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Photograph Project

Today in class we covered the history of photography and were assigned a project in which we have to look up a group of 15 photographs that we like and evaluate them based on certain criteria. It's an interesting project, especially for me since I haven't really ever thought about photography much before. I know the basic stuff from my film classes like aperture and depth of field and all that but I've never looked at it from the art side.

One thing I guess I've noticed so far is that I haven't been looking at film from that perspective. I've always thought film more closely related to literature than photography, but if you want to get technical that's far from the case. I knew I was more interested in narratology, especially since I was hoping to move into studying video games from that perspective, but photography is pretty cool too.

I always admired the style of film noir so I think I might choose for my project those series of pictures from Naked City by Weegee. I love that style, chiaroscuro it's called. There's good stuff in that book, I'll definitely find more than enough examples of shadow. Anyway, I'm going to check out some of that stuff and start posting it in the next couple of days. Also, work continues on my personal website, I'll be going live any time now (I hope).

Group Work

Well our first group project is finally all done and I have to say it turned out really nicely.  I did the voice-over work, albeit a tad grudgingly (everyone says they hate to hear their own voice but I can't imagine anyone does as much as me).  My groupies were great and did some amazing work for the images and powerpoint.  I hope our presentation goes as smoothly as the work for it did.

My Blog (2.0)

I've decided to bite the bullet and buy my own domain name, where I will move my blog for Media Practices and set up a shamelessly self-promotional space as well.  We have to create a website for Understanding Media so I figured why not kill two birds with one stone.  I'm completely new to web design as I mentioned earlier, so this will be a good experiment as well.  

I spent the better part of two hours (seriously) just trying different names that I thought would be appropriate.  Some sounded too stuffy or overreaching, others too goofy (although I have to admit, had dangerousgaming.com been available we wouldn't be having this conversation).  I finally came across thegamewriter.com which stuck.  I really wanted a .com, I'm not altogether sure why.  Anyway, like I said, the site will be a repository of all my work at The New School (I'll throw in some of my old stuff from VT for now, we'll see if that seems to bad later on).  

I'll also include an area for my professional writing that I did for GotGame and Dootsi.  And I'm thinking about a members-only space to include my event calender for my mom.  I'm going to need to find some good pictures of myself to include, maybe after I learn to use photoshop.  The ones from my college facebook account probably wouldn't do.

Web 2.0

I hadn't seen this video before and have to say it was very inspiring.  I've always been interested in new communication technologies and the web is (still) the most rapidly evolving form of new comm tech.  I've only really dabbled my toes in web design so far - although that's about to change very soon and I'll talk more about that later - but I would really love to become more involved in it.  

Watching the video inspired me to look up the Web 2.0 movement.  Of course I used one of the greatest, if not most accurate, tools on the web - the all knowing Wikipedia.  I browsed through the main article and followed up on another topic of interest to me: the anti-copywrite movement.  It's an interesting idea and their war cry - information wants to be free - is great.  

I'm not sure about how to encourage creators to give up their right to full ownership of their work but discouraging printing companies and record labels from owning rights to work is a fantastic idea.  Kudos to all the professionals who make their work available for free though alternate means of publishing, I only hope people don't end up getting burned by people using their material without giving credit where credit is due.  Right now the 2.0 movement seems a bit overly optimistic.

One Square Forward, Two Squares Back: Advance Wars in a Nutshell

I’m going to assume some familiarity with Advance Wars among the reading public. After all, if you want to find out what the game is, read all the other reviews which essentially describe what the game is rather than honestly reviewing anything about it.

Advance wars was originally a promising little game for the Gameboy Advance (minor digression on the soullessness of Nintendo making 5-6 Gameboy iterations). However as anyone could see playing for a few minutes, the game’s multiplayer (obviously the soul of a strategy game) was seriously unbalanced with a few CO’s (you pick your CO who gives you certain benefits and drawbacks to your forces; they also have a special power you can use when you’ve dealt and received enough damage, much like a limit break in the Final Fantasy universe) being dominant over the other chumps and a few units being the best. Hence one could say this game showed promise. Sadly this promise was not delivered upon, as no fundamental changes were made to gameplay in the next installment, Advance Wars 2, which featured the same fundamental mechanics, plus a few more CO’s of varying worth and a reworking of some CO’s to make things more balanced. Needless to say, the issue of balance was not addressed in any serious way. The only unit added was an even bigger tank, the neo-tank, I suppose to make other units feel even worse about themselves.
This game plays like it was made by some Chair Force general trying to prove the superiority of air units over, well, anything. Certainly the Navy comes in for a bruising in this game, as the units are expensive, worthless, and generally defenseless to boot. At any rate, the next installment, not counting the laughable Gamecube cash-in “tactical” (as in, you made a severe tactical error buying this game) FPS, just added a boatload of new, completely random units and a mess of CO’s and combinations for Dual Strike (using 2 CO’s at once).
Of course this just made the game more of a clusterfunk and addressed none of the fundamental issues plaguing the game. There is no reliable anti-tank unit, direct units rule over indirects like artillery, the air units are absurdly powerful especially when used by a CO who gets a bonus for using them, etc. Apparently there is an even newer game out which no one is going to play. I figure after three strikes, you’re out. These aren’t efforts you can just rack up because they mean nothing, like DUI’s or something.

-Alex Hufford

All I Want for Half-Christmas

The long-awaited GTA IV launch is just days away now, and I have to tell you - I'm damned excited. And it looks like I'm not the only one.



Well, to no one's great surprise, GTAIV is being hailed as the best game in the last decade by the reviewers over at IGN. I have to say, they couldn't have picked a crappier release date for the game. With finals week looming over me like, um, something big that looms over things, I've got a bit of a wait ahead of me before I can experience all the debauchery of my new favorite game (that's right, I'm calling it right now - this game is going to rule so hard). So woe has become me.
I hope everybody else out there has had the good sense to graduate from college or drop out in anticipation of the game of 2008. Oh, and how about one of those motherships from Independence Day for that metaphor before? I like that.