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I tried for Myspace, but I couldn't find any of my old posts. I was actually somewhat upset.

How does your use of social media now compare to your use of social media then?

As I was going through some of my posts on Facebook, from 2008, I couldn't stop laughing at how ridiculous they were. As I came to find out, some of them were NSFW, and I tried to find a good one. I noticed at how immature the posts were, I would have been a Freshman or Sophomore in high school, so it kind of made sense. Now I rarely post on Facebook, I use it to find Nebraska football articles and to make fun of old high school classmates, or to Facebook stalk someone. I do use Twitter, and when I post on there it is also stupid and immature, but I would say it has evolved. My posts now are stupid, but I wouldn't worry about a future employer judging me on them.

Were there social norms or architecture (the format, code, layout, etc. of the platform) that encouraged particular kinds of contributions?

One thing that I did notice, was that when you had either added a friend or a friend had accepted your request, they wrote a small appreciation post on your wall. I completely forgot this was a thing, and it just shows how social media now has dulled some of our interactions with others. I may come across an appreciation post on another friends wall, but now it seems weird and is definitely not as common. I for a long time would never even add people because I apparently was too cool. Maybe it was my transition from high school to college and I was just to high on my horse.

It was somewhat nice to see where I have come from and that I don't want to go back. It also helps me to know that if I have kids one day to get on there social media and save some of their posts, gold mine of embarrassing material.

#digitaltimetravel throwbackthursday

#watching the watchmen

#everything I need to know

#going dark

Farming for Loot!

"For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less...

along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business..."

What!? This to me was crazy! I had heard of people buying accounts from such services, but I didn't know how much people were making while making these accounts. If they work 12 hours a day, for five days and earn $80,000 a year, that's roughly $26 an hour. That to me is ridiculous. I have never really understood why people buy accounts when they could put in a few more hours in doing in reaching the same goal, with no money added. I understand that people may want to skip the hard and boring parts of a game, but I just have the feeling that this tactic would make you less likely to stay with the game, it may become boring. On the other hand, this sounds like as an awesome and boring job. You set a new account and just start looting for resources? That sounds super boring, but if you're making $26/hour, where do I sign up? I guess it would help you play on your own account, if you aren't bored of the game.

If you aren't willing to put in the time, what's there to keep you playing? If companies are making this type of money in China, why have I not heard of a company in America that does this, or anywhere else? Where can I get a job like this?

#ascholarsayswhat?

Live! 3/7/2016

1:30 - Powerpoint from Nolan Pfeifer on War Games!

1:32 - Military games let a person take on the 'soldier identity'. Arma 3, first-person shooter. PC Gamer's Simulation of the Year in 2013.

1:34 - Worked on details, uses 15 different stances to improve infantry combat. Vehicles have health, must bandage ones self when injured. Uses day and night cycle.

1:36 - Focuses on collaboration between team members. Contains PVP and PVE. The coordination between the different branches of military.

1:39 - Arma 3 teaches players many tactics that military personnel use in their own training.

1:45 - Nolan finishes up his presentation. Start watching a video called 'Can Virtual Experiences Change Us?' Technology that rewrites how we enter a battlefield.

1:48 - The addition of drones have given soldiers a new look at how they fight battles. No need for soldiers to enter the battle if the drone can complete the mission with no ally casualties.

1:50 - The pilots do care about civilian casualties, but its hard to tell who the hit. The black and white monitor can not tell them the who they have all hit, they just see the bomb hitting.

1:52 - Many of these pilots still deal with PTSD. Many of these soldiers use video games to unwind.

1:54 - Military uses video game tournaments to help recruit or look at future prospects for the military, helps to let recruiters talk to kids.

1:58 - Militainment lecture.

2:03 - The using of video games as a recruiting tool for the military.

2:06 - What is it that is becoming more realistic? What are not rendered faithfully? Photorealism.

2:15 - What do these games leave out? No explanation of why we fight in these games. The emotions that are left out of war.

2:20 - Class is out!

#liveblog it

Two Thumbs for Mortal Kombat X!

Mortal Kombat X

The newest addition to the side scrolling fighter series, is Mortal Kombat X (MKX). Released in 2015, the game is nothing short of gruesome and gory. MKX brings back the intensity that the series has been lacking with its recent titles. The game has added many new features to keep the game somewhat relevant. Its four new characters since its release and has announced four new characters to come soon. MKX have done many things right for the series, it added a feature known as Faction Wars. You can join a faction and you compete with other online players to see who has the best faction. The player can complete Towers, fighting numerous foes to reach the top and fight the leader. MKX has excellent graphics and terrifying sound effects. With the addition of characters like, Predator, Alien, Jason Voorhees, and Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) it helps to add variety to the series. The game, however, does lack the number of game types you can play. The game could be compared to its rival Street Fighter, these two titles have been releasing games for awhile now.

My personal opinion, is that I loved it, and I definitely recommend it. If you love the series, and don't mind all the gruesome video and sound effects, you'll love it too. Mortal Kombat has always been a great game to play with friends and this game doesn't shy away from the connection you can get from playing with others. From button smashing to learning combos, MKX has great playability.

#two thumbs up for one ups

Wait, what?

Stahl talks about how video games have helped create simulators as training mechanisms for the military. Do these simulators have an effect on how soldiers are affected by the battlefields? The soldier could be a top notch video gamer, excels in the simulator training, but will the military be able to simulate other things that may happen on the battlefield? "Will computer games win the war on terrorism?"

Stahl cites 9/11 as the reason for the "boom in sales" on military video games. Do you think if such an event didn't occur and the wars that followed never happened, would we have such a successful genre of video games?

Do you think these games are good or bad propaganda for war?

#wait what?

Militatinment

Militainment

"In addressing her reader as 'soldier,' Kennedy highlights a crucial aspect of the video game war: the invitation to cross over and try on a soldier identity. Twenty-first-century war games no longer project only a distant mock-up of military matters. Rather, games have become part and parcel of informationage warfare, merging the home front and the battlefield through multiple channels." (War Games, 92)

It seems like today, most of the top selling games are first-person shooters dealing with military actions. So many titles have emerged such as Call of Duty, Homefront, Battlefield, and plenty of others. There are futuristic war games such as Halo and Gears of War. Battlefields recent title, Battlefield: Hardline, dealt with cops and robbers, a nice twist to their normal games. Call of Duty has 12 different games dating back to 2003. Now three companies, Treyarch, Sledgehammer, and Infinity Ward, switch off every year to release a game. It seems that the first/third-person military shooters have stayed relevant. A lot of game genres peak and then fade, but this genre has seemed to stay alive.

Do you think this genre can stay alive for the next five years? With this genre becoming so popular, it has been for awhile, do you think it has caused a lot of people to join the military? Are the few current and last generations trading in controllers for desert boots?

#ascholarsayswhat?

Chapter 12 of Reality

"Pilot experimentation is the process of designing and running many small tests of different strategies and solutions in order to discover the best course of action to take. When you've successfully tested a strategy, you can scale up your efforts to make a bigger impact."

This to me represented how video game companies have been more releasing Betas to have gamers test out. They release a small version of the game to either a small group of players or to the public. This helps to find certain bugs within the game that the developers may have not thought of or found before. Also, company's have started releasing Game Previews, this is essentially the game, but also a Beta. With a recent game, Layers of Fear, they had a one hour game trial or you could purchase the game. The game hadn't released yet, but you could purchase what was already available. This quote, I thought, represented such actions. The most recent beta that I played, was for The Division. Personally, I thought the beta really helped to sell the game, even though it hasn't been released yet.

With pilot episodes to a series and betas to a game, do you think we will see more betas in the future? We already see quite a few with bigger titles, but will they move on towards smaller titles?

#ascholarsayswhat?

Two Thumbs Up for One Ups - Destiny

Destiny is an open world based first-person shooter. It brings together three classes; Hunter, Warlock, and Titan. Each class has its own separate special abilities. The game is best known for its social interaction. From grinding in Raids to playing in its hardcore multiplayer game types. Destiny thrives on playing with friends. There are multiple things to be done in Destiny, campaign, strikes (playing through a specific level to fight a sort of mini-boss), raids (a destination to fight off mini-bosses to reach the main boss), and multiplayer. Each game type, from campaign to strikes, requires a team, while some things can be done solo, it helps to have other guardians. The game has added much content to help gain back players, but the lack of keeping old content relevant has hurt Bungie in the long run. With a lot of misinterpreting information, the addition of microtransactions, false information, and attending to players in ways that don't quite make sense, has caused Destiny to become irrelevant. The game has announced a content addition for later this year and a sequel for next year, hopefully this will bring back players.

Destiny is a great game playing with friends. If you are unfortunate to play by yourself, you will not be able to gain access to gear that others can. I do recommend Destiny, when it was relevant. I hope for the game to make its comeback.

#two thumbs up for one ups

Reality Chapter 11

"-On average, each MP expensed twice his or her annual salary, or more than (Pound) 140,000 in expenses on top of a P60,675 salary.

- The total cost to taxpayers of personal items expensed by MPs is P88 million annually...

- Online maps comparing travel expenses filed with actual distance from the House of Commons in London to the MPs' home districts... districts who filed P21,534 versus P4,418, or P10,105 versus P1,680."

At first I couldn't decide if the numbers were as large as I thought, so I decided to start converting them to US dollars. According to the text, in US dollars, the expenses the MPs were gathering was at $195,372.80. with a salary of $84,673.18. And the taxpayers were paying $122,805,760.00. That to me is a lot of money. With the traveling expenses, $30k was estimated verse an actual $6k travel. Its amazing what the players for 'Investigate Your MPs Expenses' really found out.

A question or concern that I would have, would be, how did they not know the MPs were taking advantage of their power? Or did they know, and 'everyone was doing it'? If the government knowingly gave the documents as the expense forms and receipts as they were, did they know about the scandals?

#ascholarsayswhat?

Questions, Reality 5&6

A question that I had right off the bat was, what the heck is Lexulous!? I've never heard of such game on Facebook. That seems crazy since she talked about moms playing the game. Also, who adds their parents, besides me?

McGonigal refers to video games having 'Epic' moments and that real life has no value compared to them. If you had 'epic' moments in real life as often as you do in video games, would we become jaded to life, bored as we do with video games?

The prosocial emotion, happy embarrassment. if you play online video games or have even heard comedians today, they talk about the little kid on the microphone trash-talking. The kid is saying words that most adults wouldn't say or have even heard. Does this promotion of happy embarrassment promote crude embarrassment? When do you draw the line, when are we not having fun anymore? Do these behaviors drift into the real world?

#wait what?

Reality, 5&6.

"In April 2009, Halo 3 players celebrated a collective spine-tingling milestone: 10 billion kills against their virtual enemy, the Covenant... they averaged 17.5 million Covenant kills a day, 730,000 kills per hour and 12,000 kills a minute."

This quote blows my mind, that's a lot of Covenant kills. The game came out on September 25, 2007, and roughly a year and a half later they have 10 billion Covenant kills!? What really blows my mind, is all the content that was built into Halo 3, campaign and the wide variety of multiplayer games. You have some players that may play the campaign once and never go back, Team Slayer awaits. Just kidding Team Swat is the real game mode. You would also have players play the game on Normal or Easy, then maybe play 4-player co-op for the Legendary experience (which was an amazing and difficult experience.) 12,000 kills a minute, that is a ridiculous number for a year and a half. What I really want to say, is that the Halo community is awesome, Bungie created a great culture and built many friendships. As McGonigal states "... just because the kills don't have value doesn't mean they don't have meaning." It is nice to think of yourself as being apart of something more, these players may not have even known they were accomplishing such a feat, and they weren't really rewarded when they did. The community seemed so satisfied that it didn't even matter. Players went on to keep playing Halo 3, one of the best games to date.

A question that I would have for the class, "If you know that you wont be rewarded or even acknowledged, would you still participate in a real life movement? Is that personal satisfaction? I understand that people are in movements all the time, such as race or religious movements, do those differ from killing the Covenant?

#ascholarsayswhat?

2/24/2016

1:33 - Carson starts his presentation on "Fiero Moments." Fiero means Pride. "...how we feel after we triumph...'

1:35 - Rocket League. First three weeks, 5 million downloads off of Steam. Detailed description of the game.

1:39 - Tying back to Fiero.

1:42 - Carson finishes his presentation.

1:46 - "Lets talk about games, and why they are satisfying."

1:47 - Broken into groups of eight.

1:50 - Defining Fiero and Flow.

1:58 - Examples of Fiero and Flow. Flow, work.

2:03 - Games are great to induce Flow and Fiero.

2:04 - Difference between 'work' and 'play.'

2:11 - Criteria to make work satisfying? What are we looking for to make it satisfying? Goals, feedback, purpose, and the steps to reach such goals.

2:16 - Which criteria are present in games that are in 'real life?'

2:20 - Class is out for the day!

#liveblog it!

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