things—however irrational you think it seems.  Those were the characters I chose.  I thought of them in situations that I had seen in the past and I took those past experiences to this blog page.  I altered some past experiences and things became vivid as I was writing.

The bag of tricks you spoke about is something we will have to find, if we are to become successful writers.  I’m not saying I’m anything close to that, but I know what my literary aesthetic is.  Drama and partying would be a bulk of it.  The hard thing about that is writing about past experiences that make you uncomfortable or make you feel like a jerk.

The struggle with writing characters you emulate is putting them through conflict.  It was difficult to write them through conflict, because I found myself pacing back to past experiences where I wasn’t happy about my actions.  My characters were susceptible to immediate gratification and that’s often a cause for big mistakes.  Something I feel I know quite a bit about.

The issue I have with my writing is that it may become repetitive.  People don’t want to sit down and watch the same story with different characters all the time.  The plot structure lacks diversity.  I know I could also be more descriptive.  Another problem with this writing is I feel like you have to live it to really be successful at it.

It seems like you have to live it or you can’t put your character through those moral struggles if you aren’t facing them.  At least the situations would seem a little vanilla, if you weren’t out there experiencing the thrills of night life and being young.  Making choices is easy at times and impossible in others, so having people in your life that won’t fault you for taking risks I would say is a plus/needed.  Won’t fault you or even better make you understand your decision making a little better.

Models for PN

My first model is Trey Parker of South Park.  Trey has produced/published a Broadway play and has co-written for South Park- a comedy central TV show.  Trey writes and voices a character, Eric Cartman, considered the most manipulative and talented character of our generation thus far.  I want to use that style for my main character who commits questionable acts (legally/morally) and still continues to succeed.  The characters he writes are very comedic and it increases their likability, which I would also like to use.

My second model is Tom Kapinos of Californication.  Tom Kapinos is an American television executive producer and screenwriter best known for his creation of the television series Californication.  Kapinos main character (Hank Moody) in Californication is an alcoholic self loathing writer who makes it big on a few novels.  Hank also struggles with morality and his conscience.  I would like my narrator to be similar to these 2 characters.  Hank is a father who plays around age 40, while Cartman is a 4th grader.  This could prove challenging.

My media usage model will be Eric Cartman’s Twitter account, which is managed by Trey Parker.  https://twitter.com/Trey_Parker

The Eric Cartman Twitter account is basically an extension of the character from TV to Twitter.  It will prove useful in terms of Twitter language that the 4th grader possesses.  Both characters are very immature that I am modeling and the commonalities are greater than what can be seen on the surface.  Having the same characters on Twitter and in TV should be very helpful as I have a few ways of harnessing their values and verbage (lingo).

My final model for the narrative is Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrel’s character) of Anchorman.  https://twitter.com/RonBurgundy

Ron Burgundy is an example of a guy who doesn’t always make the right choice.  Like Cartman and Moody, Burgundy likes to make choices off of self-interest.  I will use Ron’s style for the main character and his Twitter feed should spark ideas for other characters as well.  I would like to model my other characters to be like personalities in the movie Anchorman.

Lonely Girl 15

Some people seem to have a passion that they don’t really care if it leads them to greatness or some level of fame, but then that passion all the sudden games them attention. What is even greater is when the idea created from passion effects a larger area- in this case the world. The scenarios are so complex that it seems like it became more of an obsession. They made it when the web was just getting going and we were more likely to believe everything we saw on the internet.

The TV show was sort of a new age thing.  Some episodes seem to be cut short and they really want to have cliffhangers to intrigue everyone enough to come back and watch again.

Justin Hall links

First off, I’m not sure I would be comfortable posting about a pending divorce or my entire life story online, but clearly that is what drove people to his page and created web traffic for him.  Sacrificing your life for money (or web fame) seems like a bold choice, because it would be my guess that most women wouldn’t appreciate it- clearly it is a risk- but it was such an innovative idea that I’m sure he felt that he had to run with it and see what would come of it.  The guy took risks, and they weren’t small ones.  He speaks of doubling down on the green screen and getting bored of work after six weeks and moving onto radical spur of the moment hunches.  I have always been one to trust my gut, but I can’t say it has worked out every time.  It sounds like his blueprint was to make some money first and then metaphorically double down at Caesars Palace on a green screen no less.

It seems like Justin has been able to use the autobiography site to bring in some amount of cash to add to whatever business he was involved in- Gamers.com, DeNA, etc.  It seems like one of the few rational, yet irrational decisions the guy has made.  Justin in a nutshell is the rational irrational man.  He creates the blog, which few have done and held onto since 1994, then he publishes every detail of his life that is happening from friends passing away to eventually a divorce.  He chronicles everything.  He sounds like the guy that assumed everything would always work out as he discusses failing nearly all his sophomore classes.  Justin doesn’t seem like the materialistic guy, in fact he seems like the complete opposite of that.  Making money was never his goal, but web traffic seems to be.  The passionate guys seem to be far and few that make it, because they make too many sacrifices and compromises along the way, but Justin never deviated his route and seemed to always know where he wanted to head no matter how irrational it seemed to the naked eye.

The “Beat”

Day 1:

2 a.m. Rod sends out Facebook feed that he has attacked and left a Red Cross team on the side of the road.  Rod reports he is going to help other villages that are connected to him.

6 a.m. Liberian Chronicle reports that Liberian native Rod has attacked a Red Cross van and suggest that Red Cross teams should be armed.

10:00 a.m.   24/7NEWS is now getting a report from the Liberian Chronicle that a Red Cross team has been attacked by a 2 person assault team.  The team was let live, but are in critical condition after being stripped of their communication and forced to walk to the nearest town.  The report claims that a younger child was given a weapon.

Day 2:

8 a.m.  Professor Bill reports to students that a man has been attacking Red Cross vehicles and distributing the items to fellow countrymen.

12 p.m.  24/7News reports that Red Cross vans attempted fire on villagers seen running at the vehicle.

4 p.m.  Chris dismisses all claims by 24/7News and reports that 24/7News is an untrustworthy source of news.

Day 3:

8 a.m.  Professor Bill shows students how horrible meddlers can be in mass media with the reports from 24/7News.

10 a.m. Liberian Chronicle writes article on Western help and how more need to contribute.

12 p.m.  Liberian Chronicle publishes article to warn villagers that Red Cross vehicles are armed.

Day 4:

8 p.m. 24/7News reports anarchy and that village rebels have teamed up with other hijacked Red Cross vehicles and equipment.

10 p.m.  24/7News reports that Red Cross vehicles are not armed.

11 p.m.  Professor Bill speaks to class on hindsight and how unhealthy it can be.

Day 5:

8 a.m.  Rod reports to followers that Red Cross vehicles do not have any GPS tracking.

12 p.m. Liberian Chronicle publishes report that villagers are aware how vulnerable Red Cross teams are and that they do not possess any tracking features.

9 p.m.  Chris blames 24/7News for the villagers of Liberia now being aware that they can attack Red Cross vehicles without blow back.

Day 6:

9 a.m. 24/7News takes credit for villagers awareness, although they had nothing to do with it.

1 p.m. Professor Bill tells students that people are desperate for fame and integrity is sacrificed because of it.

3 p.m. Chris dismisses reporters and denies that he made up the report.

Day 7:

4 a.m. Rod makes final attack on Red Cross vehicles, but turns out they were pirates themselves and killed Rod and his son.

12 p.m. Professor Bill tells students that they can’t understand chaos and its true meaning until you see it up close.

1 p.m. Liberian Chronicle reports that Red Cross hijackers are now turning against one another.  Chaos was inevitable and things have actually become worse.

3 favorite projects

Madrigal writes about a fake Twitter handle satirizing a public figure.  It is something I’ve enjoyed over the past couple years with my fellow sports writers being mocked over Twitter by kids around my age.  What we don’t realize during the fun is how damaging it can be to ourselves and the person we are impersonating.  The formula was Punk-Rock Attitude + Deep Feel for Chicago + New Media Storytelling Chops + Day-to-Day Political News Watcher = @MayorEmanuel.  The fake account went unimpeded for 5 months posting over 2000 tweets, but suddenly shut down.  The Chicago Tribune published an article that expressed how much the people of Chicago missed the Twitter account.

Aunt Diane.  Many of us will admit that we have the far from savvy relative who wants to be one of the kids again on social media.  Aunt Diane reminds me of my uncle, so taken by the craze of Facebook he would post everyday and comment on old delicate photos of mine.  Aunt Diane’s artistic nature is clearly an acquired taste and seeing as how she would rather be paid in eyelashes than actual money it would lead you to believe someone may be having a little fun with this Twitter account also.  This sentence would mortify any young high schooler- Aunt Diane- First sentence of my memoir: “It was an orgasm so powerful that the antelope screamed like harpies and the clouds vomited rain.”

You suck at photoshop.  People have different ways of keeping an audience engaged.  This guys method of constant insults and borderline indecency is an interesting method of attraction.  The guy puts up a front that he is showing us how to photoshop as a momma’s boy basically, but he continues to go off course with friends calling to play video games or whatever else occupies his attention.  I like his mixture of a few techniques and distracting humor.