TASK 3 & 4

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I have always been fascinated with fashion and how it relates to its time. So when I saw the ‘Wearing Propaganda’ book, I was intrigued. The book contained lots of useful pictures and different types of references to the different propaganda fashion in the UK, Japan and the United States. I found this interesting because all these countries listed had their own propaganda. It shows how even at this time, (1921-1949) fashion was increasingly becoming a very important symbol, especially for women at the time; and being accepted for the advertisement of political propaganda.

Atkins, J.M.A., and Dower J.W.D (2005) Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931-1945. New York: Yale University Press

 

I wanted to consider more detail about propaganda and found this very interesting website about Propaganda Scarves. What really interested me was the fact these scarves were produced during WWII depicting ‘militaristic iconography, patriotic flags and maps’ and then sold to profit the war effort. It was very fascinating to know that something a trivial as selling scarves could help the war effort, and it showed every means of raising money was accepted. Paired with the fact the prints took a much needed ‘jolly’ twist on the what was a gruesome war.

Alfiesantiques (2014) Propaganda Scarves. Available From: http://alfiesantiques.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/propaganda-scarves.html [Accessed 24 January 2014]

Finally, I found this newspaper article about the famous ‘Women Also Serve’, which was a political milestone for the acceptance as women as capable workers. And how the efforts of women helped drive the war to success. The article explains simple things that women could do to help the efforts, including something as simple as mending soldier’s clothes.

 

The Australian Women’s Weekly (1939) Women Also Serve. The Australian Women’s Weekly, 30 December, 30-31.

task 7&8

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<Taste, fashion and the French fashion magazine> is the article I chosen to read.

In the first paragraph, I knew that the fashion magazine was originated in France in seventeenth Century, the role of the magazine is not only to record the process of fashion and the development of art, but also to promote the development of fashion.

In the next paragraph, I knew how does the fashion magazine appear (1627) and what form it appears. And then, in the years of 1768, fashion magazine got the official publication and the “taste” of fashion come out.

 

How to prove this thing is art or fashion, the problem began to be discussed, after a lot of experiments, that everyone has their own views on art, their taste, this is a very inspired me, everyone looks at each work has its own thoughts and opinions, because of this, the world is colorful, fashion is also various, in my opinion, different fashion together can be considered a real fashion.

 

Fashion magazines may not completely change the way people appreciate their beauty, but they can tell people how to dress, how to entertain, how to change some interior decorations, and tell people about their interests and customs. It also improves people’s fashion taste

 

Even in some art or paintings, there are also differences between fashion and clothing, such as Claude-Louis Desrais, Pierreomas LeClerc and Antoine Watteau “s grandnephew, Fran ois-Louis-Joseph Watteau (Morini 2006: C 32.), we can see in the illustration to the different class system of clothing is not the same, can tell the clothing tell the difference between people and history in the fashion clothing at the same time.

I really like this sentence, “Le Brun Tossa intended the concepts of fashion and taste to be regarded as fulïŹlling the same function: if fashion could be aligned with taste, it could also—very conveniently—be regarded as a form of art, and if fashion could indeed be regarded as a form of art, then it would also legitimately become the proper remit of the faculty of taste”.

Different types of clothes can present different culture and life style, people have the right to choose, fashion magazine could be one of the most influential way to spread.

Art and fashion are not conflict, fashion comes from art, and art comes from fashion.

So the transformation process of fashion magazine recorded the clothing style, also marks the transition to modern history, not only in fashion, of which there are many potential such as history, society, history, so I think the fashion magazine is a very meaningful product.

Task 10

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Repetition
Reproduce
Swirl
Chance
Intention
Colour
Control
Aesthetic
Discussion
Abstract

My practice involves exploration of the physically/materiality of paint and the act of painting, which is why I used the words chance and intention, abstract. I also like the idea of collecting, and repeating, working with materials and results at hand, which is why I used the word repetition and reproduce. Colour, aesthetic and swirl describes my style of painting however intentional or unintentional I try, my work always takes on a playful, pretty aesthetic. I used the word discussion because I like to hear the discussion around one of my abstract pieces, I like reaction bad or good. I like to hear what thoughts and questions it brings up.

Ben Teague – Skill Stamina and Luck (week 3)

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Select one example to outline the key concepts of the interactive narrative genre?:

The most recent one I can think of is “Life is Strange” created by Don’t nod Entertainment. It is an interactive narrative game, about a young girl called Max, which gives the player the ability to rewind and change the past and future. “The idea behind interactive storytelling is to reconcile narrativity with interaction.”(Ercim.eu, 2017) It features all of these points that make in an interactive narrative game; a well written and engaging story that is told to the player as they progress and narrative choices for the player to engage in.
But a game doesn’t have to include them to be interactive and narrative. It just lies in them two words. First being interactive; it has to have some way for the player to actually interactive with the game, such as; moving, deciding, figuring out, etc. It also has to include narrative, usually in the form of a story. I don’t know how else you could include a narrative without a story, but I am sure there are ways.

Does the interactive narrative still have a role to play in video games today. Give exemplary examples?:

Yes it does. Ever since TellTaleGames started producing and saturating the market with interactive story games, such as: The Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, Tales From the Borderlands, etc. Players, such as myself, have realized how fun them types of games can be. I don’t agree with the amount of games that TellTaleGames have produced, but I do want to see more, especially if they are anything like The Wolf Among Us. TellTaleGames, do interaction the best (so far) that I have seen, they make you feel really engaged with the character you are playing as, and you feel as if you have a big toll on the story. However, I would prefer it if the games produced were original an entirely created by the developers, because obviously all of TellTaleGames productions are of someone else’s work, so more along the lines of Life Is Strange. To date, I think that is the best Interactive Narrative game ever produced. And I would openly welcome more games of it’s type into my library and so would thousands of other players.

Bibliography:
Ercim.eu. (2017). Interactive Storytelling: the Rise of a New Game Genre?. [online] Available at: https://www.ercim.eu/publication/Ercim_News/enw57/cavazza.html [Accessed 6 Dec. 2017].

Interactive Narrative

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The key concepts of interactive narrative games.

Interactive narrative games date far back, but the ones we will look at are the Fighting Fantasy books created by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. When these books came out they became an instant hit as they allowed readers to forge their own path through a fantasy world. This allure gathered a huge following. The books consisted of numbered paragraphs in which the reader would choose a path and navigate through the numbers they were told to help create their own story. The player had to navigate their way through the book whilst they may have rules to restrict them and different mechanics to challenge them. The reader has to decide on a path and accept the consequences of their choice, whether they be immediate consequences or later down the line.

The books acted as a game that the reader could play by themselves which was revolutionary at the time. By rolling a dice at the beginning of the game they could create character stats such as luck and skill which meant that the story would never be the same as they could have a different character every time. This decision made the game very popular and would later inspire other games. The link below is an interesting article on the Fighting Fantasy books and how they were created. The webpage also has numerous articles on who Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson were as well as how to obtain these books.

  1. http://officialfightingfantasy.blogspot.co.uk/p/what-is-fighting-fantasy.html

A key question is whether or not Interactive narrative is still valid and used in modern games. And the answer to that is simply, yes. There are plenty of modern games that successfully nurture the interactive narrative genre. From episodic titles such as TellTales Walking Dead. This game as an example is a good example of an interactive narrative. The game has you play a character and progress through different environments by making choices which lead you down different paths and change the nature of the game. Some choices may result in you losing and some change how the game can be played and eliminate other options from the game.

This article below on the web page talks about how interactive narrative video games have been changing throughout the years and the how the change in technology has had an impact on them. It mentions games such as Colossal Cave, Zoark and Kings Quest whist talking about how they had an impact on gaming at the time. Whether or not the success of the games are clear, what is clear is that interactive narrative will continue to be a part of gamings future. This is evident by the release of upcoming titles such as Detroit – Become Human, which is an extremely anticipated game that is completely based around interactive narrative. You’ll see the player choosing between a large variety of options without knowing the outcome and having to deal with the consequences which is what interactive games are all about.

  1. https://www.imore.com/colossal-cave-walking-dead-legacy-interactive-fiction

 

task 8

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After being inspired by a lecture by Roxana Halls I decided to use her work for my appropriation task. The painting I chose to appropriate is called ‘Laughing While Eating Strawberries’ and was made in 2015 Oil on Linen. This portrait is of a women eating strawberries maniacally looking up at the food laughing. The painting has an obvious colour scheme of blue and red tones. Halls made this in disagreement to women who give up identity and people who think a women can only indulge in food once they look really pretty. She says that she envisions her paintings and what she wants them to look like before starting a piece. I find this to be an interesting concept as working from a mental image relates a lot to memory. As a play on this idea of memory. The method in which I chose to distort the image was to glitch it. This affected the colouring of the image in interesting ways I hadn’t preconceived, for example, exaggerating the blues into turquoise’s and reds into pinks and purples. The glitch also created horizontal lines of colour across the work contrasting against the naturalistic style of the painting and also making it impossible to see some of the painting. This is also symbolic of memory as sometimes we remember parts of a memory but not the full memory e.g. some things in memory are clearer than others.

HCI

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 A) select one game of your interest and explain why does it have a good/bad game UI 

The Crypt of the Necrodancer is the game that whose UI I will be looking at as the layout is one that one an average game may seem cluttered but within the context of the game works so well. Now good UI has been described as something that “tells you what you need to know, and then gets out of the way.” (Desi Quintans 2013) Now with Crypt of the Necrodancer, the UI tells you what you need to know but doesn’t really go away as most of the information remains on-screen at all times, the only part of the UI that will ‘get out of the way’ is the pause menu screen. This approach isn’t all bad as there is still a good majority of screen dedicated to where the player and the world is.

Considering that the gameplay is made to be played in-time with the tempo of the music, having a UI like say Morrowind would be impractical and would make the game harder, possibly throwing players out of time with the music. The only brought up menu, the pause menu, stops the music whenever summoned and resumes the music at the exact point it left off when gameplay is resumed.

Everything on the games UI is necessary information to the gameplay and although a little claustrophobic the lack of boarders or boxes surrounding the UI prevents the screen from being too enclosed and tight, allowing the player to still be able to play the game and access the information easily.

B) discuss how technology augments human abilities. Reflect upon the implications of the future of HCI. 

Browsing through related articles for this question I stumbled upon an article on an article from a technology news website that explained how technology, specifically mobile phones and cameras augment humans and the weakness that is our memory. I thought that that was an interesting statement and the article explained itself very well saying that “nearly every human technological invention was designed to augment a fundamental weakness of human beings.” (Ben Bajarin 2017)

Expanding from that, cameras, video recorders, GoPros and other mobile devices are all, in some way, a form of memory augmentation. Why? Because they make better our ability to remember by capturing the image, sound and movement of the scene which can later be looked back on or posted to social media for others to see. Just from the evolution of cameras from large devices that had to be propped up on stands, with limited capabilities and constant errors to HD quality cameras that are in-built into most smartphones we can only assume that the technology will only become more adept to the active lifestyle humans leave.

A possible future for the devices that augment our memories could be the ability to record and keep track of actual memories from the perspective of the user much like the implant technology found in Black Mirror’s Season 1 Episode 3 ‘The Entire History of You’. The implant in that records memories which can be rewatched and reviewed like video clips on a phone. Sure the show has a darker take on technology and our relationship with it but the idea of this kind of technology being physically possible isn’t too much of a stretch.

 

Quintans, D (2013) Game UI By Example: A Crash Course in the Good and the Bad. [online] Available at: https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/game-ui-by-example-a-crash-course-in-the-good-and-the-bad–gamedev-3943 [Accessed 2 December 2017]
Bajarin, B. (2017) Technology is created to augment the fundamental weaknesses of human beings. [online] Available at: https://www.recode.net/2017/6/20/15841086/smartphone-camera-sensor-augment-human-memory-technology-mobile [Accessed 2 December 2017]
Lamble, R (2011) Black Mirror episode 3 review: The Entire History or You [online] Available at: http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/10738/black-mirror-episode-3-review-the-entire-history-of-you [Accessed 2 December]

W9 Own

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  1. What do you see as the positives and negatives around copyright?

Copyright is a system that allows people to have total ownership of their own intellectual property. This already sounds wonderful as a concept and if you take the definition given by The UK Copyright Service it seemingly gets better as it states that “ It gives the author specific rights in relation to the work, prohibits unauthorised actions, and allows the author to take legal action against instances of infringement or plagiarism.”. That’s great right? Anything new I make is protected and belongs to me. The problem with it is enforcing copyright law is expensive so if something you do does get copied, if the company is big enough, it’s probably not worth the time and resources to sue them for it. The obvious plus is that you have the right to sue them of course, but I wouldn’t call it time well spent unless you’re able to make a considerable amount of money from doing it.

 

References

Unknown (n.d.) Summary of intellectual property rights. The UK Copyright Service. Available at: https://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/intellectual_property

2. Is it possible to make anything new?

Absolutely. The easiest example is to shuffle a deck of cards. There are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations of a deck of 52 cards and based on the number of potential outcomes It is stupidly unlikely that the order of the cards in your hand has ever been seen before in all of human history. The same theory goes for simply drawing a line on a piece of paper. Has there ever been a line like it in history? There are more than likely many very similar lines but maybe the length or curvature or line weight of your line varies from them making it unique. But that is all small generally irrelevant stuff. It is definitely possible to make new things but bare in mind there will always be similarities to many other things as our minds take inspiration and ideas from everything we come across in everyday life, whether we like it or not.

 

References

Unknown (n.d.) One of A Kind, Quite Interesting Limited. Available at: http://qi.com/infocloud/playing-cards

 

Dieter Rams 10 Principles of good design

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Dieter Rams 10 principles of good design can be seen in many modern day inventions, from kettles to phones. He states that good design should:

Be innovative
Make a product useful
Is aesthetic
Make a product understandable
Be unobtrusive
Be honest
Be long lasting
Be thorough down to the last detail
Be environmentally friendly
Involves as little design as possible

Cell phones when created are always pushed as being unique and are finding new ways to be innovative. When they first were released they were incredibly basic and had limited functions. However they were still innovative in the way that they were a new and unique product which drew people’s attention. When phones moved from physical buttons to touchscreen it could be considered good design as it makes the product simpler to use by removing multiple mechanical parts and making the products more aesthetically pleasing. They become more aesthetically pleasing over time with sleeker appearances and smoother edges.
These are a few of the ways that cell phone companies take Dieter Rams 10 principles and create new innovative products.

The website below (1) shows how phones evolved over time with new innovations in technology and the impact that had on the public. Dieter Rams 10 principles aren’t just applied to physical objects though. Looking at a toaster you know what you’re doing, and this should be the same for a webpage. Your webpage shouldn’t be confusing to figure out how to access it and use it properly, its should be honest and thorough. So as you can see web pages are another thing that the 10 principles could easily be applied to. The website below (2) showcases Dieter Rams 10 principles and how they take it into account when designing web pages.

  1. https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/evolution-of-mobile-phones/
  2. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/dieter-rams-10-timeless-commandments-for-good-design

 

The second part of the question would be whether these 10 principles are relevant in games design today. And i can honestly say its not going to be as simple as a yes or no answer, more of a “they can be useful” answer. Now straight away i would say that they are not relevant in modern gaming due to the complexity of games nowadays. Games such as dark souls, whilst aesthetically pleasing and innovative, is not easily understandable and involves a huge amount of design. And you can consider many games to be obtrusive today as they perform their function of entertainment yet also provide frustration and can break easily.
However, not all games share these same issues.  Games can actually use all 10 principles or at least most of them and these principles help to design these games. For example the game Magic the Gathering. A card game which utilizes the ten principles put forth by Dieter Rams. Below is a link which explains how they have been implemented into the game. In the article he talks through the different principles and how that applies to him as a card designer and how these impact the choices he makes and the way people perceive the cards.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/ten-principles-good-design-part-1-2010-05-03

 

Reference:

Image 1:  http://unit30distinctiond1.blogspot.co.uk/

 

W6 Artificial Intelligence

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  1. Behavioural modelling is an important part of NPC development for games. Should emotive modelling be part of that development?

For human NPCs, the exact emulation of human nature is the ultimate goal. It is a seemingly impossible goal as much of the human mind is still not totally understood and human nature doesn’t have one way of working but still developers will try their very best to create characters that represent people as closely as possible. In the interest of creating as accurate a representation as possible, emotive modelling should definitely be a part of NPC development. Currently developers make characters appear human and often work around giving characters emotions by programming them to respond specifically to scripted events. for example in many RPGs killing a passive character will anger certain characters causing them to attack where as other characters will become fearful instead and run away. Both of these are portrayals of emotion however it is very noticeably scripted where emotive modelling in combination with the normal behavioural modelling would make the response seem more natural and representative of an actual human.

 

2. Consider your favorite video game. If it contains AI controlled agents how individualistic are they and their behaviors, and, how might you set about improving them?

Taking Civilization V as an example for individualistic AI is like taking Brian May as an example of a ‘good’ guitarist. Each character in Civ V is a world leader from history and they were all thoroughly researched to create an AI that truly represented that leaders personality traits as accurately as possible. That said there are definitely many things wrong with Civ V. In fact there was one bug from the original civilisation game that was so wrong and so humorous that the developers decided to play on that bug in every game following it.

The bug as described in these images causes Gandhi, arguably one of the most peaceful leaders in human history, to become more aggressive than what should be possible within the games restraints. Immediately there is room for improvement to this AI however I also personally love this bug and it’s hilarity within the flow of play is something I quite enjoy.

Unknown (n.d.) Tumblr

Aside from deliberately kept bugs there are still many things wrong with the games AI. For example the AI characters don’t understand the concept of hypocrisy as they will often tell you not to settle a city near to their land but will then settle right next to you very shortly after. In the latest iteration, Civ VI, this action can be used as a reason to declare war on an opponent however the act still occurs far too frequently and is something that I think could be improved upon, not necessarily by removing it completely but by making it a more deeply considered action by factoring in how close the nearest non-friendly city is.

 

Reference

Various Unknown (n.d.) Tumblr, available at: https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/78145553694/chaz-gelf-sixmilliondeadinternets-gandhi-has