Videogame Session

Warioware on the Wii was made up of a set of mini-games that were very short in length. It was these few seconds of the game that are most memorable. However, time spent playing the game is actually made up of mostly animations before and after the times one actually gets the chance to interact and use the remote. I find it interesting and somewhat natural to assign priority to part of the time spent playing the game.

People generally improved as the game went on. I have always wondered why time seems to slow down in situations that call upon skills that we have practiced. For instance, in basketball, before taking a lay-up, I feel that there is enough time to consider the position of the opponent, the hoop, my body, and also consider different ways to finish the lay-up. Time seems to slow down in situations like these. I experienced this phenomena with when playing videogames as well.
The Wii takes an interesting approach at trying to immerse players into the game. While DDR is an attempt to make a game of someone's dancing skills, the game is not the perfect way to measure if someone is a good dancer. On the flips side, being good at DDR does not necessarily make you a good dancer. These facts are barriers to the immersiveness of the game. There are tricks to win this game that are not directly translatable to dancing. For instance, one very helpful piece of advice is to keep your feet in the middle and then step out before returning to the center. The Wii makes a sincere attempt to break these boundaries that keep a player from being completely immersed in the game.

While people did have to be reminded to stay in the range of the sensor, this is an indication of how this new approach to videogames is able to draw people in. I was very surprised that people did not complain about the responsivness of the remote. In watching how the Wii works, my first concern was if the remote was more of a gimmick and not as accurate as using a more traditional control scheme. This new and addicting control scheme tries to incorporate more of the body. As people have mentioned earlier, time seemed to go by faster on the Wii. I feel that the immersivness of using the remote technology was the leading factor contributing to this distorted measurement of time.

"The Truth Will Set You Free"

Throughout the film, I felt there was a clear tension between fantasy and reality. The first example of this came in the visual style of the film. As Shane mentioned earlier, the look of DV is very different from film. I felt that digital video made the movie seem less glamorous. This treatment of the captured events is contrasted with images that are shown projected on a screen (audition, screening). In the scene where the aspiring actress (Selma Hayek) and her lover are hiding behind the projection screen, she is literally "off-screen."

Selma Hayek's character is especially complex in blurring the line between fantasy and reality. In her audition, the other actor in her scene ironically asks "but after all your lies, do you even know who you are anymore?" She performs her craft so much off-screen that she can not distinguish between the fantasy world that is captured on film and reality.

The concept that we are watching the events of a production company shows the audience what the film industry is actually like. Whereas the movies that are typically captured on film instead of DV are idealistic and formulaic, this film is constantly grounded by reality. The focus is not on a single character. The story is not linear in that every event is significant to the story. The frequent earthquakes have a limited impact in the overall story. Unlike most Hollywood films, this film shows an uninterrupted sequence of significant as well as insignificant events.
Alex represents the ultimate conflict between fantasy and reality. He is a dreamer. He proposes to his girlfriend (not Selma Hayek) that they should move to Tuscany knowing that this is not realistic. Even as he is bleeding to death, he makes plans with her for dinner.

Some other scenes that embody the conflict between fantasy and reality:
- When the pretentious screenwriter/director tries to give a practiced and dramatic speech, reality rudely interrupts with an earthquake.
- The first song performed by her and her lover is blaring contrast between a talentless rapper and the singer with a heavenly voice.
- During the love-making scene, there is the contrast between sex on the screen and reality.
- Throughout the movie, there are varying genres of music. There is the simplistic techno beat contrasted with the typical orchestration that would be in a big budget film.

Suburbanite = Terminal Citizen

From growing up in a typical, conservative suburb, I saw the degradation of the sense of community. In the beginning, as a kindergartener, I remember running through the fields of empty plots with neighborhood children of a similar age. Despite warnings from adults to beware of snakes, games of tag matured into competitive homerun derbies. The homerun derbies, however, quickly died in frequency as plots became filled, and the diamond was limited to the fences of a backyard. By the time I was out of middle school, communication with neighborhood friends was nothing more than a half-hearted wave or nod of acknowledgment. The plots were filled, and dense traffic made playing in the street inconvenient and dangerous.

The generation that followed, my siblings, and I were "cocooned" by "teleports" (20). As urbanization limited our realm or space in the "near," the "distant" promised freedom (20). The suburb, in itself, embodies the aims of the "teletopical City" (21). Cities are planned in a grid-like fashion to promote efficiency and reduce the amount of time and space that is needed to travel between destinations. The space in between destinations becomes a repetitive landscape. In this way, there is a similar sense of focus on the arrival that is given from channel surfing.

While the suburb does not directly resemble the "teletopical City" because the suburb is still defined by conrete space, limitations and segegration of the here and now made the freedom of telepresence that much more appealing. The freedom of mobility that used to inspire children to venture into abandoned houses and "haunted" forests, which are now extinct in suburbia, transformed into the exploration of the web. Virilio's assertions about channel-surfing have even more validity when considering the activity of surfing the web. Language that describes human interactivity with the Internet mimics descriptions of concrete space and time. We go to and leave websites as if they were actual places. Search engines help us navigate and find the web "address" that we desire. The destinations for telepresence are endless. There is an undeniably liberating quality to the Interent, possibly synonymous with teletopia (Second Life?), in contrast to the "concrete presence," which focuses on the ownership of physical boundaries.

Primer

This movie won multiple awards at the 2004 Sundance film festival. It only cost around $7,000 to produce. The writing, directing, score, and lead character are all performed by the same person. Of course, the movie is about a time machine, but it's unlike any movie you've ever seen. I promise. Primer is available at the media resource center. I also own it so if someone would rather watch it in the comfort of their own home, I'd be willing to loan it.

Here is a link to the trailer:

http://primermovie.com/trailer-Large.html

Traveling from the Cradle to the Grave

As classmates repeatedly questioned Vertov's self-proclaimed ability to capture reality, I wondered what their definitions of “reality” were. Isn't "reality" different from person to person? Besides my physical environment, my reality includes stirring images of my past and the plans of my future. In this way, one's consciousness becomes a vehicle for time travel.

Throughout a single day, "our minds are often...'somewhere else' (Rosenwasser and Stephen 2). When I see a classmate that resembles a friend from high school, I might call upon memories that immerse me in the events of a couple years ago. If I see the flashing blue and red lights of a police cruiser, I "jump back for a moment" to the times when I was guilty of speeding (Wells 6).

Within each hour, our consciousness constantly zips back and forth between the immediate and distant memories of the past and future. If I see someone wearing a shirt I like, I might make plans to buy the identical shirt this weekend. Immediately, my mind provides an image of myself, a smile on my face, purchasing a new shirt.

Could this be Vertov's impression of what's "real"? One's consciousness is a very mobile vehicle that exceeds the limitations that determine the paths of a car, horse-drawn carriage, or cable car. At times, like the progression of incoherently quick edits, the consciousness frantically races with poignant memories and predictions. If one considers the subjectivity of "reality," understanding someone else's reality can be a hefty challenge. Perhaps Vertov truly wanted to capture his experience of a single day during the industrialization of Russia that included all his ponderings, musings of what his eyes and ears presented to him. In this way, reality becomes the sum of the present as well as the destinations in the past and future that the consciousness effortlessly traverses. Concievably, one can also imagine past and future experiences through the eyes of others. Capturing this on film would vary greatly from the linear progression of a traditional film. While proclaiming that Vertov wanted to portray the consciousness’ ability to travel through time would be too convenient of an exaggeration, it is important to remember that one’s consciousness unpredictably travels back and forth across what Wells calls the “Time-Dimension” (Wells 5).

"We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave" (Wells 5).