Week 15: Recap of Subject

In the final week of my blog I have decided to do a recap of everything that has happened in Creative Interactivity.

I have handed in four assignments, with the first one being an interactive website. I made this website in flash then put each flash file into a separate website then linked them all together. The project has a bizarre type of story, where you wake up in a house and have to discover where you are, how you got there and if you are even real. I felt it was very interactive and everyone seemed to like it that commented on it. I simply used royalty free sound effects off the internet to make it more engaging for the user.



My second assignment was an argumentative hypertext essay. It was to be over 2500 words in length. My topic was Argentina getting into the Tri-Nations rugby union tournament and I was for it. I actually found that it was a difficult topic to write about in the end as there weren’t many scholarly articles that were relevant to any of my points I was talking about. However, I did get many quotes from players and executives etc. on the whole debate which helped me greatly. In the end I was fairly satisfied with the essay that I handed in.

My third assignment is this blog, which I have written an entry in every week since week one until now. I am quite satisfied with it and its overall layout and design. My final assignment that was required for this subject was the biggest, which was another interactive flash assignment. I have just handed that in today and was quite pleased with the final outcome. It is another strange type story where the user has to enter their own mind and find out why and how they have been in a coma for over 10 years. They have to go down several pathways to piece the story together. Overall it is similar in design to my first assignment handed in but with some more advanced things.

The teaching was good in this class and the workshops always had a relaxed and fun environment. I have touched up on my Adobe Flash skills quite significantly in this class and have also used some HTML coding that I learned back in Writing for the Web. Overall I enjoyed this course and look forward to doing more Digital Writing courses in my third and final year.

By Michael Angus (S2587197)

Week 14: Jason Nelson's Game

This week I decided to talk about and review an interactive artwork from my teacher, Jason Nelson.

‘Game, game, game and again game’
URL: http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/gamegame.html



It is basically a game engine that Jason has used and he has modified it and turned it into a bizarre interactive artwork. You go through the game level by level, having to dodge little scribbles that can kill you and jump over obstacles that have been hand drawn. You play the game as a little black/red hairy ball type of creature. The game is relatively easy to get through bar a few levels where the character often becomes stuck or it is made very hard to get past the dreaded scribble of death.

The scribble/hand drawn look to the game gives it a more artistic look than a traditional arcade game. The character moves like a normal game character, with space bar as jump and moving left and right with the arrow keys. There is a lot of creative writing that appears throughout the piece, and this really is the main feature. By moving the character over certain areas, poetry and other meaningful text pops up for the user to read.

To show that the game is more an artwork than a game, the score at the top of the screen does not even add up, but instead just flicks yellow arrows left, right, up and down. The music in the game is outstanding, and really brings out a strange, bizarre and artistic experience to the piece and gives it the atmosphere that an artwork like this should have. Often during each level, if you character moves to the right place, a video will be unlocked of Jason’s past, which gives the piece a nostalgic feel to it also.

Each level kind of tells its own little story, but overall the piece seems to have many different little meanings here and there, and really is up to the individual to interpret in their own way. The game is linear in structure, like a typical arcade game but is interactive as an artwork as you are moving a little character around and also clicking on buttons to view videos. The whole messy, scribbled look gives it a authentic, original feel I believe.

Overall I think it is a very interesting and cool artwork that I recommended to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.

By Michael Angus (S2587197)