magicmacguffin — Camp Magic MacGuffin

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Sunday, June 3rd, 2012

In a burst of insanity I registered for ds106 this summer semester. The theme this time around is Camp Magic Macguffin. I’ve been following ds106 for a while now but never felt an urge to participate. It seemed out of my realm of competence. We’ll see if I was right then or if jumping in was a smart choice.

So far, it’s hard to say. With only a few weeks left in the school year and a sprint triathlon tomorrow morning I haven’t been able to find the brain space for ds106. Writing this post is the first step in breaking through that wall. I intend to at least try some of the Daily Creates in the next week. That and commenting on others’ creations is likely all I can handle right at the moment. I hope before the summer is over I will have achieved much greater things.

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ds106 – Liminal States story shape

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

This week at Camp Magic MacGuffin we took a look at Kurt Vonnegut explaining the shapes of popular stories:

Our counselors asked us to blog, likewise, about the shapes of stories we know. I first thought of Alastair Reynold’s House of Suns, which I adore. However, I doubted that I could figure out a way to represent the nested narratives in a way that satisfied me, so I wound up working on a graph of Liminal States. As Cormac McCarthy’s The Road terrified me viscerally page-by-page, Zack Parson’s Liminal States terrified me intellectually and spiritually page-by-page (with a few chapters of visceral terror thrown in for good measure, especially late in the novel).

Liminal States is a “from bad to worse” story that gave me the same feeling I felt reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven for the first time. Parsons’s novel is a western, noir, WWII, military-Industrial, utterly sinister xenomorphic mash-up. It reads like this:

Liminal States Story Shape

I am glad I finished it before going to the beach. I drew another layer of imagery over this one, but it creeped me out too much to include. (Then I made an animated .gif of the two – abhorrent!) Prime material for a tweet-up, no doubt.

If you’re up for a heart-of-darkness kind of existential genre flick consequences-of-exceeding-your-grasp kind of yarn (and you are, you know, old) give this one a read.

As I commented on a fellow-camper’s blog, my students and I used to draw roller-coasters themed after the novels we read with decoration, loops, tunnels, and turns representing devices and plot points. We gotta get back to that.

Posted in bunk4, ds106, Liminal States, magicmacguffin, openonline, Story shape, Zack Parsons | Comments Off on ds106 – Liminal States story shape

ds106 – Bryan Alexander and stories in long games

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

Full-on 2012 – Minecraft by Andrew Beeston

Between visits to Camp Magic MacGuffin in Minecraft, I’ve been exploring Bryan Alexander’s New Digital Storytelling site today. I hit the games tag and got interested in Games too long for complete stories”, a short piece referencing this CNN article from Blake Snow.

The idea: most gamers do not finish the main story-lines of long games, but they do complete other games along the way.

I was struck by a few of the examples cited by Snow as games with low player-completion percentages. I had finished one of them, but couldn’t see myself creating smaller games inside of it for myself to play. I think my reaction in that case betrayed my genre preferences (I’ll really only noodle about for 100+ hours in a fantasy world or a world-building game) and bias against multiplayer (I like to build next to people on Minecraft servers; thus far, that is the most stable build of my gaming socialization code).

When I think of successful open-world games – and by “successful” I mean games that contemporaneously hold my attention, as well as my students’ – I think of games that have structured side quests, occupations, and story-lines that cater to different play styles and gamer identities (no surprises here). I see many students struggle in games that offer too much freedom to manipulate too many variables – but “too much” is a subjective thing. I wonder if learning to code would make exploring, say, a Sim City game more intrinsically rewarding for my kids – if knowing what was happening inside a learning curve would help students better enjoy and learn from failing along its path.

I wonder what role “purposeless”, non-casual games will have in our lives – and I wonder if we’ll ever publish a AAA game that isn’t meant to be finished in any traditional sense. The prolonged endgame of navigating ambiguity: will we ever want to play it – is play it – or is play an escape from it?

I often imagine a game about an exiled protagonist who has to balance reinventing himself against being called back to win a sequel to the conflict he lost, knowing that returning to his old home would forfeit the lives of those his exile saved. Would we play a game about disappearing infinitely? A game that ends in obscurity?

I’ll quit now before I start in on the connections between Lucky Wander Boy and single-player, peaceful-mode Minecraft. I’m excited to see the story of ds106 unfold across media, as well as in-game.

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Daily Create 146: take a photo that represents destruction….

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

Daily Create 146: take a photo that represents destruction. (Taken with instagram)

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Hatchet Jack Writes Some Words

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

All our Magic Macguffin campers are engaged in writing weekly letters back home to mom and pop or family they may have. Hatchet Jack, as you might imagine, has no family to write to. And Hatchet Jack really ain’t much of a wordsmith. He is more of a campfire tall tale kinda fellow. So Hatchet Jack is gong to talk like he is sitting around a campfire with some fellow campers on a warm evening by the shores of Lack Macguffin.

This week our campers started on some projects related to the animated Gif. The idea is to really focus in on a moment of time in a short sequence of images that a bit of motion makes stronger, or brings out the essence of the images message, or something like that. I made one with Randle McMurphy trying to lift an impossibly heavy water feature from a psychiatric hospital. He was straining and trying and tying so hard to get that damn thing out of the ground. His effort and determination was what I tried to capture.

This week we also had out bunkhouses assigned campers and we got to know them a little better. We came up with a bunkhouse name. Our bunkhouse 4 is called, “Slaughterhouse 4.” No relation to the word “Hatchet” in my name.

We also sent out a call for bunkhouse monikers or logos. I made one. It is below.

I tried to make it like a badge because at camp you might get badges. So we will be ready to sew on this badge if it should be the selected logo for our bunkhouse.

The administrators added a wonderful feature to our campsite. They added bunkhouse pages to we can see recent activity from just those in our bunkhouse.

This week Hatchet Jack saw as he was peering into the bright white of the internet saw two things. One being that it is commenting that holds the internet together. Some camper from another bunk mentioned that a Dr. Oblivion, who was once employed at this camp, had apparently scrawled that into a tree years ago down by Lake Macguffin. The camper also noted that a Jim Groom has made similar comments, but slightly different language. He is known for saying, “Commenting is the adhesive that sucks the webs together.” Whatever. He appears to be a creepy guy.

In the white light Hatchet Jack also had a revelation similar to the one he had at Camp Counselor training day when the administrator @cogdog said, “There is no guilt in #ds106.”

The white blurted out to Hatchet Jack,

“There is no behind in #ds106, only forward.”

Jack thought that was a bright idea from the bright white light of thought.

So forward it is, and on we go campers!

Posted in bunk4, counselor, Hatchet Jack Stuff, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Hatchet Jack Writes Some Words

Camp Note Saturday 2 June

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

tihs is just a quick note of a couple of things I’ve been doing over the last day or two at camp. Apart from getting killed in the wide game. I’ve added a nice wee plugin to this blog. The google fonts plugin allows you to add a google font. The control panel lets you add some custom CSS to use the font if you do not want to apply it to say all titles or all headings. I’ve just added a class, campletter for the ‘Over the Rainbow’ font. I also added a drop shadow and a rotate to the CSS.

.campletter {font-family:'Over the Rainbow',san-serif;font-size:18px;background:#ee9; transform: rotate(10deg); -ms-transform: rotate(11deg); /* IE 9 */ -webkit-transform: rotate(10deg); /* Safari and Chrome */ -o-transform: rotate(10deg); /* Opera */ -moz-transform: rotate(10deg); /* Firefox */ -moz-box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888; -webkit-box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888; box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888; Padding:6px; Margin:6px; }
It is pretty easy to get the CSS code for this sort of thing, just google it. The google fonts pluggin settings page has a section for custom CSS SO I didn’t even have to edit the theme.

The other thing I’ve been playing with is the iPhone friendly daily create page I made. Now shows the creations for the last 5 daily creates:TDC Today. I am finding this quite useful, this afternoon I was. Standing right beside this destroyed hut when I checked TDC. The code is now a real mess of php and JavaScript, it seems to work here. Let me know if you try it and it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

Posted in bunk2, camp letter, Default, iphone, magicmacguffin, openonline, plugins, TDC, Wordpress | Comments Off on Camp Note Saturday 2 June

The Shape of 50 Shades

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

From beginning to end, the shape of the first book in the 50 Shades trilogy “Fifty Shades of Grey” is a roller coaster ride. Typical girl meets boy story that doesn’t have a happy ending…yet. I’m currently reading the second book is the series “Fifty Shades Darker” so I’ll report back on if Ana and Christian get there happy ending.

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Shared Vision

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

This Spring 2012 term, I have been taking Introduction to Digital Photography here at Lane CC from Richard Lennox, who is an excellent teacher. Our capstone project was to create a “photo essay.” This was a perfect excuse to do a project I’ve long had on my mind–something to showcase my father’s photography.

My dad left behind thousands of slides, and all of them are in a closet, as you’ll see in the video. I chose a mere 125 of them to have digitized at Photo Magic. Then I chose some of his, some of mine, wrote a story, and rewrote and rewrote….well, these projects take time!

It was created in i Movie on the i Pad 3.