Editing/repetition

I found this cool video on YouTube and couldn't help but think of this class. Enjoy=)

Conquering space in games

Previous game consoles had you gaged in a story or an adventure, where you can interact with the game in order to "level up" - somehow proceed further. Other games, such as Tetris, gave you a logic puzzle of sort to solve, where the player is passively active in the background controlling the fate of their character or their game. The controller (let it be a keyboard, a joystick, etc) was the way for you to guide the game and be a part of it.
Wii changed all that, by breaking the space barrier between the player and the game. No longer are you an outsider that tells the characters or the pieces how to move - you actually have to move them yourself. A prime example of this are sports games that are available on wii, where you are no longer controlling a player to perform as action, but you are the player playing on the baseball field, a tennis court, or inside the bowling alley. The way you physically play allows you to emerse yourself within the surroundings of your screen, as you run up towards the screen in order to throw a bowling ball, or save the falling girl that you love (MONAAA) by reaching out to her with a motion towards the screen. Although you are not physically inside the game's environments, you become a big component of it as you summon the world you play in onto the screen. As someone has previously stated, this is possibly the closest we've gotten to virtual reality, in terms of technology that is available to the mass public.

Since wii has been the popular topic to blog about, I figured I'd talk about a very different game, that unlike the wii, garnered very few spectators who lasted only for a moment, although they kept on coming back to see if anything else was learned. Yes, I am talking about Cloud, the experimental game from USC. Unlike Wario Ware Smooth Moves (Nintendo Wii), where you were told how to use your controller and you had to figure out within 5 seconds what was the task at hand, Cloud offered very little explanation about your objective as you explored the world for a very long duration (until you got bored or gave up?). If you poke around enough, you can find out the controlls of the game (Thank you "h"), but although you learn how to consume a cloud, spit it out, and fly around, your objective remains unclear. The reason I decided to bring this is for the following question: Which game brings you closer to a virual reality - the world of Wario Ware Smooth Moves where you are physically emmerse yourself and complete 5-10second tasks; or the world of Cloud, where you must emerse yourself for a long duration in attempt to explore the world and learn about it. And did anyone figure out the objective of Cloud?

decoding time code

Four split screen, a converging plot, and a ton of confusion. We've been talking in class about technology and it's ability to focus on detail and help us organize and investigate things more closely (Kino eye). We've also talked about how film loses detail because we can only see what is in frame and miss a lot of the surrounding context that isn't shown. Mike Figgis, the director/write of Time Code brought a creatively disorienting piece that is herhaps harder to pay attention to than Virilio's dense commentary on (real-time) techonology.

It was actually interesting paying attenting to what you focused on during the film - which of the four plots am I looking at, or am I just staring blankly into space. Throughout the movie I kept on thinking about my tendencies to concentrate on one of the scenes and what drew me to the specific quad of the screen. The dialogue often forced me to start paying attention to the relavent story, but after a moment I had to remind myself to try to pay attention to the other three. It was especially difficult in the beginning, where the background sound muffled the dialogue in the starting scene, giving no context at all as the four plots began.

As previous posters have noted, the film is partially ad-libbed since the whole movie is shot in one take, and I wonder how much of the dialogue is made incoherent because it was so irrelevant. Or was the movie just trying to be mysterious by sporadically giving a portion of some dialogue, sometimes mixed in with other dialogue from one of the other three screens, or just having silence. Mysterious or not, it seemed that the scenes were predictable - even though the movie was to some extent improv.

Perhaps, the most intriguing scene was when the Russian woman (not sure who she was, but taking this from a previous blog entry) began describing her ideas for 4 simultaneous stories that converge - pretty much desribing the idea behind the movie. She said that the big surprise in the end should be that, although the four stories are shot in "real-time" at the same time, they describe the same person in different times. Although it sounded intriguing, I didn't see how this movie led itself to doing that. Did it even try to converge not only the plots but the characters as well? Perhaps a second viewing would lend some answers, but I'm not sure if I could pay attention for another 93 minutes and if I could, which story would I pay attention to then.

The Third Interval?

Like many previous works that we have read and examined in this course, The Third Interval once again deals with Technology and it's effects on the society in terms of connecting time and space. The sense of acceleration that the Technology provides, both in it's ability to mold space and time, but at same time, to alientate a body from this given space. Technology allows two bodies to communicate while sharing no common physical space and yet allows the two bodies to be "present" and "interacting" at the same time. This builds a sort of contininuity, a connection between objects that is impossible to break, but, at same time, placing a gap between these objects - to some extent a barrier.

As you immerse yourself in the "real-time", and become accustomed to the 1's and 0's that provide you with this virtual world that is is occuring in real-time, you no longer become a player of the universe, but another object that is being connecting within this web. This link cannot exist without it's objects, thus, as is, the human's intrigue and interest in using and exploiting this vast network feeds the web and adds to its engulfing and alienating powers. The essay argues that this "enslavement" leads to a transformation from so-called 'real' moment to a detachment from the time and space and eventual loss of yourself.

The acceleration that the technology provides as well as the vast realities that it offers breaks the need to obtain 'real' moments with other people and simply seek the better and faster 'real time' that the technology makes possible. This parallels the works such as Charlie Chaplin's The Modern Times, where this wonderful technologies serves as a medium that detaches Charlie Chaplin's character and provides this barrier between him and other workers as he simply becomes just another object that is enslaved within the Techonology.



This essay was indeed very dense and seemed very scientific in nature as it defined many terms as it gave its analysis. I was very intrigued how it used light as the cosmological constant that linked Time and Space, i.e. "Time and Space are inconceivabel without light". Light, or light-speed, is usually thought of as a physical traversal through space, and as we've discussed in The Time Machine, there is this link between time being traveled as another dimension, just as space is. I am wondering why the author decided to describe time as a "positive sign" and space as a "negative sign". It continues to say that this lays out the geography and history of the world, but I would think that would mean going back in time, or looking at time with a "negative sign". Perhaps we'll find out what he mean by all this=/

Time Travel: accelerating your life to see the course of history.

The Time Machine reminded me of the movie Metropolis, a clip of which we saw in class. In the clip we saw the workers slaving away in the underground in an environment that seems reminiscent of the underground in which Morlocks live in. In the same fashion, the people who live on the surface of Metropolis live in luxury – just as the Elois are living a fruitful life in harmony amongst each other. Freder, the character in the clip who was wearing all white clothes and was observing the chaotic life of the underground notes the great gap that exists between the people and the surface and the workers of the underground.

In the novella The Time Machine, H.G. Wells uses the notion of time travel to critique the socio-political facets of life. The Time Traveller travels to the future expecting great advances in technology and the people to have great intellect – “be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything” (pg 21). On contrary, he only finds old architecture to resemble any sort of technology, suggesting that these people are capable. He skeptically proceeds to form theories on how Elois came to be, noting that this is a very different Utopia than what people have imagined to be. The Elois have evolved into simplistic race whose intelligence has deteriorated. While Elois had everything, someone had to be doing all the work for them.

The Time Traveller then found the subterranean race, the Morlocks, who are the workers. Just as in Metropolis, our civilization has evolved into two species – those that work and those that live in the Garden of Eden, of sort. Wells is able to use time travel to note how our society is driven to the dualistic state, a consequence of aristocracy (pg 40). The time machine is able to break down barriers of linearity to accelerate the evolution of “history” and critique the course of the society, driven by industrialization and gap between the rich and the poor. Although, at first, it seems as an evolution to a utopian harmony, soon we come to realize the cannibalic state of affairs.