Author: Graciela

After completing the first podcast, Jasmine and I had a better idea of what to do with the second podcast. We realized that our second podcast on the popular game Mario Party needed more depth in terms of our content because we primarily focused on telling about the game in the first one rather than the purpose of the game. Our one-on-one with Professor Morgan helped us wrinkle out the small details we needed to work on and also some of the things that we did well. One of the things that we kept in the second podcast was the interesting intro that served as our hook. We acted out a small scenario about a friendly rivalry and perplexing question at hand: How did Jasmine win the entire game by losing the most games? We then slowly delved into the analysis.

We introduced the game at first from an objective standpoint. Then we flooded the podcast with subjectivity in terms of the purpose of the game. We talked briefly about how Mario Party is a fun game that has a series of short mini games to give people a small sense of accomplishment, thus giving them an incentive to play more. We then touched on how Mario Party brings people together and provides them with something to talk about to break the ice and also the realistic aspect of the game. We found the importance of tying the game to real world concepts. We talked about how there are always people with an unfair advantage who will beat you simply because of luck or just the advantages they grew up with. Unlike most games, you can’t really predict the outcome of the game because people get points for improvement and even completely losing. People would feel stressed when anticipating the next minigame outcome and just hope that they rank above their friends.

In terms of editing, we used Audacity and found it easier to the second time around. However, it was still a complex process trying to piece together which music clip or song goes best with the message we were trying to convey in our podcast. We used a script throughout the podcast and tried our best to make it sound as candid as we possibly can. I think we improved the structure of the podcast as well because we introduced the game at first and dove into the critical thinking aspect after we gave the audience a firm understanding of what the game is and its objectives. I am glad that we received the chance to do a second podcast because this overall process was very enlightening and gave us a firm idea of how to convey a message without the use of an essay.

When our group members first met up, we all had no idea about how to play the game. We gathered at Eagle’s Landing and spent the first hour figuring out the instructions and how to play the game. We searched videos on Youtube and also other instructions online, yet even though we did not fully understand how to play the game, we just gave it a try and improvised until we got our creative juices flowing. We have all never played a play-role game and never experienced the freedom of it. We carved our own game and that was when we realized that the instructions were not so descriptive because we were, in some sense, the gamemakers.

We started getting into the game pretty fast once we figured out the whole instructions dilemma. The setting we selected was the Wild West. Our four characters were Princess Consuela, Frunk Trump, Killary Hilton, and Lucy Kane. I played as Killary Hilton and I was to help Princess Consuela and Lucy Kane on their quest to assassinate Frunk Trump. We wanted to not only save the world but also inherit his fortune. It was honestly such a fun experience because our team members each had different ideas and ways in which we wanted to execute our master plan, and Frunk Trump, played by Daniel, was actually okay with the outcome. There were some points in which he suggested a less brutal way of doing so. Unlike other games, Fiasco players do not really care for their outcome. I can see there is still some friendly competition in the game, but nothing like typical board games. We still want the best outcome for our player yet we did not really put much effort in doing so as we do trying to make a creative and fun story that everyone agrees with.

The plot was definitely a group effort. In terms of relationships, Lucy Kane and Princess Consuela are Chinese Opium dealers/addicts, Consuela and Trump were former crime partners, Trump and Hinton were once reformed criminals that hate each other, and Hinton and Kane are cousins. Princess Consuela’s lover is Frunk Trump. Even though she loves him deeply, his fortune and power is worth more to her, so she ultimately deviates a plan with Kane and Hilton to assassinate him. Frunk Trump is the mayor of this town because he killed the old mayor with a set of colt revolvers. When Trump was at the dentist office trying to fix his cavities, Lucy Kane was selling Opium to the dentist and his patients, which makes the dentist high on opium and allows the Trump assassination team to commence with the plan. Princess Consuela recognizes his partner’s million dollar gold colt revolvers and she kills him with it. I served as the lookout as Consuela and Kane stuffed his enormous body in a sack and put him in the truck’s trunk. When the sheriff was on his way to pick up Frunk Trump, we were already nowhere to be found. Daniel was not that angry that his character died halfway through the plot, yet he still contributed and had some say in how it will play out.

During the car ride, my team gets into an argument about who will keep the money from the colt selling. We could not keep him for ransom because the people hated him anyways and would not pay money to get him back. Princess Consuela wanted the colt to herself so she smacked Lucy Kane in the head. Hilton grabbed the colt revolver and questioned why she did that. In the end, we leave Kane passed out in the middle of nowhere and Consuela ends up dropping the gold revolver in quicksand. We also had sympathy on Frunk Trump and decided that he didn’t die because the bullet only went through his nose.

This game allowed us to develop our own setting, characters, plot and relationships. I thought that his game was very different from any book or video game learning experience I’ve ever had. I learned that allowing people to contribute their ideas in this scene only made the game more interesting and intriguing. Our plot turned out so much better than I expected, and I could not have imagined a better way to unravel the story. My group and I were beyond confused when we started the game, yet we ended up really enjoying our experience. In the end, even when some of our outcomes were better than others, we felt that we all won in some sense because our objective wasn’t keeping our character alive and happy. Instead, we wanted to effectively create a story that we could be proud of.

Hello everyone,

I would love it if you could take the time to read my interpretation of how John Darnielle’s novel Wolf In White Van explores the ways in which a young man copes with trauma through escaping the world around him with games. I also discuss the author’s use of limited range of narration as well as his effective development of the plot. Check it out!

Hello everyone,

I would love it if you could take the time to read my interpretation of how John Darnielle’s novel Wolf In White Van explores the ways in which a young man copes with trauma through escaping the world around him with games. I also discuss the author’s use of limited range of narration as well as his effective development of the plot. Check it out!

 

 

I have been playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl with my family for several years, and I honestly cannot imagine most of my childhood without it. It is an exhilarating game that can easily bring people together both in the spirit of competition and teamwork. I found it interesting how my partner, Jasmine, and I had a very similar perspective of Super Smash Bros and its features. It was quite difficult to narrow down our options but we both ultimately agreed that this game is one of the most challenging yet exciting game on the market that we can thoroughly analyze and talk about. As we each talked about and delved into our own personal experiences with the game, we realized that we had so much to talk about when we were writing our script. We decided to give the audience a taste of the excitement the game brings by putting a twist in the beginning of our podcast through the introduction of a third character. We made it seem like a boxing match within a video game, and we also added the element of competition with the small dialogue between Jasmine and me before we further analyzed the game.

As we wrote our script, we realized that the way we say things are just as important as what we say in our podcast. We had a hard time trying to make the podcast sound unscripted, but since we had a physical script in our hand, it made it harder to make our conversations sound more natural and unforced. After we went through the whole podcast, we thought about using bullet points next time to talk about the key points we want to address but not necessarily write out our entire script. Even though we tried to accentuate certain parts of the script to make it more lively and interesting, I felt like we lacked depth in terms of game analysis. It seemed like we were marketing the game rather than studying the different aspects of the game— both good and bad.

The whole process of editing and putting together the dialogue and the music was also quite difficult. Neither of us had worked with Audacity and it was a struggle to figure out how to operate the system. We tried to do everything in one take but as we were reading off the script, we were bound to make mistakes. However, even though we faced several problems making the podcast, I was very satisfied with how it turned out. I thought that the analytical elements were lacking, but in terms of capturing the audience, I thought that we did a pretty good job. We incorporated Digital Citizenship and utilize technology to engage in electronic environments and online spaces. We also received insight on how collaboration can be used to elevate how we deliver our message. We learned that a conversation between two people is oftentimes more intriguing than one person solely talking about the game. Jasmine and I brainstormed and added to one another’s knowledge of the game, which not only broadened the audience’s perception about the game but also our own.

I thoroughly enjoyed making this podcast. Every step of the process and the project as a whole taught me so much about how to take our knowledge of a game and lay it out on a table for an audience to hear. I’ve never even listened to any podcasts until I took this course, but I found a new way to carry out information and explore literature in a unique, meaningful and fun way.

I have been playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl with my family for several years, and I honestly cannot imagine most of my childhood without it. It is an exhilarating game that can easily bring people together both in the spirit of competition and teamwork. I found it interesting how my partner, Jasmine, and I had a very similar perspective of Super Smash Bros and its features. It was quite difficult to narrow down our options but we both ultimately agreed that this game is one of the most challenging yet exciting game on the market that we can thoroughly analyze and talk about. As we each talked about and delved into our own personal experiences with the game, we realized that we had so much to talk about when we were writing our script. We decided to give the audience a taste of the excitement the game brings by putting a twist in the beginning of our podcast through the introduction of a third character. We made it seem like a boxing match within a video game, and we also added the element of competition with the small dialogue between Jasmine and me before we further analyzed the game.

As we wrote our script, we realized that the way we say things are just as important as what we say in our podcast. We had a hard time trying to make the podcast sound unscripted, but since we had a physical script in our hand, it made it harder to make our conversations sound more natural and unforced. After we went through the whole podcast, we thought about using bullet points next time to talk about the key points we want to address but not necessarily write out our entire script. Even though we tried to accentuate certain parts of the script to make it more lively and interesting, I felt like we lacked depth in terms of game analysis. It seemed like we were marketing the game rather than studying the different aspects of the game— both good and bad.

The whole process of editing and putting together the dialogue and the music was also quite difficult. Neither of us had worked with Audacity and it was a struggle to figure out how to operate the system. We tried to do everything in one take but as we were reading off the script, we were bound to make mistakes. However, even though we faced several problems making the podcast, I was very satisfied with how it turned out. I thought that the analytical elements were lacking, but in terms of capturing the audience, I thought that we did a pretty good job. We incorporated Digital Citizenship and utilize technology to engage in electronic environments and online spaces. We also received insight on how collaboration can be used to elevate how we deliver our message. We learned that a conversation between two people is oftentimes more intriguing than one person solely talking about the game. Jasmine and I brainstormed and added to one another’s knowledge of the game, which not only broadened the audience’s perception about the game but also our own.

I thoroughly enjoyed making this podcast. Every step of the process and the project as a whole taught me so much about how to take our knowledge of a game and lay it out on a table for an audience to hear. I’ve never even listened to any podcasts until I took this course, but I found a new way to carry out information and explore literature in a unique, meaningful and fun way.

I felt as if I went on a completely different direction in the final draft of Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern Project. As I was writing my first draft, I was completely lost as to what the content would be and how to tie it together to Manuel’s Tavern.I wanted people to get something meaningful from this piece and I really felt that I learned the value of writing as a process. I solely thought that our project would be on the piece that we selected, yet I learned throughout the process that the objects we chose were merely additional pieces to the bigger picture. I believe that I improved on a variety of things from properly citing my sources to just structuring my arguments.

I stayed heavily on the surface in my first draft because I was practically regurgitating facts from articles and news sites, which made the project appear more like a research paper than an artistic and analytical piece of writing. I knew that I had to delve deeper as I write the final draft because I really wanted to make more of a personal connection in my piece. I ended it with a statement that ties together Goose island, Manuel’s Tavern and also ourselves as human beings. From meeting Professor Morgen to reading commentary from my classmates, I had a much clearer idea about how I wanted to structure my piece as well as the message that I wanted to relay to my audience. This ties to the importance of collaboration and getting input from someone other than yourself. I completely abandoned my first approach and took on something completely different with some of the same facts that ties to form a much more significant message.