#They should invent a me that has executive function when not immediately threatened | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fallingfromaboveget1033-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Reflection Puah Jia Hui (A0160171U)

1. Introduction

Out of all the interesting lessons that we were introduced to each week, we found that “video games” is the most relatable topic as all of us have played video games before at least once in our lifetime, and we are still actively doing so. Thus, we believed that video game is the area we would like to explore in this final project and we hope to apply the concepts we learned in classes into the domain we interested in.

This project is a 2D mobile game on Android created using Unity with the objectives of being simple and addictive to players. We learned about OpenProcessing during the tutorials, and we believe that although the platform allows us to create digital art and video games within minutes effortlessly, it still has its limitations. Thus, we decided to build out game with Unity, the world’s leading real-time engine, due to its benefits: it’s free, multi-platform (Android, iOS, Windows) development, and the abundance of online tutorials for us to learn from scratch.

2. Connecting to ideas learnt

In week 2’s lecture of history and development of computation, we learnt that computers have evolved from single-purpose machines to universal computer (in which Charles Babbage is credited for the first computer design and Alan Turing being credited for the design’s realisation). An universal computer is a device that captures input and reacts according to the rules specified. A true universal computer is able to adapt and perform any function of other computers. The idea of universal computers being able to do virtually anything based on our codes is very intriguing to us. This invention allows us to work on the project in the first place, and we decided to use this creation to create a video game.

We learnt about many different kind of video games in week 4. Video games have evolved not just digitally, but also physically based on the machines that they are played on. Gaming machines have changed from 8-bit machines to home computers to home consoles to handheld consoles. Since video games on mobile phones have been more popular in recent times, we decided to use mobile devices as the platform for our project.

The rest of the concepts and ideas learnt are stated in subsequent sections.

3. Critical Analysis

Written Rhetoric

Written rhetoric is the art of how a creator/author can influence his or her audience through words. The instructions of the game are written clearly in text form, allowing the players to comprehend the mechanics and the objective of the game. The difficulty levels (i.e. easy, medium, hard) are written under each character in the character selection screen, where different character determines the difference in difficulty of the game.

Visual Rhetoric

It is necessary to analyse how non-verbal media, in image and video form, produces arguments, which is known as visual rhetoric. In our game, the three different characters were drawn in order to match their difficulty. The smallest character, a petite turtle, symbolizes the easiest difficulty. The average-sized lion determines the normal difficulty of the game. Finally, the big and oversized elephant signifies the hardest difficulty. The fruits laid out in the game asserts that they are beneficial to the players when collected. However, the threatening spiky durians would induce players to avoid them. The strength of the tiles spawning throughout the game are also symbolized by what they are made of. The first phase of the game spawns tiles made of ice which can be easily destroyed. After achieving certain points, tiles made from earth (i.e. soil and grass) are spawned which shows the difference in sturdiness when compared to ice tiles. Lastly, thick wooden tiles are spawned after the second milestone, emphasizing on the strength of the tiles’ endurance. The spikes on the ceiling and floor of every instance of the screen induces the fear of the character’s death, which the player should avoid.

Procedural Rhetoric

According to Bogost (2007), procedural rhetoric is the art of influencing through processes such as computational rules. The concept of procedural rhetoric could be applied to a large extent in our project especially because it is a video game. Firstly, each character falls downward with different speeds. The petite turtle falls the slowest, while the average-sized lion falls at normal speed, and the heaviest-looking elephant falling at the highest speed. The speed of each character is the main differentiation between each difficulty level. The number of hits required to break the tiles represents the strength of each tiles. The relatively fragile ice tiles requires 1 hit to break, earth tile requiring 2 hits, and the sturdiest wooden tiles requiring 3 hits. The different number of fruits collected affects the final outcome (I.e. score) of the game. The fresh fruits collected by the player increase the score, while the score decreases when the player hits the spiky durians. Touching the spikes at the edges of the screen immediately ends the game.

4. Four Affordances

Janet H. Murray’s four affordances are used to describe the different functional properties of a digital medium (Murray, 2011).

Spatial

Low: Spatial affordance refers to information repository that can be navigated through virtual space. The virtual space is technically endless in our project, as the background and position of the character continues to move until the game ends. However, the frames and background are actually the same, thus it doesn’t show that the game is very spatial virtually.

Encyclopedic

Low: Encyclopedic affordance refers to the amount of information stored in various forms. Other than the instructions and character names, the project does not have any information.

Participatory

Medium: Participatory Affordance refers to the input from organism action used to create interactivity. Due to the nature of the project, user inputs from mobile phones’ touchscreen are crucial for controlling the game. However, user inputs are not entirely necessary for the game to run. Even if there is no input from the user, the character still moves downwards (although the game would end very quickly though).

Procedural

Medium: Procedural affordance refers to the executable rules. The game reacts according to the different conditions met during the gameplay. The character swerving left and right and pressing the “dig” button to break the tiles are examples of the rules coded into the game. Due to the game being fairly simple and straightforward, it does not have many complex executable rules, thus the medium “score”.

5. How does it make use of the new abilities of computers?

Because of the advancement of computer over the years, development projects are becoming easier and quicker to develop with new software, libraries and frameworks. Unity Engine allows us to test our source code on the go and also let us share our codes between each other easily through Unity Collaboration. This is achievable through the largest network of computers – Internet. The internet connects our machines together for us to communicate and share codes.

Although we do not have enough knowledge, we have thought of ways to implement new abilities of computers in the future. One example could be to convert our project from using graphical user interface to using tangible user interface. We believe that it would increase the interactive aspect of the game if the players are able to control the digital game through physical environment. An example would be changing the game for the character to jump on tiles to move upwards. The character would jump upwards in different directions, and players would have to place physical blocks on the interface to prevent the character from dropping downwards.

Another implementation would be virtual reality. The idea of allowing the player to be immersed in the digital world allows for a whole new experience. This enables the player to experience the falling sensation to a certain extent, increasing the entertainment value of the game.

6. How does it build off other projects you have seen?

During the phase of brainstorming, my group members and I talked about the games that we have played before. “Icy Tower” is one of the projects that came to mind. It is a game where the character jumps on tiles to reach high levels. The player loses should the character falls off and touch the bottom of the screen. Instead of the character jumping upwards, we decided to modify the game and let the character fall downwards in our project.

Other features of the game were inspired by the different game projects on OpenProcessing discovered during our tutorials. We picked up the syntax of programming languages (E.g. JavaScript) along the way and use that knowledge in our project. We have also discovered some games created with Unity Engine. Due to the limitations of OpenProcessing, we decided to use Unity Engine as the platform for our project and occasionally use Unity projects as reference.

7. Conclusion

Throughout the course of this project, I’ve picked up C# and how to use the Unity Platform. Although the language is new to me, it didn’t take much time for me to adapt to it due to me having knowledge of Java. The project allows me to apply many interesting concepts learnt in lectures and tutorials and also enables me to understand them more deeply. The idea of using an universal computer to develop programs is very intriguing and I hope to use it to create digital mediums of a different category, such as digital art and digital fabrication, in the future.

Reference

Bogost, I. (2007) The Expressive Power of Videogames: Procedural Rhetoric. Murray, J. (2011, November 20) Four Affordances. Retrieved from https://inventingthemedium.com/four-affordances/

0 notes

republicstandard · 7 years ago

Text

Who Are We?: Toward a Positive Western Identity

“For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.”-Arnold Schwarzenegger

This is Western Man in a nutshell. Never was there a population as dynamic as we. From the North Pole to the Race to the South Pole, the discoveries of the Americas, Oceania, and the Orient, the circumnavigation of the globe, from the conquest of the highest peaks to the Space Race, and now the push for Mars, all have been products first of the European imagination, and then of European execution.

An Italian discovered the Americas (and they are named for another); another Italian (though born in modern-day Croatia) connected Europe to the Orient over land, and a Portuguese man accomplished this by sea; another Portuguese man started the first global circumnavigation, which was completed by a Basque; Dutchmen first sighted Australia and New Zealand; an Englishman climbed the Matterhorn with nothing but a small flask of tea and a ham sandwich, and it was a Kiwi who ascended to the summit of Everest; though each of two Americans are often credited with first reaching the North Pole, this is disputed, but it was an American and a Norwegian who we definitively know first reached the North Pole, and that same Norwegian barely bested a British expedition for the South Pole; a Russian was the first man in space; an American first stepped foot on the moon, and it is another race between a white South African and another American most likely to have us on Mars.

The West is the birthplace of democracy and republicanism; of the Scientific Method and the Enlightenment; of cartography; of secularism; of the university; of the printing press, the internal combustion engine, electricity, flight, and the internet; of free market enterprise and precepts of equality that sought to eradicate slavery and global poverty. As Charles Murray chronicled in Human Accomplishment, 97% of accomplishments in the sciences from 800 BC to 1950 AD took place in the West. From prehistory to antiquity to modernity, it has been the progeny of Europe who have driven man’s advancement. For Ricard Duchesne:

The aristocratic libertarian culture of Indo-European speakers was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many war-making novelties and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of the first rational theology in history, Catholicism, were a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch making transformation in Europe is endless.

Western Man is defined by what Oswald Spengler termed his “Faustian Spirit”; as Duchesne enumerates, this Faustian Spirit is captured in:

the “infinite drive,” “the irresistible trust” of the Occident,

the “energetic, imperativistic, and dynamic” soul of the West, and

the “rational restlessness” of the West

of Hegel, Spengler, and Weber, respectively. There is something fundamentally different in the composition of our souls that places a premium on accomplishment, particularly against long odds. We have always been a global minority, and yet we have set the pace for humanity for millennia. Duchesne elaborates:

I believe that Oswald Spengler’s identification of the West as “Faustian” provides us with the best word to overcome the current naïve separation between a cultured/peaceable West and an uncivilized/antagonistic West with his image of a strikingly vibrant culture driven by a type of Faustian personality overflowing with expansive, disruptive, and imaginative impulses manifested in all the spheres of life.

For the Western spirit, complacency is death, hence why post-modernism and its “de-construction” has been so lethal to our civilization. When we are not moving forward and upward, we die, both literally and meta-physically. The inversion of the Faustian Spirit in the form of “progressivism” has taken the restive-yet-productive disposition of Europeans and channeled it into something wholly destructive. One could easily define the post-modern era as being in the stars and looking at the gutter. It isn’t enough that, as John Derbyshire wrote, “We have pretty much dismantled our civilization in an effort to accommodate blacks. And still they complain.” No, we must compound the egregiousness of the paternalistic nanny state to encompass the entire globe and sacrifice everything we hold dear at the altar of Progress. Mangled genitalia attached to prancing totalitarians in the streets, sitting ducks for the next Moslem-driven lorry to turn into tomato paste is not my idea of progress, yet somehow we have come to cherish the notion, as perverse as it may seem, that this is somehow a noble aim, or else it is our penance for even having the gall to exist.

We are meant to “problematize” the ways in which the delineation of borders, boundaries, and “the Other” shape notions of identity, and how, consequently, these often artificial distinctions may be misappropriated for use in nationalist and imperialist dogma in the dominant discourse, particularly as it pertains to the West. We are meant to abhor any assertion of Western identity as Nazism incarnate, but we must celebrate all other cultures and creeds (and orientations) in the pantheon of Progressivism. The burnt offerings of the past preclude any ability to remain discernibly “us”; guilt, cowardice, fear, the suffocation of alternative points of view, the retconning of the past, intellectual and identity dis-armament—all received as holy sacrament in the temple of the university, a Confirmation into the Church of Social Justice that is a Bachelor’s (or PhD) in the academy. We receive this catechism with blank minds and glazed eyes, conditioned to unquestioningly accept our own destruction. By colonizing the language, the Left has already claimed a strategic victory at that nexus of where the formulation of thoughts becomes expression. Even if people inherently feel that things are profoundly wrong, they may not be able to express those feelings adequately, or have the necessary conceptual or linguistic framework to articulate their anxieties.

“We live in a world of intense ugliness,” Jared Taylor said. The profane is now sacred, the Other venerated, the stranger more dear than our own flesh-and-blood. This is the Malformed Age, testaments to faith and achievement now drowned in an ocean of hideousness and degeneracy. The West is Scapegoat Eternal, even the ones who proclaimed to be conservatives failing to conserve a single thing, busy prostrating themselves before the Left’s cultural commissars, caught up in what Elizabeth Wright called the “Glenn Beck carnival of repentance.” In this Western Necropolis, the supposed sins of the past are omnipresent, the ghosts of a history that never was holding the present hostage while they call it progress. We are disembodied yet wholly tethered to the material, the deepest of contradictions held together with the firmest of hands. For Victor Davis Hanson:

The great immediate dangers to Western Civilization are not hunger, global warming, inequality, or religious fundamentalism, but obesity, consumer culture, utopian pacifism, multiculturalism, declining demography, the secular religion of political correctness that threatens the right to free speech, an inability to protect national borders and to create a common culture rooted in the values of the West, and an absence of belief in spiritual transcendence and reverence for past customs and traditions. The challenge is not just that Australians, Canadians, Europeans, and Americans increasingly cannot articulate the values that explain why throngs of immigrants migrate to their shores, but that even if they could, they feel that they probably should not.

In what Colin Liddell identified as our “anti-civilization,” what sits at the heart of Western civilization as it is presently constructed is a yawning void. As Bruce Thornton quipped; “No one will die for the E.U. flag, or a shorter work week, or a longer vacation, or afternoon adultery, or more porn on the Internet.” Now, it’s all well and good to identify that which besets our civilization, and I shall continue to diagnose those forces that imperil our existence, but we must understand what we are both defending and fighting for, for what defines us should be more than commercial goods, leisure time, and vague notions of “tolerance” and “inclusion.” Liddell points to the need for us to foster and develop a sense of positive civilizational identity once again, where we are defined by what we are, not by what we are not. To re-claim our national sovereignty, our identity, our civilization, we must re-discover what lies in our souls, what we know to be true, and we must learn to love it again—warts and all. For Garrett Deasy:

The extension of loving yourself is excluding those who do not belong; those whose love for your country depends on your tolerance of their subversion. Real patriotism in the end is nationalism. By loving ourselves and our own imagery, we will appear as a threat to those who can do nothing but meme us into their terrifying shadow. We are number one.

It’s high time we embrace that.

Thank you for reading Republic Standard. We publish this magazine and the Freebird Forum because we believe in free speech. Make a donation towards our running costs by clicking here.

The Republic Standard Web Shop is now open! Every piece of merchandise you buy is a victory against the nerds.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2t50VE2 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine

0 notes