We want to make an adventure game that has different stages and paths. It is also an interactive game since we offer choices every time you move on. The minute you go to a place, the choices that follow are not the same as the final outcome. At each level we set up small games, such as card games that are close to Hearthstone, rock-paper-scissors and other games, which we are still conceiving.
link:
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tj1059/universe/
Comics, cartoons, animations… things which seemed to be all similar now show a little difference to me after reading the Understanding Comics.
Among the various elements of comics introduced by Scott McCloud, what inspires me a bit more is the refreshing concept of comics itself and its relationship with other similar things as well.
“Comics refers to the medium itself, not a specific object.” (4) The definition is given at the very beginning of this book, which nevertheless has already broken my previous thought – comics, comic book, is what we were all passionate about collecting during childhood. However, according to Scott McCloud, comics is exactly what can be visualized, thus being defined as Sequential Art. Functioning as medium, in other words a certain form, it delivers ideas through both words and pictures, easy to understand. Meanwhile, different from animations, (especially the Japanese ones that I am highly enthusiastic in), it is presented spatially rather than in time.
Apart from animations, I’m also keen on photographing, which is mentioned as another factor related to comics. Subjective Motion, a trickery in photography as the example, was first applied in Japanese comics, then being spread around. I myself am pretty familiar with such “trickery” both in photographing and comics I’ve ever read. However, it never occurred to me that there exists certain relationship between each, which in essence reveals that different forms of media are interconnected in a sense. Exploring media art in contemporary era, we should do our utmost to discover such relationship and to better utilize, thus making the media art truly INTERACTIVE.
Anyway, I’ll finish reading the rest chapters very soon.
so bad at photoshop :(((
“The medium is message.” Whatever content we see today is the specific outcome of being spread through certain medium. In other words, medium plays a decisive role in presenting content. Therefore, what really matters is the medium itself, which represents times characteristics in a sense, rather than the informative, so-called representative content.
This really makes sense, especially in our current information era. With the rapid development of media, people’s living styles and thinking patterns have changed a lot. Nowadays, almost everyone receives message through internet, which is surely the most universal medium at present. However, it is because internet makes it possible to spread so much content to so many receivers that content itself becomes not such important any longer. Instead, from a historical perspective, it is Internet, the currently popular medium, that dramatically differs our era from the past, which is exactly the most influential message ever so far.
Similarly, in the era that printing was first invented, content was not at all important as it seemed to be. Rather, the exact message expressed by printing was that people was already aware of spreading knowledge, which then laid a transformative foundation for the later thought collision among areas and even cultures. In fact, different media accordingly mirror the characteristics of each period of time.
Therefore, every time a new medium emerges, no matter what content it spreads, itself has already meant a historic transform.
Looking back to the short but splendid development of web/internet, it can be called nothing better than a miracle. During the past several decades, it prospered much more rapidly than any other modern fields, which is now almost relied by everyone in daily life. Personally, Internet is not only a public resource for me to get informed regardless of time and location, but also a place where liberty is greatly promised compared with other physical ones.
However, every coin has two sides. When certain companies take the advantage of LIBERTY to develop into bigger ones, they tend to pursue the privatization, thus narrowing the publication of Internet and leading to a more closed world. Similar to the example of ITUNES given by Berners-Lee, when we listen to music, the copyright issue also causes we users to download different applications in order to follow different singers.
Needless to say, openness is the key to innovation. Only if we share the information and ideas instantly can we efficiently facilitate the development of various fields and even claim personal rights both online and offline. Therefore, we should collectively preserve the underlying principles of Internet, respect basic human values and more importantly, serve us humanity, thus linking the Internet to a bright and creative future.
Here is the link of my first website:
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tj1059/week1/website-1/index.html
What highly shocked me after reading was that the book was actually written over a hundred year ago, when the Second Industrial Revolution nearly reached its peak and steel and iron, the basic materials for machines, were first allowed to be mass produced. Depicting such a world overwhelmed with machines and lack of various physical actions and inner thoughts, Forster, the prophet in a sense, warn we modern citizens of reflecting on our constant pursuit of technological “advancement”.
We are now unprecedently rely on such mechanical technologies. When receiving information bombarded by the internet, we kind of dumbing themselves down, claiming that “First hand experience is dismissed as being impressions developed from fear, and therefore uncivilized”. Confronted with a machine-providing-answer era, we are indulged in the convenience offered by technologies, thus gradually resisting the real world, losing his/her original judgement. What on earth will happen if one day machines truly stop? We don’t know, but we should always keep ourselves alert and become INDEPENDENT anyway.