Hello everyone! I hope everyone is excited about starting classes on Monday...personally I wish the break were longer but oh well...
Anyways, I decided to hop on here and leave a message because I stumbled across some awesome news...THERE IS A THIRD BOOK IN THE CATHY'S SERIES COMING OUT IN MAY! It is called Cathy's Ring and I have already pre-ordered the book on Amazon...
Well that is all I have to say!
Good luck!

This is it. Grades are due to the registrar this afternoon, and with that, this semester, my first at UMW, will be officially concluded. I thought I'd use this occasion to post a blog entry here summing up what I think I've learned so I can put some perspective on what has been a truly momentous few months -- both personally, and professionally.

They say that having a baby changes everything. I don't know if that's true, but for me anyway, having a baby is a lot cooler than knowing you're going to have a baby soon but having to wait for her. It is pretty amazing to see her grow and start (already) turning into a little person. Cool little girl.  read more »

For my final project, I originally wanted to create an IF or ARG or even a combination of the two. However when I thought about it, I did not think that I could get my whole point across with either or both. That is when I decided to write a short story. The story focuses on what reality is and when, if ever it is fake. I created a concept for a futuristic video game and one of the people who indulges in it. Throughout the story, I try to establish the fine line between what is "fake" and what is "False."

This isn't the final project that I wanted.

I had a very cool game concept put together and planned out, but couldn't tie everything together, which is a shame.

I'm sure that over break all the planets will align and I will be blessed with the time and foresight to complete it the way I have it imagined.

Instead here is a bit of prose about the real, and a few trailheads and a puzzle that are almost ready to be tied together.

I think there is enough here to make something really cool, or, at least, virtually cool.

Reflecting on the class as a whole, I really love the concept of comparing the Virtual and the Real, and think reality is completely subjective.

I've enjoyed the idea of creating little bits and pieces of a world, starting with a webpage, interactive fiction and then on to full blown ARG-ness. One thing that i really liked about this class is that you get a chance to make something up, something completely random and off the wall, and then physically insert it into the world, and that act makes it real. So Cool.

Crazyness.

Cheers!

//EDIT// Let's try this with the attachments this time.

"The world is about to end in 2012... 'cause the Mayans made calendars, and they stop at 2012. I got encyclopedias on the bus... The world is about to end as we know it. You can see it already. A planet doesn't exist - there's no more Pluto... Mosquitoes bite you and you die. And a black man and a woman are running for president."
- Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. AKA Lil' Wayne

I created an ARG based on the Mayan Calendar theory that the world will end December 21, 2012. It sounds a little strange, but it actually sends a message to players that I think will be influential in the future.

Read and enjoy!

I really enjoyed creating this final project. I think it was a great end to a pretty cool semester. I was debating between doing an ARG and a short story. However, I ended up choosing a short story because I felt that my ideas could be expressed more clearly in a short story than an ARG. Once I began to think about all the movies and short stories we've read, I began to find connections within each one. I found that each one focused on a reality that was unlike our own and that each of these realities were undefinable. I especially focused on Level Real of Avalon where that reality was static and posed the question if it was real or not. In my story, I tried to pose that same question, how do we define reality? and is our definition of reality the right one? My story deals with the idea of dementia and schizophrenia and how those realities connect to our own. I guess you just have to read the story for yourself because it has a twist ending that I'd rather not give away. This semester has definitely taught me to look at what I consider reality very differently. Like someone previously said, for all we know, we could be sitting in a comatose in a nursing home.  read more »

For my final project, I documented, in essay form, a game that I wanted to create for my final project. Though I didn't have the time I wanted to finish the project, I believe the essay more than makes up for it. It is funny and an interesting read. I don't think that it is something anyone else would really want to write about though I'm sure there are some that felt the same way as I did at times during the course. It's been a pleasure...

I decided to have my project take the form of what could be considered a trailhead for an ARG. It’s a letter from a woman who claims she is participating in a research study against her will. Her letter is a cry for help, because as she claims, she is being electo-shocked by subjects of the research study. I wanted the letter to act as an introduction to a multitude of considerations regarding virtual reality. I think one of the most important themes of the class was the suspicion that a fictionalized concept of reality may or may not be false. I think this concept is particularly problematized when the fictionalized concept of reality requires an ethical reaction or engagement from a real-world participant.  read more »

My project is in the form of an essay, but is really just many of my opinions and feelings about the things we've learned and discussed this semester. Hence the title, "Stream of Consciousness."

I talked about the possibility of a dangerous future due to VR as well as the positives VR can make to our future. I also discussed my increasing fascination with alternate reality games and how I can totally see myself in the future playing one and being completely into it. I did not know anything about any VR stuff before this class. And a lot of it won't really effect the life I live now, or my future. But I feel more open to technology and to the idea of SL and IF after this class. I don't think it's as strange as I originally thought.

My final is just a rambling of my thoughts and ideas based on IF, SL, and ARGs. I also talk about "Lawnmower Man" and "The Machine Stops" very briefly to show my point. Although this is not a "Traditional Essay" and doesn't follow a 5 paragraph essay form, I think it serves to support my point of view and my opinions.

This final project was a nice finale I think to the course. I decided to create an Inform project that explored the various parts of the course that I felt were the most important. I focused on ARGs, IF, and VR and then under each other I added in 'rooms' describing some of the things we did in/for class that went under each other those categories. This whole course has been different than what I had imagined going into it. I mean that in a good way. I never knew how to work with HTML, nor would I have ever made the time to learn, yet it is something that is going to be a very handy skill in the near-future. Being an English major, I wasn't too keen on all the projects that involved working with the computer but the explorations really did me a lot of good. I was introduced to a whole new genre of 'gaming' and it's all useful knowledge. The new technologies are a bit scary (I have flashbacks of different movies) but I am excited to see what keeps coming. After taking this course, I am sure that I am more prepared to handle it and be able to take part in it all. I was never good at the interactive fiction games.  read more »

For my final project, I chose to write a short story.  read more »

For my final project, I decided to further explore ARGs (more specifically lonelygirl15) and the “actors” within them, to help shape and support my theories about the switch that turns our worlds on and off. I used an MTV article about lonelygirl15 to help.

Whether created or pre-existing, a world is reality.

ARGs are thought of and created. To the creators, players, and puppets, it is a reality to them for some time. The creators put real time and effort into the lift-off of the game. Players invest time and energy into solving the puzzles. The puppets, or actors, are really being filmed and really doing their job. In one way, or another, it is reality to everyone. The story itself may be made up, but it is itself a part of reality. Are lies not a part of our daily life—our real life? New Media has basically forced me to take another look at what I consider reality, what I consider truth.  read more »

New Media's been one of those classes in which I feel like I'm constantly up until all hours of the night finishing projects. Like something always gets in the way of me doing these things reasonably ahead of time. I might kind of miss that.

Each project we've done so far, I've lost a few points on clarity (hence the snide title of this final post). I'm not sure that I'll win any back with this project. It winds a little bit, here and there. I think I get more direct near the end.

To clear things up a bit:

So far, looking back, I've seen a theme within, at least, my own projects, and my own thoughts on the matter of alternative reality. That is, as Matt also said in his project post, that reality is what we make it - that, I think, comes across in my project without having to dig too much.

To be sure, I've evolved that idea a bit since it cropped up in my head very early in the course in vague form. Now, I think, I'm much more inclined to think that our reality is affected by what we make ourselves, and it is through this that we affect our reality. But does that mean our reality affects us not at all?  read more »

For my project...I wrote. I didn't plan. I didn't structure. I didn't formulate. I simply wrote. That's why it's called 'Musings on the Alternate Reality' and not 'An Essay on the Alternate Reality.'

My main focus is gaming because I see it as the closest thing we have to the scifi image of 'virtual reality,' but I also spend some time writing about dreams.

It's almost entirely conjecture. Some might call it the ramblings of a madman. But it's really just the result of this course which, though it educated me and fascinated me, ultimately left me confused and uncertain about the nature of "the virtual and the false."

In that I believe the course succeeded. I don't think the course was meant to give us an answer but rather to make us think. And it certainly did that. My brain hurts right now but that might be because it's 4:44 AM.  read more »

My final project is an essay exploring ideas about technology paranoia as we've seen in several of the works we studied. I wanted to allow myself some blank space to to just think out some ideas about why people are afraid of technology, especially virtual reality, and why it shows up in such strong media images as The Lawnmower Man's ridiculous psycho internet murderer plot, or the massive scary war in The Matrix. I read a blog entry by Henry Jenkins that is about Second Life, actually, that I found very relevant while I was writing this, so I ended up quoting some of the discussion from there. The entry was about how Second Life is sometimes heralded as the coming of the Virtual Age, when everything will be totally and completely immersive and virtual a la Snow Crash or Feed or something similar, and how that's a really wrongheaded conception of Second Life, because people pattern their internet behaviors after their real-life behaviors, so all virtual reality can really end up doing is reinforcing the real world with its secondary structures.  read more »

I accidentally attached my final for my other class to my previous post. Here is my real final for this class.

For my final project I wrote Prof. Whalen a letter. It's actually more like an essay than a letter (its 5 pages). I focused on virtual reality. I wrote about what I discovered about virtual reality during this class, using my personal experience with our assignments as my examples.

For my final project, a short story, I explored the idea of shifting realities and the potential for a variety of realities in what is perceived as one reality. The story is based off of a couple of different people I ran into in the nursing homes in which my great-grandmother and grandfather lived. One woman was convinced she was a cruise boat director. Another man appeared to be the sweetest old man and, before his illness set in, was just that, however, when approached would do nothing but yell obscenities at people. for a while I was struggling with my own grandfather's rapidly progressing dementia due to Parkinson's and realized that many times these men and women, though they appear to be in the room we're in, are in a completely different world that we cannot access. Who are we to say that our world is more real than the one we're experiencing just because it happens to be the one we are experiencing. To me, it's kind of like the "real" level in Avalon, where reality is never something static, defined or even definable. How are we to know that we aren't hallucinating our whole lives?  read more »

Like the post below me, I wrote a short story for my final project. It is quite short (about three pages) and is really more of a long summary--the form is a character telling her story about her world. It combines both virtual and alternate realities. I borrowed vague concepts from the book Feed by MT Anderson and "The Machine Stop" (particularly the silence bit). It's sort of more or less based on a poem I wrote a while ago about a similar topic.  read more »

I decided to do a little something different for my final project and wrote a short story (more of a novella really) which I hope to eventually flush out into an actual short story or perhaps something longer. In it, I describe a world post the 2008 beginning economic crisis in which one major company now runs the world and controls all aspects of life. The main character is part of resistence group, who stumbled onto the project purely by accident and was recruited (very similar to an ARG) to help this group, called "The Network."

I thought that doing an alternate-reality-slash-alternative-future would help to incorporate elements of the themes we discussed in the class, as well as bring back one of the stories I found the most interesting, "The Machine Stops," to play with the concept of our own reality and possibilities of future technological revolutions. I attempted to show some elements of contemporary technology (my use of the term "bookmarks" as well as a simple laptop computer) to show a path that is similar enough to our to make the reader stop and consider where we might be in five, ten, or fifteen years down the line.  read more »