kiyochan's blog

As I'm trying to piece together my final project, I've run into a bit of a bump. See, for the paper (because I am at a lack of imagination for another medium otherwise - thank you, semester) I was hoping to see how language, image, and music mixed with interactivity creates or supports the narratives of different video games that either revolve around a musical premise or where the music itself aids in creating a narrative that it otherwise undefined.

The difficulty I'm having is that I forgot/underestimated the number of video games out there that "revolve around a musical premise." When I first drew this up, I had pretty much only Electroplankton, Lumines, Meteos, and probably Rez (though I haven't played it yet) in mind. But after reading through a few books, I realized I'd completely overlooked those games of Guitar Hero/Rock Band, the entire Beatmania (Dance Dance Revolution, etc.) series, those karaoke games and some other ones I'd never heard of before such as Buzz (some music quiz game), PaRappa the Rapper and so on.  read more »

To be bluntly honest, I didn't find Photopia to be a particularly noteworthy experience, though certainly unique. I think this may be solely based upon the fact that the game has such minimal interaction. Between puzzle games, side-scrollers, and quasi- RPG adventure games, I've spent a lot of years minimally playing video games where you push a button and things happen right off.

In Photopia- which isn't exactly a video game, but a game all the same - there is a lot of trial and error as you have to figure out commands, which is hardly anything new in the spectrum of gaming. The chance that the action you just took two seconds ago could be rendered completely useless within seconds. Adding to this frustration is the fact that all the dead end running happens in an optically unchanging environment (meaning you're looking at the same basic format of screen outside of the changing colours.) When you run into dead ends at the start of Zelda games, you're probably looking at new, fullscreen, scenery until you start walking in circles or at least seeing your commands in action. In Photopia, some more text and a prompt appears and maybe border colours change - yay.  read more »

First I have to apologize for my track record in blogging: traveling out of state without my computer every other week and spending the time in between preparing for a dang audition has totally taken a toll on my ability to write - in both the sense of typing something out and typing it out coherently. (Apologies for my terrifyingly awful arguments and writing in advance, too.) My notebook is laced with blog post outlines which were to be elaborated upon and incidentally, it is now that I take a break from the midterm to flesh one of them out. Oh, the irony.

Getting to the point and going very far back, when we watched the Activision promotional video, there was a good amount of talk regarding "having fun with your friends" as you play them - interaction was the thing to have, be it between person and game or two people drawing out a story together by playing the game. With these games and such simple "win-lose" scenario, the narratives were created between the people playing since there wasn't too much to the story in the first place. Shoot the alien before your friend. You saved the planet hooray. Gloat. Repeat.  read more »

I found it highly amusing that the video shown in class today ended with the man talking about the someday existence of a video game which would make him cry as I had read [this article] just yesterday.  read more »

Sometimes, Webmail really gets on my nerves. I'm nicely behind on this blogposting and I can't really thank anything but the fact that my confirmation email didn't show up in my inbox until about three hours after I first registered.

I should take a screenshot sometime of how I receive emergency notice emails from classes at least two days too late far too often. This post was written in advance Friday afternoon.

So far as semi-reflections go, the class has definitely already caught my interest between thinking critically about a video game (yay!) with "Passage" and a discussion on Krazy Kat, which I had previously investigated with Dr. Ault in last semester's "Comics and Animation" class. I'm looking forward to upcoming discussions in these same two mediums and how they expand into other mediums too. To think that "Passage" was commentary on life? Fascinating. Now I am just looking forward to picking up the course material and seeing where that will take me (no pun intended...mostly.)