Author: 0alloldusers

Simulation caught my attention more then anything. I think the idea to mimic something so close to the original is something that should stretch the idea of how technology can become a threat. Simulation can be a threat, while in class the video of “Tom Cruise” makes me think if they can do that to a celebrity how much further can they go to create chaos in the world?

Simulation can be an amazing thing too. With simulation, it can help benefit digital gaming systems to make them more real then ever. VR games are a great example. They make you feel like your actually in a time era, different part of the world or interacting with an person. I can see a future with more VR experiences, even though we have them today. With this type of technology who knows if a doctor can assist with a surgery from the comfort of their home.

You could be traveling around the world with this type of simulation. There are so many places that I would like to see that I don’t think I will be able to see in my life, so having this could really help people experience what other cultures are like.

Original  – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

Blurr – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

Based on the readings (and the videos in the 06 Data & Information chapter) above, do you think that big data and data analytics introduce real threats to human culture or do they promise revolutionary changes that will ultimately benefit human life? What can we do to ensure that our digital technologies work to improve human and nonhuman lives?

I think that big data is seen as a threat to the smaller things in life that one doesn’t think that could be taken over from it. For example, I think that Amazon is seen as “big data”, being able to send you your packages in 2-3 days instead of going to a small business and buying from them to help profit your community. Funny thing is that is so convenient for so many people to go the big data route.

I understand that big data is a positive thing for most people and how it can really benefit companies, families and can create a community for most people. Having large amounts of data can help with major world problems and hopefully one day help heal what some people have created such problems.

For my point of view with big data, it’s a little scary with how the world is censoring and watching our every move. I don’t feel safe or even feel that the ideas or belief I have for things is okay with the big data.

Digital games (which includes video games, apps and arcade games) emerge quite naturally from digital technology, because  computation (keeping score), interactivity (making play choices), narrative (story worlds), social interaction (fun with friends) and random effects (rolling dice) are all quite easy to simulate on a computer.  Choose a favorite video game from your childhood and apply a brief game analysis as described in section 7.2 of the Digital Games chapter. What about the technology of the time made the game leave such an impression on you?

When I was growing up my brother and I played Sonic the Hedgehog the most. I was 5 or 6 at the time, but for me I liked how he was blue cute animal, collected rings, on a tropical island and he was super fast. He didn’t have any super heroic powers, like moving elements or could fly. He just curled up in a ball and went a million miles per hour, I loved it.

The idea of the game as to collected all of thing rings in the level, collecting more rings gave you more points,  get the quickest time during the level, collect the extra fast shoes and defeat Dr. Egghead at the end of the levels. Wasn’t to hard for a little girl. It was fun and if I could find a Sega somewhere I would probably try to play it again.

Another game I remember being popular when I was little was Pokemon. I recall a friend having the Nintendo 64 game Pokemon Snap. He loved it and it was hard to get him away from him when I would be at his house and there to play.

Today I don’t play video games. But my husband bought a pre loaded super Nintendo and him and my daughter play super Mario bros and super Mario world. It’s really the cutest thing. I enjoy watching him teach her how to fight the Koopa and her favorite part is to find Yoshi and have him tag along in the adventure.

I would want to create a work out app that helps people get moving more during our uneasy time. With people having to stay home as much as possible, creating a work out app could help people get moving while being in their home for so long.

With this app would you could set up how many calories you would like to burn for the day, work out time and how many steps in a day you would like to get. With completing daily goals you get points that could get you to a reward system. After so many points to rewards you could redeem them to a program that can help you get free things. So partnering up with a healthy food delivery service, like hello fresh, would be more motivating to keep a healthy life style. Or even a workout clothing line could throw in sports bras, shorts, leggings or even shirts when you hit specific goals or getting enough points towards rewards.

Daily points = to rewards and rewards = to a beneficial lifestyle

With the app having specific work out movements for all parts of the body. Another plus for the app is you could have a trainer help you with a work out of the day. Get local trainers to download videos to the app that will be seen by the customers. The more views to a specific workout, that trainer can get rewards too. For the trainer it could be something of how to get their business up and running, free ads for their business or even, when the world stops being weird, have a free face to face session, that could help with creating clients and business.

With the app create a competition round. For people who use the app and do specific workouts can compete with others on who burned the most calories and where you place in the competition you can get more points to go towards your rewards.

The  app can have spirit weeks. Take a picture of the outfit you wore for spirit week and get points for that as well. You could do a tye dye theme, 80’s/90’s theme, animals, colors and sports teams.

What is the challenge?

The challenge is to burn as many calories during the day/week/month as you can. To beat other people who use the app to get as many points as you can to earn rewards that can help you get free things to benefit a healthy life style.

What is the choice?

The choice is yours if you want to compete with other people or against yourself. Make personal goals yourself, have a trainer help you achieve those goals or just making the choice to step in the right direction of helping yourself.

What is the change?

The change is your lifestyle. The change is your body feeling better and lighter. If you were to lose weight with the app the change would be your wardrobe.

What is the chance?

The chance is to get these rewards. Getting a trainer one on one session, getting free gear, getting hello fresh shipped to your door, the chance to change your body/health for the better.

Simulation is the most fascinating form of Computational Technique to me. It allows for the individual to create a way to find a solution to multiple different problems using one program. Simulating the results possible for every scenario in a situation makes finding the right solution or at the very least the least dangerous solution, incredibly efficient.

On the more artistic side of simulation is Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. The possibilities in both offer unique views on the way the world is built. Virtual reality, when integrated with enough technology, could simulate entire universes at the push of a button. Most standard VR sets don’t even need buttons nowadays, as hand and finger recognition is getting so advanced that it’s becoming the standard for companies like VTC and Oculus. There are also more advanced rigs that allow for leg tracking for movement or kicking inside a virtual space.

As an art form, I believe that art galleries and national monuments will be something that can be simulated from one’s own home. A few years ago I participated in a VR Art Gallery hosted by the Louvre as part of an art class. I have never been to France yet if it werent for the fact I was barefoot and standing on carpet, I would have been completely immersed in that virtual space. It was so realistic that the only thing that kept me grounded was the lack of interactability with the actual art pieces. With this in mind, it wouldn’t surprise me if entire art galleries were held in a virtual space in the future, with pieces being other digital artist’s use of VR Space.

I personally would love to make simulated cooking. I feel with the introduction of a “smellovision” to a complicated VR rig someone would be able to recreate different dishes and cooking techniques to such a degree that they would even be able to learn those skills and replicate them in real life. It would be a great way to experiment with food and test out dishes without wasting food on things you may not end up enjoying as much as you initially think. I feel like some way to simulate smells accurately would not only benefit my personal idea but many artists’ goals of creating immersive spaces for their own projects.

My game of choice growing up had to be Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64. This was a classic turn-based RPG based in the origami-styled Mushroom Kingdom. Analyzing the game using Jamieson’s four elements Challenge, Choice, Change, Chance I can distinctly find examples inside this game that has kept me in love with it to this day.

Challenge: For the challenging portions of the game it would have to be the puzzles and the battles. For puzzles, you have to use the fact that you are as thin as a sheet of paper and slip through cracks in walls or gaps between bars in order to solve rooms. This is a very creative way to apply a challenge to someone when normally they would believe they are a 3D model in a 3D world. The battles are just as challenging when bosses or special enemies are involved, as they can change and affect the fields where you are fighting. My favorite example of this is one mini-boss fight in the middle of the game where you fight the enemy in a pitch-black room. The only way to successfully hit him is to attack his lantern and light up the room, but if you hit the lantern too many times you can give him the chance to hit you even harder before he snuffs the lantern to make the room dark again.

Choice: Choice comes into play when you have to decide what kind of equipment you want to have while playing. In Paper Mario this comes in the form of Badges. With badges, you can unlock certain bonuses for Mario as you play. These can include stronger attacks, cosmetics, or special effects that unlock secret additional content in the game. The number of badges you can equip is controlled by the amount of BP you have unlocked. When you level up, you have the choice to upgrade your HP, FP, or BP. There is a version of the game serious players use when they want a challenge, which is to solely upgrade BP rather than HP or FP.

Change: Change occurs as you progress in the game. The goal of the game is to save all 7 Star Spirits and defeat the final boss
Bowser. Each time you rescue a Star Spirit you unlock the next level of the world, giving you access to a new part of the map in order to find and save the Star Spirits. This also comes with a difficulty increase, as the mobs and bosses become harder with each world. Change also comes in the form of extra mobs appearing in worlds you already visited. These mobs are 100% optional and won’t hinder your main-story progress at all, however, they do end up appearing in the world, and change the story if you choose to fight them.

Chance: Chance, while part of the game, is less of an important factor in the overall gameplay, as many portions of the game’s chance aspects have some way to turn the tides in your favor. Most of the chance comes from in-game items that inflict status effects on the players. These status effects can be sleep, poison, or dizzy, and they all affect how you are able to play the game. These effects can be inflicted by pure chance depending on the items used in battles.

At the time, the Nintendo 64 was one of the first 64-bit gaming consoles available. What seems like an ancient relic now was the pinnacle of gaming technology then, and that left a great lasting impression on me as a kid just wanting to kill time on rainy days. My brothers also were instrumental in making this game fun for me, and so there are memories I share with them that can affect my perspective on the game.

With all of the current social media apps, and the new ones that come along, people can find themselves living their lives through the screen. Social media is a way for someone to escape their lives or make their lives look much more “interesting” then it really is. Like Dwight, from The Office.

(The Office)

With all of these platforms people can create another type of them. Maybe someone wanted nicer things, being successful at their dream job or create a profile to get the courage to talk to someone they are interested in.

The main reason why I like social media is because I can stay connected to my family who lives through out the US. I think that actually having a “real life” connection with makes it more important. When random people want to “be friends”, it really makes you wonder if the person in the picture is the person behind the screen.

My concern for a second life is that you don’t know who is on the other side of the screen. It makes me worried for my daughters, technology is going to change so much. Even though people can make is so believable right now, I can’t imagine what the next step will be to catfish someone. I worry that with it advancing so much, predators can be so much than then they are now.

Big data and data collection is certainly an uncomfortable thing to think about. Several different servers owned by massive corporations are collecting each and every piece of data we produce by living in an online society. The idea that big data and data analytics is inherently good or bad may be a bit too black and white for the issue. I would say it’s both a give and a take, inherently it is a good thing, but when misused it becomes a bad thing.

On the inherently good side, AI and data analytics are there for humanity’s convenience. A computer keeping a record of your interests and search histories will be able to help recommend similar topics to you as it learns about you. These newly introduced topics or pieces of information can help lead someone to a place where they can find new interests, discoveries, or even lead you to new topics worth exploring. This is one of the revolutionary changes as it mimics the way human curiosity would lead them to bigger and better things at a fraction of the time it would normally take.

Inherently, this revolutionary change is a very good thing, as it advances humanity’s interests in learning as well as helps provide an easier way to live for many. However, most of the time these recommended interests are manipulated by big corporations in order to turn a profit. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have been known to collect and store the data of their users and sell it off to those wishing to make a profit off of certain demographics. This process of selling off data that should not be for sale is where threats to human culture are introduced, as it ignores human desire for inherent learning and instead focuses on the profit of one large corporation rather than the individual human’s interests. Another threat is the unwanted collection of data through our devices with built-in microphones listening and recording what we say for specific targeted ads. This may just be an anecdotal fallacy on my end but I have had the experience of my devices listening to me saying something completely out of the blue and then showing me ads related to that topic not 10 minutes later. This is a total breach of privacy as that is proof that devices are listening in carefully to hear exactly what you have to say at all hours of the day.

What are ways we can combat this? Well put simply, there needs to be restrictions in place on what data can and can’t be stored. There also needs to be laws and regulations in place that restrict companies from selling or trading customer or user information with other companies. With laws against trading as well as selling data will keep corporations from making a profit off of sharing data with each other, as well as keeping their users safe.

I thought this was fun to make.

twine-template

I posted this to Slack when I finally figured it out. I’m really proud of the smallest code I took out to make the smallest line, on the right side of the picture, to make this “Glitch”

Digital technology easily remediates the narrative arts of all other media (radio, movies, tv, fiction), but it also introduces new possibilities that may challenge our very notions of narrative – that a story needs a beginning, middle and end, for example. Which of the above digital texts engage you most and why? Discuss how we can approach new digital works that present stories in unfamiliar and challenging ways. What are your thoughts/experiences of how the digital, hyperlinks and the web are changing the art of storytelling. 

The first story that I read was “how to rob a bank”. I liked how Alan Bigelow had took the time to take multiple screen shots and make it feel that you were the one in control, like when you use your phone. I thought the story was easy to understand. A family struggling and had to do something desperate to help themselves survive and make sure that their daughter is taken care of. It was a well put together way of telling the story. Something that I have never seen before. The way the hyperlinks were connected through out the story were nice and smooth. There was no confusion on how the story flowed, even though you couldn’t see some of the slides the way the journal was written to the daughter was detailed. They painted a picture in your head, giving the reader

I also read “With those we love alive” by Porpentine and I loved the Twine! While starting to read it reminded me of a book when I was growing up that gave you options to pick different paths to take in the book. And depending on the path, you could either finish it correctly or hit road blocks on the way. I do believe though that Twine could be a challenge for some people. Some people just want to read a book from start to finish and other’s would, mostly book worms I’m assuming, would enjoy the different roads they can take in stories.