Final project

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Since I felt we had exhausted comparing and contrasting many of the works we had to read this semester, I chose to take the reading material and use it as a jumping ground for my project. I researched mondern day applications of virtual reality in the real world and was surprised by my findings. I hadn't ever really thought about the military using it, but it makes sense. In fact, I found out that the military was the first real world application of virutal reality in the 1920s. It is also prevelant in the science and medicine fields to develop new graphics to aid in the research of new medical procedures. Even more common daily activities like the obeseity epidemic and dating services have been influenced by virtual reality.

When I first approached this project, I was really tempted to send Dr. Whalen a Wal-mart bag full of random things with puzzles on them to be like, "There's an ARG in there somewhere that says something about what we covered in class in there." Instead, I decided to make a sort of self-contained ARG in Word.

So I flipped through my notes, since the prompt was about the connections made between what we covered this whole semester and I basically took bits and pieces of my notes to make an ARG. I thought they could all go off the idea that it’s another world and few people understand it. Plus, you always have to have the trademark ARG plot where someone is dead and someone is missing—but here is there secret video diary—solve the mystery. So that’s what I basically did.  read more »

For my final project, I want to do something having to do with artwork and perceptions of reality. Since I do not believe that true objectivity can exist, I think that the concept of reality is impossible to define. People vary so much in what they believe and what they perceive things to be, so "reality" to one person could be completely different than it would be to someone else. I go more in-depth into this topic in my word document explanation of my project. I decided to draw a picture of a hibiscus plant as one would see it. Then I focused in on a specific part of one of the flowers and showed that it was, in fact, not a flower at all. It was words of poetry that created the form of the flower. I picked poetry because that is also something that is completely subjective. The way one person perceives a flower can be completely different than another person, just as with writing. Since reality is undefinable, I thought that this drawing would show what I learned in this class: alternate and virtual realities might be "reality" to someone, it all depends on how they perceive it.