TEDtalk Tuesday: Video games and emotions and augmented realities

Hello again...finally.

I apologize in advance for my text-heaviness and rambling.  Someday I'll edit my thoughts.

I thought I'd come back into the blogosphere with a video to share with you all, given that I finally have time to enjoy my video games after such a hectic quarter.  --Also...I'm on a video game binge, I realize.  I do have other TEDtalks in my queue. promise. =P

This TEDtalk is a long one, so I'll split it into two parts (because I'm feeling lazy tonight and actually don't feel like thinking at all).

Essentially, David Perry started out life learning how to program computers. And he didn't program them to help kids with their homework--he made video games. In his talk, he essentially covers the past and future of video games...he has a cool timeline video that he updated from a previous TED conference that tracks the audio and video quality over time (only until about 2007...it's a bit outdated).  

What I thought was most interesting about this Talk was the "student's opinion" video that David puts on at about 10mins in. He had met the student (Michael), at a Game Developer's Conference, where they focus on Emotion, Purpose, Meaning, Understanding, and Feeling.  They ask questions like "Can a video game really make you cry?"--to which, I respond, "YES!" from personal experience.

The student's opinion reminded me of one of my earlier English classes at Western--a class called "Augmented Realities" with a quirky professor named Tony Prichard. He is wonderfully scatterbrained, and a total genius.  He got his PhD in Media Philosophy, and students can often be seen leaving his class with "wtf" looks on their faces. (plurkers who read my blog, please attest to this.)

I love it.  =D

Tony was a big fan of letting us teach ourselves.  He'd lecture for hours and a lot of the time, I felt like he was just throwing things at us just to see what would stick.  I bet a lot more would stick if I got the opportunity to repeat the class...I just need to brush up on my french philosophers.  

I digress.  The point of the class was to look at the different realities we now have around us and ask questions about their morality, their life, where they're headed...and essentially dream up possible futures. Tony encouraged us to think in ways that hadn't been invented yet.  Just describing the class is hard.  I can't imagine how he managed to get it approved by administration. My final project was writing a story that played with blogging and atemporality.  I essentially wrote the story in reverse, so that a reader could read it the correct way while scrolling down the page--backwards in time...or in any order, really.  It still needs work, but it's an interesting concept...and I dreamt it up myself.

Augmented realities can be found everywhere.  In the military, in architecture, in video gaming, art, and right down to daily life.  We did a lot of research into scientific prototypes like Boston Dynamic's Big Dog (since then, they've actually created a humanoid walking robot now, that is called PETMAN). Projection mapping in architecture, and of course, the new augmented reality prototypes for iPhone, or even just as a projection device (think about projecting your kindle book functions like the dictionary, onto a real book without needing the kindle).  Not sure if that made sense...

But getting back to the TEDtalk--the student's opinion video hit the nail on the head in terms of talking about how video gaming (as a reality) has crawled into our brains and become part of us.  

Another TEDtalk I watched today discussed how iPhones were designed to be forgotten.  They were designed to be integrated so easily, that the gestures we produce to use them become an extension of our normal gestures.  It was designed so that it "does not threaten to attach itself to your brain, but rather...attaches itself to your brain." (5:50ish)

Hmm...This is not where I intended this post to go, but, what can you do? I'll see if I can't focus my brain a little more later in the week.  =)

Happy Tuesday, everyone!