Play Make Write Think

Author: David

Games Podcast: Further Details

Quests

Overview

This post contains lots of additional information that will be useful to you as you work on your podcast episodes, mostly focused on nuts and bolts issues like equipment, editing, and so on.

Check out the assignment prompt for conceptual guidelines and roles and for information about what I am expecting from you.

Equipment

If you are on campus, there is equipment that you can use to record your podcast episodes, including Student Digital Life’s Music and Audio Recording Studio.

The Writing Program has purchased 4 Yeti microphones and placed them on reserve with the Music and Media Library. If you check out one of the Yeti mics, you might want to skim over the manual here. There are a number of other microphones available for checkout as well, so if the Yeti mics are not available check out something else.

Because so many of us are separated from campus and from each other, however, it will be fine for you to record yourselves via Zoom. Make sure that you launch the call using your Emory Zoom account and record the call to the cloud. Whoever is hosting the call will get an email once the recording has finished compiling and from there can download the files from the call — there will be a text file with the contents of your chat, an mp4 with the video from the call, and an mp3 of the audio of your call. You can just download the mp3 and then edit it in Audacity to produce your episode. A short time later, Zoom should also add an additional text file with a transcript of the call. Download that file too and edit it into a transcript of your episode.

 

Audacity

Audacity is a good, free, open-source audio editor (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). It’s pretty standard software for mixing podcasts, so I recommend you give it a shot.

There is a very good tutorial wiki for Audacity online — this basic page on mixing voice narration with music probably covers 90% of what you’ll need to do for your podcast. It’s not terribly difficult, but there is a learning curve to it and you should definitely make an extra copy of your raw audio files before you start mixing and editing them. Expect for it to take longer than you think it should to do the sound editing and build time for mixing into your plans. There are some students in the class who have a fair amount of experience working with Audacity — make friends with them and ask them for help (make sure to give thanks for their help in your episode credits!).

 

Other Software

If you’re already very comfortable with using GarageBand or another sound editing software, you can use that instead.

Student Digital Life also has lots of resources that should be of use to you with this project. If you want to use more advanced software, the Media Lab has the full Adobe Creative Suite, including Adobe Audition, available and student assistants who can help you in using it. The Tech Lab is also a great space for you to go to get ideas about how to approach these projects. There are also gaming consoles available in Cox Computing, so if you want to explore games as new media you might stop by SDL and see what you can do.

Recording & mixing guidelines

As I say above, Audacity has a very good tutorial wiki. There is tons of information included there, but this single basic page on mixing voice narration with music probably covers 90% of what you’ll need to do for your podcast.

Transom is “a performance space, an open editorial session, an audition stage, a library, and a hangout” that seeks to spread good ideas and practices for public media, especially focused on audio. There’s lots of good stuff there and I encourage you to check them out.

Of special note: “Using Music: Jonathan Menjivar For This American Life.” Menjivar is a producer and music supervisor at This American Life and his essay is a fantastic breakdown of different methods for incorporating music into a podcast episode.

See also, the other pieces in the Transom “Using Music” series.

Podcast hoster Buzzsprout has a pretty good “Podcasting 101 Guide” with some useful tips, including about where to position yourself with regard to the microphone.

Music

You need to be careful when using music to not violate copyright law. Here are 4 really good sites to find Creative Commons licensed music that you are allowed to use (with attribution):

  • Free Music Archive. Mostly more contemporary music types, searchable by genre or by other methods.
  • Musopen. Public domain and creative commons licensed classical music.
  • Incompetech (Film music from Kevin Macleod)
  • ccMixter

Reprogramming a Game by Playing It

David's Posts

I am nowhere near an expert on the Super Mario Brothers games but this brand new world record speedrun of SMB3 in 3 minutes is both confusing and fascinating. Before last month, the record speed run of SMB3 was about 11 minutes, but Zikubi cut the time down by 75% by actively reprogramming the game as he played it in order to open a wormhole to the ending.

In an explanation of a much earlier speed run record the blogger Kottke explains the beauty he sees in such pursuits:

In the video analysis of this speedrun, if you forget the video game part of it and all the negative connotations you might have about that, you get to see the collective effort of thousands of people over more than three decades who have studied a thing right down to the bare metal so that one person, standing on the shoulders of giants in a near-perfect performance, can do something no one has ever done before. Progress and understanding by groups of people happens exactly like this in manufacturing, art, science, engineering, design, social science, literature, and every other collective human endeavor…it’s what humans do. But since playing sports and video games is such a universal experience and you get to see it all happening right on the screen in front of you, it’s perhaps easier to grok SMB speedrun innovations more quickly than, say, how assembly line manufacturing has improved since 2000, recent innovations in art, how we got from the flip phone to iPhone X in only 10 years, or how CRISPR happened.

Week ahead: 6

David's Posts
9/17*
9/20
6 9/22
  • Fiasco/Alice is Missing Rulebooks
  • Setup games in class

This week, you’ll be playing one of these two games together in groups of 3-5 via Roll20. I’ll be sending you invitations to join games on the platform. After you play, you’ll write up a reflection about the game.

In class on Tuesday, you’ll get a chance to begin setting up your characters and the games.

We’ll also spend some time in class finalizing details on the podcast series.

Ranking walking simulators by how good the walking is

David's Posts

I mentioned in class on Tuesday that Gone Home is one of the originators of the genre: walking simulators, a term that was originally intended to be derisive because it wasn’t violent enough to be a game, but that it has since been embraced with a bunch of games that can all be designated as walking simulators. We’ll be playing a few other games this semester within the genre this semester.

Which reminded me of the video below, which is a Polygon video that ranks some of the examples from the genre according to how accurately they simulate the actual walking within the game.

Note that one game that makes a couple of cameos in the video, even though it is not ranked, is Night in the Woods, which was included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. We won’t be playing that one together as a class, but if you want to play the game for a podcast episode, you might begin by asking whether it qualifies as a walking simulator. In the game you play as College dropout Mae Borowski when she returns home to the crumbling former mining town of Possum Springs seeking to resume her aimless former life and reconnect with the friends she left behind. But things aren’t the same. Home seems different now and her friends have grown and changed. Leaves are falling and the wind is growing colder. Strange things are happening as the light fades. And there’s something in the woods.

 

Player Narrative Reflection

Quests

Once you have published your player narrative as a page on your site, you’ll need to also publish a post about the narrative that links to the page. That post serves three fundamental functions:

  • it provides a compelling preview of your narrative that summarizes your controlling idea in a sentence or two;
  • it reflects on what you have learned in the process of writing your literacy narrative;
  • when your post syndicates to the class site, that constitutes turning in your narrative.

Some questions to consider in your reflection:

  • How did you approach this essay differently because of the work you had already done writing your literacy narrative? Even though the freewriting questions were the same, did that process change for you because you were writing about playing games instead of about reading and writing?
  • In just one or two sentences, describe the structure of your player narrative.
  • What new idea did you learn while you were writing this player narrative?

Week Ahead: 4

David's Posts
4 9/8
9/10* Ian Bogost “Media Microecology” and “Empathy” from How to Do Things with Videogames
9/13

In class on Tuesday, we’ll have two primary tasks:

  • We’ll continue to establish our own working definition for what a game is and to develop the basic theoretical framework we can rely on to analyze games by considering Steven Johnson’s argument in Everything Bad is Good for You and Mary Flanagan’s “Introduction to Critical Play.”
  • We’ll also need to establish the ground rules for the podcast series that this class will be be publishing this semester.

Make sure you have read over the assignment page for the podcast series. You’ll be divided into 6 groups of 3 students for the podcast series, then within each group you’ll take turns rotating through the 3 different roles as you produce episodes. That means by the end of the semester we will have together published 18 episodes of a podcast series exploring how games encourage us to think, feel, and behave.

I am going to encourage you to devote episodes to exploring games that were included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality this summer. The bundle included more than 1700 independent games and raised $8,149,349.66 for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund in order to support protestors who continue to march for racial justice throughout the nation. I’ve put together a playlist called Play Make Write Think that highlights almost 50 of those games based on recommendations I’ve seen and based on my own perusal of the list of 1700+ games, just to help make the choice not so overwhelming. I purchased the full bundle and can make games from it available to you for the purposes of critical analysis in your podcast episodes.

In our class discussion on Tuesday, you will all need to be engaged in developing the rules for the series; for example, should each episode be devoted only to a single game or can we be allowed to compare two? and should we make every episode about one or more games from the Bundle, or should we allow the freedom to go outside the bundle for episodes? We will also need to come up with a title, begin drafting the text we’ll record for the introductory bumper, and think about what music we’ll use in the intro to set the tone.

After class, for the rest of the week

After Tuesday, you’ll have two short essays by Ian Bogost that will round out the theoretical foundation texts for the semester. Ian Bogost is a Professor of Media Studies and of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, has written or edited ten books on video games, and created the wildly-successful Cow-Clicker, a Facebook game critiquing Facebook games. These two essays are very short but they are fairly dense theoretical writing. Please read them carefully, paying special attention to “Media Microecology.” On September 15, we’ll have a special guest teacher discussing that essay with you so it’s very important that you come to class having read the essay and are prepared to discuss it.

I have also sent you all emails with information about the game we’ll be discussing on 9/15, Gone Home. Your side quest this week is to liveblog your playing of the game.

Week ahead: 3

David's Posts
8/30 Side Quest 1: Avatar
3 9/1
  • “Introduction” from Superbetter: The Power of Living Gamefully by Jane McGonigal
  • Play Depression Quest
9/3*
9/6 Side Quest 2: Combophoto

 

As of writing this on Sunday afternoon, 8 of you have already published your avatars on your sites and I’ve gotten them added to the Students Sites page. The syndication of students posts is still not fully automated because I’m waiting for three more students to let me know the URL for their sites. Once I get those and have finished setting up syndication, I’ll make the process fully automated so that when you publish a blog post to your site it will show up on the Student Posts page almost immediately. Until then, I need to run a manual update to pull posts in, so don’t worry if you publish your avatar post and it doesn’t show up until tomorrow.

Before class on Tuesday, play Depression Quest. It’s a browser based game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. You do not necessarily need to play to a conclusion, but play for at least an hour or so because we’ll use Depression Quest as our primary text for discussion on Tuesday, where we will be paying most attention to these two issues:

  • You’ll have read a couple different essays by Jane McGonigal (“What is a Game?” last week and the introduction to Superbetter this week) plus listened to the podcast analyzing Monopoly last week so we’ll spend some time thinking about the definitions she forwards for games and how they apply to Depression Quest (and Monopoly).
  • Last week, you also read Andrea Lunsford’s description of the terms we need to consider when we think about the rhetorical situation of a text or an author. Rhetorical situation is a really important term for any first year writing class, so we will spend a bit of time discussing those terms and then I will ask you to think about the rhetorical situation of Depression Quest.

After our synchronous class session, you’ll play the browser-based game Tangaroa Deep and read Steven Johnson’s essay in which he argues, amongst other things, that our increasingly complex games are making all of us smarter. And I’ll publish a discussion thread on Canvas where I’ll ask you to think about how Johnson’s article pertains to that game. We will also definitely spend some time in class next week discussing the Johnson article.

All of these discussions working out definitions of games and what kinds of things games can do to and for us will be really important in the coming weeks when we start playing some games that I have selected for you in greater depth and as you start choosing games you want to analyze in podcast episodes that we’ll publish as a class. We are laying the theoretical framework for future discussions, so please read carefully and come to class ready to ask questions about the texts’ arguments.

Also, your second side quest is another photography assignment that should be fun. You’ll be combining two different photos to create a new powerful image.

Links are for humans; URLs are for computers

David's Posts

URLs are for computers.

They are specific addresses that tell the web browser where to go to fetch data and show it to you in one form or another. The URL for the resources page on this site is https://eng101f20.davidmorgen.org/resources/. The URL for the oldest post on the course blog is https://eng101f20.davidmorgen.org/davids-posts/header-image-credits/. With a little awareness of the syntax, you can decode that information. If you wanted to read the page or post that I just referenced, you could copy that code and paste it into your browser to get there.

Sometimes people just paste URLs into emails or pages that they’re writing, and some applications (like the few most recent version of WordPress) will convert those URLs into links so that you at least don’t have to go to the trouble of copying and pasting the code as separate steps to get to the pages referenced. For example, one way to show you Gavin Aung Than’s comic adaptation of a quote by Jim Henson would be to just do this: http://zenpencils.com/comic/150-jim-henson-a-puppeteers-advice/. However, most of the time readers will find URLs confusing and uninviting, and it’s difficult for you to effectively contextualize that information smoothly.

Links are for humans

Links use HTML code to turn URLs into something that is readable and clear for humans. One way to create a link is manually, by inserting some HTML code around text that makes the text into a link, so

Check out Gavin Aung Than’s <a href=”http://zenpencils.com/comic/150-jim-henson-a-puppeteers-advice/”>brilliant comic adaptation</a> of a quote by Jim Henson.

looks like this in your browser

Check out Gavin Aung Than’s brilliant comic adaptation of a quote by Jim Henson.

Most of the time, though, you don’t need to insert links manually. When you’re in your WordPress post editor, you can create a link by highlighting the text or image that you want to become a link and selecting the button that looks like the links of a chain, then pasting the URL into the dialog box. But if you want to add a link to a comment you’re leaving on this site, you’ll need to know the HTML code to do so.

This distinction between URLs and links is important for our class because our first learning outcome states that over the course of the semester, you will “demonstrate understanding of audience” and learn to “use and adapt generic conventions, including organization, development, and style.” Using links instead of URLs is an important first step in understanding the reading needs of your audience and is an important stylistic and generic convention of writing for the web.

This distinction is also important because using links opens up a whole range of more interesting options for you that are unavailable when you merely drop URLs into your work. Jokes can be goofy commentaries or can offer useful insight on the topic at hand.

css.php