Personal Brand Project
Athena’s Kiss & Apollo’s Tears
Advent Incantation
Advent Incantation Live
Living Permit Piano Version
Scarlet Sacrifice
Scarlet Sacrifice Live
Practice 8
Addition Live: Frost Overture
Response of Scott McCloud’s presentation
After watching this presentation, my first impression was that Scott McCloud is more like a future designer than a cartoonist. Because he pointed out an idea about the future of comics form and demonstrated this point of view systemic in historical field.
I found two representative points of view from Scott McCloud’s presentation. First, one advantage of comics is that it can bring more reverie space to readers by the simple picture. This point of view can reflect on last week Jordan Weisman’s exercise, some classmates found that once they made their comics complex but it also made readers hard to understand the true meaning of the comics. I realized that sometimes simple expression on comics could explain the meaning more powerful and strongly. And I also thank about the simple expression in our life, sometimes the details of life can reflect your whole life, it is simply but has a very typical role in the life history. Second, the time and sequence. Scott McCloud pointed out that the problem of the combination of comics and computer technology was the broken/interruption of time and sequence. The reader’s visual feeling has interrupted by some other sensory experience like hearing. The solution idea was to make the screen as a window not a page. I realized that the media was moving into a new age, what Scott McCloud wanted to tell us is how to look for the “staying power”, simply, how to change the oldest and cater for newest. Not only comics have the “staying power”, there are many things have that power in our lives. For example, the traditional heavy metal music combined with other types of music such as folk music, orchestral and electronic music. The rock musicians created combo styles to avoid the impact from other music styles and made the heavy metal survived. As what Jordan and Scott pointed, regardless of comics or heavy metal or other art form, they all derived from the life and changed for future.
Run Lola Run
“The game is 90 minutes. Let’s see how you play it.” That was my first impression of the film Run Lola Run. Actually I have seen this film many times because its’ typical role in film industry.
There are many animations, montages, and fast switching lens in this film. Rock music has run through the whole film. All these things created a tense atmosphere which enough to make audience rapid suffocation. Yes, we can say it was a film which was learned from computer game operation mode, it also has a computer game rhythm in edition work. The ingenious points of this film are that it broke the traditional narrative structure and space constraint. It put three different storylines on one event. Obviously, that was a very bold film technique. The director directed the film in audience’s perspective, the same story in different situations have different outcomes.
In PC games, player also has two identities: First, the chooser of the game directions. Player could load the game when the character is dead. Player can overlook the location, status of enemies. At that time player likes an “Omniscient God” of the game and controls the whole game. Second, player involved in the game and develops the plots as a “Main character” identity. Player plays the game in the simulation state, the character’s actions connected to player’s actions. In some of the circumstances player even can share emotions and the experiences of life and death with the character. Conclusion, player can find the subjective feelings and subjective viewpoint from these two identities.
Similarly, we also can find the omniscient and subjective viewpoint in Run Lola Run. That is what the director want bring to us. Under the game shell, the film showed us the power of subjective initiative. It made me start to thinking about the value of life. Life likes a PC game, RPG or ACTS what ever. The time, space, death, love, starting and ending will meaningless if it goes to over. So how could we make it valuable? I think winning or losing is not the most crucial. The key is to keep playing to the end with strong-will.
DICE Video Response
After watching Professor Jesse Schell’s presentation, I related his unique insights to my first experience of playing the online game “Ragnarok Online”. At that time I spend most of daytime playing “RO”. I earned experience points, upgraded the character and got the virtual items. After a series hard work, I found that I became a big brother in the game, my character was stronger than most of other players’ and I could help them. I felt great that my character brought me the esteem what I never got in the reality. But soon the company offered some cash items such as “double experience potion” and intensified weapons. Everyone caught up me in a short time by using these items. I felt disappointed that all my efforts became zero by the company’s “points=cash” policy. Like the example professor Schell showed in the presentation, the Mafia Wars, people saw their friends whose character strong than theirs then said “Hi my friends are batter than me! I spend time on it too! How can I be better?” then pay 20 dollars to upgrade their character. There were two kinds of player showed up in the “RO”, one we called “Time Warrior” and other we called “Cash Warrior”. Some people say that it sucks to spend money for upgrade the characters, but I say what ever you spend (the time or money), the cost is the same. Because you all spend the real things form realty to exchange the virtual points.
Other typical example in China is the shopping points. People who buy a lot of things from the department stores can accumulate the shopping points in their membership account. When the shopping points reach a certain amount, people can exchange them to any real merchandise. But if you do not have a member card or money points in the card then the shopping points will not available to use. So people supplement money in their cards for shopping and exchange the items, but they can not withdraw cash with the card. If there is any small numbers of points left in the card, what customers can do is to fill it again or leave them in the card, if a customer decides to keep the points in the card then it is equal to giving away the money to the department store. Many people know that the “shopping points” is a commercial trap but they still use it because of the shopping behavior will never stop.
As a culture studies student’s view, I call that “points culture”. Points consumption brings series of social phenomenon. Under the “points culture” modern people have to calculate and cumulate the points incessantly. They do not care what belong to the virtual and what belong to the realty because points exchange mixed the boundaries of virtual life and real life. The favorable factor of this “point culture” is that it can advance the commercial development by series points franchise, and offer a useful method to control and take advantage of people’s daily behavior. The credit card is a good example of that. Relatively, the collision between reality and virtual can make people hard to identify themselves in the current social environment, it can make people confuse the sense of worth and bring more social issues such as communication disorder and crisis of confidence. Although the points operation could make a lot of money to the game owners or companies, but it still premature and weak like a bubble. There are still many issues need to be solved.
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
