Category: Student Posts

I enjoyed the process of creating this podcast, The Sims 4, with Kiara. We shared the same ideas and we did really good job in integrating our thoughts and fitting it into our podcast. Furthermore, since we chose the game for the podcast rather than being assigned a certain game, we could design the podcast according to our interests, which was flexible and did not constrain our thoughts. At the same time of playing and podcasting the game, we dig deeply into our game and discover that it had both pros and cons.

Inspired by the different video games earlier this semester, I also wanted to do a Podcast focusing on role-playing game in which players can really escape from busy life, release their burdens, and take all control of their lives. Rather than composing of complicated plots and mysterious settings like the Stanley or Gone Home, my dream game is easy to play, close to real world, and meaningful to the players. Thus, I started to search online which game is most similar to my ideal game. Browsing the websites, I was attracted by pet raising games as well as life simulation game: The Sims 4. Fortunately, my partner Kiara also had that idea and we played the games together. However, we still were not able to decide which one was better and how to talk about a game through Podcast. Thus, we discussed with Professor Morgen about our thoughts and brainstormed the pros and cons of the games. In the end, we decided on doing the Podcast of The Sims 4, a life simulation game which provides the players with life experiences like ever before and like never before.

For Kiara and I, we first planned out the structure of our Podcast, intro and reflection of the process of playing, and wrote the scripts for them. However, we found it was difficult to talk about a game without any thesis and deep meaning behind it. Therefore,Instead of doing the Podcast according to the structure we had before, we discussed the pros and cons of The Sims by referring to some topics in How To Do Things With Video Games, which is written by Ian Bogost. “Empathy”, a topic in this book, best reflects the deep meaning behind the game. When we were playing this game and enjoyed the happiness of living another life, we put ourselves in the characters’ shoes and have the empathy of them. For example, my character Wendy broke up with her boyfriend because her busy life of being a tech-industry woman. I felt blue during those days and tried to come up with some ideas to fix their relationship while still keep her interests in industry engineering. The process of playing the game influences my life. Also, this game also reminded Kiara of some experiences during freshman year. Our own experiences in this game and vivid description of the characters would give the audience a more straightforward sense of it. In addition, the pros and cons of this game enable the audience to get rid of it negative effects and misleading part.

After figuring out all the things we need to include in our podcast, we started our recording part. The easy part was that we could read record according to our scripts; while we needed to find background musics, combine all the sound track into one, and make sure our voices are loud and clear. The Podcast took our hours to finished, however, we expressed our own ideas to the audience and encouraged them play in a more vivid way through voice rather than plain words. The this project requires our collaboration and teamwork, which includes encouragement and understanding.

We did all the things together happily and were both very excited to see our collaboration outcome on podcast website of this class.

Work Cited

Bogost, Ian. “Empathy.” How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2011. 18-23. Print.

“Hi everyone, I am…” hearing the podcast created by Lucy and me, a sense of reward haunted me. The process of creating the episode was not a smooth path when looking back, but I did learn a lot from it.

Deciding the choice of the game is our first challenge. We both want to find a game, which is both entertaining and educational. Coincidently, we read a brief introduction about Sims, which attracted us at first sight. Sims is a life simulation game that allows players to create and control people in a virtual world, which shares similarities to other RPGs we played during the beginning of the semester. After playing the game, Lucy and I put forward all the ideas and points as many as we could think of. Brainstorming did give us some clues, but they are disorganized and trivial that we cannot find a thesis to focus on. Fortunately, meeting with Prof. Morgen inspired us with an explicit outline of the draft. He suggested us to draw the comparison between American culture and Chinese (my hometown) culture and why this RPG is special from others we played earlier. The cultures remind me of my freshman year experience with my American roommate. Thus, we narrowed down our concentrates to cultural connection and unique empathy property of the game. We divided our task; I am in charge of the culture part and she tries to tie Ian Bogost idea with our game and previously played RPG. Because our podcast was made during the Spring break that is hard to find some interviewers, we determined our podcast to be conversational with tons of interaction, as achieving our primary goal, which guides our listeners ponder our questions and feel empathy with my own experience.

From this experience, I learned critical thinking and reading resulting in writing and collaboration. In our first draft script of our episode, we were both popping up with the flow of ideas, by listening to other’s ideas, more fantastic ideas were coming out. Despite the draft is less organized and some of the minor ideas are meaningless, I did integrate other’ s thoughts with mine, develop my own statement and think critically. I realized that I could use the tool as I write the traditional essay in the future. Prior to this point, I only write the statement that I thought to be significant and relevant to the thesis on my draft before writing the essay, but more innovations can be made by the flow of collision ideas. Although some of the ideas are irrelevant, they could motivate me to present with new ones. Luckily, my co-producer is Lucy, who has open-minded and often some up with poignant points. We meet often brainstorm fresh approaches, compare our progress, and exchange the difficulties we met.

My suggestion for my peers is to plan deliberately. Writing a script beforehand is indispensable, and tried to put the time limit on separate part need to address. Because recording is very different from writing the essay, improvisation is inevitable. If not manage properly; it is easy to run out of time. I talked too much about my own experience and squeezed the time about empathy. In order to state out each point prepared, limit the time that conveys your respective ideas.

The experience of playing Fiasco was very new for me. I have played many different types of games before, but a role-playing game was not one of them. Fiasco, unlike most role-playing games, does not have a game master to help facilitate game-play. While having a game master may have helped us get the game started, the two other people in my group were also first time players, so none of us were qualified to be game master had there been one. The first thirty minutes of the time we had allotted to play the game consisted of the three of us on our laptops looking at video tutorials and scanning over the instructions to try to fully comprehend how to start the game. We eventually found out how to properly set up our game and were able to get started playing.

We chose the suburban play set, but our story was far from ordinary suburban life. Our plot developed around an intricate drug dealing operation out of the local supermarket where I, along with my two partners, worked. My character, aptly named Pablo Escobar, was one of the members of our three-ring drug dealing business. The other two members were my separated spouse and my stepfather, the other two players in the game. All of these details were set before any of us began to take turns and layout how the scenes took place. The effort that we put in before the game started allowed for much easier, creative story telling once we began. It was like we had created the outline for something and needed to fill out the interior. I strategically chose to resolve for my first and second turn, so that I could make sure I got both a white and black die. I was trying to play the game the safe way and was doing all I could to protect my character to allow him to come out on top. However, once we hit the tilt, where we robbed the store where we worked and were on the run, I reevaluated my game strategy. I no longer was concentrated on keeping my character away from harm, but instead wanted to help create the most interesting story I could. I ended up rolling double zeros after my 4 turns and had the worst aftermath I could have possibly gotten, but that gave me the freedom to turn things south for my character in the darkest way possible.

The most interesting part of writing a Fiasco story was how we all bounced ideas off each other and collaborated to create the final product. Someone would start their turn and another one of us would add thoughts as they came into our head and we would begin to piece together an engaging turn. We all had different things we wanted to get out of the story and, through the structure of the game, we were able to not only entertain ourselves for a couple hours, but also create a hilarious narrative of three drug dealers living in suburbia.

At first, Fiasco seemed like a complicated game with no real goals or instructions whatsoever. Unlike my classmates who played with each other, I was playing with 2 other friends, Rumi and Habib, who aren’t even a part of our class and it was really difficult to get them to play to with me, so I just hoped that the game wouldn’t bore us to death. As we read the rulebook, an overwhelming feeling came upon us and it seemed like we didn’t know what we were getting into.

After spending 40 minutes trying to figure out how to distribute the dice, we finally started the game and decided to elect “Bangkok” as our playset. We named our characters in the game based on our personal favorite cartoon characters- Homer, Goku and Bulbasaur. We realised that with the playset, characters, details and other elements of the game, we’d have to create a story of our own. We didn’t hold back; we created a very fictitious crime story involving drugs, money, gangs, and the DEA. My character, Bulbasaur, was the leader of a gang called “Ri$h gang”. Rumi’s character was Goku, who is a DEA officer, and the relationship shared by Goku and Bulbasaur is that they are brothers who were separated at birth and don’t actually know that they are brothers but eventually realise it since they look almost the same. Habib’s character, Homer, is also a DEA officer but is working as an undercover agent and is investigating “Ri$h gang”. Homer and Bulbasaur are gang members, and Homer and Goku are both part of the DEA team force.

Playing through Fiasco, I ran through my imagination and felt a burst of creativity. After we finished the first act, all of us felt like we had the energy to continue to the second act without taking a break. However, we messed up the game quite a bit and all three of us ended up dying in the aftermath. However, I must say that the experience was not as bad as I expected it to be. The game was very enjoyable because of the way each of us approached our creative sides competitively. The learning outcomes I had from playing fiasco were reflected upon by me afterwards. I had definitely learned collaboration with others. Even though my friends weren’t as enthusiastic about the game, something about the spirit of collaboration got Rumi and Habib to play with me on the same level of excitement. I also improved my rhetorical composition skills, as I was able to demonstrate an understanding of the particular elements of the game. Lastly, I also feel that I understood writing as process. Since there were times when I was confused and I didn’t know what to do or how to write/act, I would look up other works for inspiration and this would often help me get through obstacles while writing.

Fiasco wasn’t such a fiasco. I have to admit that it was one of the few games that I actually enjoyed playing this semester.

Students normally abhor doing any sort of group project, especially when the project is something so foreign for them. I thought that playing Fiasco would indeed be a fiasco to play. Especially at the start of creating the game trying to read all of the rules and figure out how to pick a play set and objects and relationships was almost overwhelming, but oh was it worth it.

After nearly half an hour of floundering around, we eventually settled on Antartica for our location. I did not think that it would be possible to create a fun story out of such a boring place as Antartica, but we far exceeded any expectations I had for my group. The player sitting to my right was Mady Arles, aka Roberto “The Bitch Ass”, and she elected for the rest of the group to come up with a story and she would then decide the outcome. As this was the first turn in the fiasco, it was not very exciting. My turn was next though and I decided to try to liven the game by setting up my own story and letting my fellow players decide my fate. This kickstarted the game and established that I was partners with Roberto in a tour giving company of Antartica and that Kino, the player to my left, aka Maxwell was my one time fling while on a tour that Roberto and I gave.

Although truly one would have to be participating in the creation of the story to understand what took place, my best description of it would be a drug fueled murdering love story.  This experience taught me the art of developing a story, I have attempted writing short stories and books before and I have always failed because I try to think of everything first and then write it down. Fiasco taught me that sometimes it is good to just go with the flow when you have a loose thought on where you want to go.  Also that collaboration is a major key to success in any work. Collaboration can sprout new ideas, or can help edit thoughts.

Fiasco reinforced that literature does not have to come from traditional sources. I believe that the feeling that playing role playing games, video games, or reading is what actually defines literature. I feel the same, if not more invested in the Fiasco scenario that my group created than when I write essays or stories. I know that I will employ the experience of playing Fiasco in my future writings. Playing gave me the ability to realize when I took a joke or scenario too far through my partners telling me so, and that will transfer to my writing because I do enjoy spicing up even the most serious essay.

Photo credits

I got frightened when I first saw the Fiasco instructions with 130 pages, worrying about how I can play the game with such complex rules. But the things turns out pretty nicely, despite I felt confused at the beginning of the game, I played my character throughout the game and did enjoy the time. There is no “Game Master” or “Dungeon Master” of the game, which is the unique part of Fiasco as an RPG.

Feeling awkwardly at first, we took about 40 minutes to set up the settings. We choose out the location to be the Suburban community. The settings are abnormal: skewed relationship, eccentric objects, and creepy needs. Despite we can choose the character and needs we want to, the choices are limited.

Tannis is the name of my character, which is a guy. The experience is unforgettable because I felt like I really stood on the perspective of the opposite sex. Unlike other RPG, the sex and role already created for you, Fiasco allows the players to fully development the personalities of the character. I had a criminal relationship, thieves, with my right partner, Bob (Billie), and a rivalry relationship with my left partner, Chad (Ian). Bob and Chad were distant relatives. The connection between players tightly bonds us, in order to grow the web among these relationships. I want to get even with Chad because my dreamboat, Chad’s ex-girl friend, killed herself when Chad broke up with her in high school. I premeditate cautiously but none of my plan threatened his life. I own a supermarket in Apple Valley with Bob, under the cover; we are accomplice in smuggling arms and diamond with corrupted police. Our story is kind of driving to a dead end at the end of Act 1. After infusing two new elements in our existing scenes, the story had surprising moved towards the climax. Chad was killed by her ex-girl friend, who was thought to be dead but not. As our black business exposed, I was arrested and Bob was waiting for a trail on the drug scandal.

As went along the process of set up and resolve scenes, I strongly felt I was writing a fiction collaborately instead of individually. For the property of the game, the relationship web tied every player together, so each role should be in the story, not necessarily in every scene. Despite only all character in one scene, we also should take them into account to set up the scene, considering the impact on them. Every move for each role could cause directly or indirectly influence to other character, so we need to discuss and alter our scene before change it to a real plot in our story, which is very similar to writing as process. We were revising, editing and drawing reflection in every step when writing our own stories.

We employed climax and conflict to our story subconsciously. As I mentioned above, our story was hard to proceed before tilt, we then added Chad’s ex-girlfriend was not dead and she came back for revenge with Chad to the storyline. Tannis (the character I played) suffered from a dilemma, for the only reason that he avenged Chad is not real. The back of ex-girlfriend turned not only Chad’s life, but also the life of Tannis as well, thus pushing the story to climax.

I really like the end of act 2, aftermath. Due to the color and points on our dices, there is an outcome for our characters throughout the whole story. We need to create the story built on the conditions offer by aftermath. In traditional writing, the last paragraph is often reiteration or expectation, which we already conceived in draft, no new ideas pupping out. Aftermath did restrict us in certain way in developing the role, but it guide us to give a decent type outcome, instead of an out ended one.

Constructing my first ever podcast with my co-producer, Jay Kim, we decided to work on all aspects of the podcast together, as opposed to splitting work up. Since we shared many of the same ideas and motivations for the project, collaborating with Jay was very easy.

The idea of producing a podcast for the internationally recognized title, FIFA, came very naturally to my co-producer and I. With soccer having a very prominent and central role in cultures outside of the U.S., this idea came naturally knowing that Jay is from Korea and my family is from Mexico. Furthermore, with the previous podcast incorporating sound in the background, “Doing Video Games with … Reverence”,  we thought FIFA would be the perfect game title to explore Music, one of Ian Bogost’s characteristics of games, Since we both had spent countless hours playing this game growing up, we felt that we would be able to free flow our podcast and speak freely about the music. As a brainstorming process, this allowed us to be very creative and talk about what we like and didn’t like about FIFA, more-so like. However, the time restraint in which we had to present our game, our message, and our argument, we realized we had to broaden our scope in order to still have our audience engaged, entertained, and informed.

For Jay and I, we first thought it would be difficult to construct an argument that suggest something new and wonderful to the world. It came as a surprise to us that Ian Bogost, the author of “How To Do Things With Video Games”, disagreed with the idea that video games have the ability to connect people from different cultures and eras. This idea is clearly debunked when knowing that many of the songs in FIFA’s soundtrack are played in soccer stadiums before and after matches and that music shared between countries and languages brings similarities between very different cultures. What seems very strange for Ian Bogost came very naturally for Jay and I.

A natural obstacle that arose for us with the production of the podcast arose when it was time to record and edit within the software program, audacity. Previously, I had some experience using audacity, therefore the learning curve was not quite as steep. However, our biggest issue came when trying to improve the sound quality of our podcast. 

Co-producing this podcast with Jay turned out to be a fruitful experience leaving me with several key things to take away from. Firstly, I understand more that, even for projects other than writing essays, the organization and refining of ideas still applies the same, especially when more than enough ideas are present. In the process of creating this podcast, Jay and I met several times with our Professor to discuss about what we found interesting in FIFA and the different avenues we could explore. Even during hours of recording, there was still refinement and clarification taking place. We made several retakes of recording in order to try to emphasize on specific points.  What I am most proud about our episode was that we were able to incorporate music throughout our podcast in a way that was balanced yet powerful. More-so, Jay and I were able to evenly split our talking time and contribute evenly about our thoughts on the game.

The FIFA podcast episode along with the “Read|Write|Play” series can also be found here.

Image Credit: Username “Dong” from Flickr

If you are from the millennial generation like myself, most likely you have never heard of the game Fiasco. The game is unlike any other you have most likely played recently. Fiasco is not played with a console controller, mouse/keyboard, or electricity.  Now, you are probably thinking Fiasco is a board game. You know, one of those games that comes in a cardboard box, you choose a game piece, and you try to make it from start to finish before everyone else. Surprisingly enough, Fiasco is not one of those games either. Fiasco is a unique game where, instead of playing and following a given path, you are placed in the seat similar to that of a game designer. As opposed to consuming stories, you are now creating them. And not only are you creating them, you are creating them collaboratively within a group of three-to-five people. Fiasco gives you a template of fundamental story qualities such as settings, location, plot twists, events, objects, and a tone to guide how stories should pan out. Your story, and more so your experience with the game, primarily depends on your willingness to contribute your personality, creativity, and style to the group.

Set in a suburban area, I, Silly Sam (Nick), was a long-time drug dealer with Frank (David). I lived in a white van with no wheels and had bad blood ties with Sigmund Freud (Brian), a brutal and ethical cop who held qualities similar to that of Commissioner Jim Gordon from Batman. When setting up the fundamentals to the story, each of us were completely open with each other about our character’s personality, habits, and intentions. Having picked qualities of romance, death, cops, and drugs, each of us quickly came to realize that our story was going to share many similarities with that of a Mexican soapopera. By the end of the game, drug deals went wrong, people went to prison, people got out of prison, good cops struggled with internal corruption, romantic relationships turned bad, betrayal occurred, people died, and once again, people went to prison.

One way in which my experience playing Fiasco was similar to other RPG games was that decisions had to be made and my personal objectives were constantly changing. However, unlike a vast majority of RPG games I have played, my focus with Fiasco was not really about winning or loosing. It didn’t matter to me that my character did not become the drug lord of the era and instead ended up in prison.  In retrospect, I now realize I consistently made choices that were perfect opportunities for me to be betrayed. This may be because in reality, I try to trust others and network of people as much as possible. This lead me to making a poor choice of seeking Office Sigmund Freud (Brian) in hopes of gaining his companionship. As a result, I was sent right back into prison. But in the end, in the scope of playing Fiasco, these mistakes were alright because they contributed to an exciting and thrilling, dramatic adventure.

Throughout the collaborative story making process, I was more concerned about my overall contribution of substantial creative ideas of impossible, dramatic, yet entertaining events. As we played, I imagined that scenes in my head and was more concerned with if our story would also prove interesting to my group members and others who may visualize our story through a T.V. show or movie. Playing Fiasco built upon my exposure and experience of composing and creating within a group. In our collaboration of creating this story, there was a big disconnect between how we  wanted the story to turn out initially and how the actual decisions we made took us further from that realization. We were all a little disappointed and shocked that the story had not turned out to what we wanted it to become. I think that, although we had a similar end goal in mind, our small variations in vision, the friction and bouncing off of each others ideas, and the pulling of trying to come back to our own realities, created a widely different story than of us had expected.

Featured Image Credits: Art from one of Fiasco’s playsets. Image found on Flickr account “oneseven”. 

My group got off to a bit of a rocky start trying to play Fiasco.

It took us two laptops, and two Iphones (with rules and internet cheats) and a lot of frustration to get us started. With literally hundreds of pages in instructions, one would think that this game would be so well explained that a kid could play it, I would say this is definitely not the case.  This game could easily be explained in three pages tops in a much simpler way.  If it’s possible, I think the directions were too detailed.  I think it was hard to focus on the point of the game and pick out what was actually important out of so much excess stuff that was crammed into the directions.

Although I had lots a reservations about the game before we started playing, the annoying and lengthy instructions were really the only thing I didn’t like about this game; although I’m not sure it feels like an actual game to me.  I enjoyed creating a ridiculous story line with absolutely no purpose and seeing where it went.  Once we started, it flowed very well and easily and it was extremely fun and entertaining to work together to create an absurd story about drug dealing, love, murder, suicide, and a magic polar bear.  I did, however, feel like there was no game-like aspect to this though.  Nothing the game made us do seemed to make a difference to how the story turned out.  It felt as though we were picking and rolling dice for no reason, except for the fact that we were told to.  I don’t think that our story would have turned out any differently if we had been instructed to simply create a story with given options for location, character relations, desires etc.  I think a lot of the stuff we were told to do was sort of pointless.

Even though it was a strange game and like nothing I’d ever done before, I enjoyed playing Fiasco.  I enjoyed getting to physically get with other people to play again rather than just staring at my computer screen.  I enjoyed the collaboration that was involved and I enjoyed the freedom to make our story whatever we wanted it to be.

Having never created a podcast before, I was intrigued and a little nervous as to how the experience would turn out.  The process ended up working out differently than I had anticipated.  It was easy to fall under the assumption that Jordan and I could pick any video game that we wanted and magically have something astute to say about it that also related back to Bogost’s terms in his book.  This is not how making a podcast works.  We ended up having to start over once we got together to actually construct the podcast after we realized we couldn’t relate our original game (Mario Kart) back to any of the terms.  We then decided to work in the opposite direction.  After looking through the book and reading about each of the terms, we decided we wanted to do a podcast on exercise and then picked Wii Sports as our game to go with that.  After we were able to settle on an idea for our podcast the rest wasn’t actually all that hard.  We decided that I would pick apart the details from the book that related to what we wanted to say, and Jordan would research Wii Sports to look for anything that could be of use.  After that, we simply overlapped our work and wrote out what we wanted to say.  Bogost had a lot of interesting ideas about video games about exercise, “exergames” as he calls them, that we were able to relate to Wii Sports.

After we knew what we wanted to say in our podcast, we then had to figure out how to actually make the podcast, which was arguably the hardest part, even though it ended up being fairly simple.  I have used garage band a handful of times way back in middle school, but that is the extent of my podcasting experience.  I had no clue what I was doing.  It took me a few minutes to figure out what everything on the screen was and how to do what I wanted to do, but once we found our way around the application the whole thing came together pretty easily.

Overall, the experience was better than I was expecting it to be.  It was surprisingly easy to talk about a single video game for five minutes and turn that into a podcast.  My advice to future video game podcasters though would be to not save all of the work until the last minute.  Although the project is relatively straight forwards once you get into it, it takes a little while to figure out what direction you want to go in and get started with it.  If you give yourself a good amount of time to plan out your project, it should be a breeze.