My Web Report

Ever since I was old enough to read I was playing video games. I can remember sitting in my family room, controller in hand, maneuvering a little pixelly character named Mario across an equally pixelly environment, evading and conquering hordes of pixelly villains to save the beautifully pixelled princess. Video games have come a long way since then and the industry’s evolutionary process has always intrigued me. So, for my “State of the Web” report I decided to evaluate the two links leading me to an article entitled "Game Master"and a video named" Gaming 2012" which is a podcast. The article appears in a subcategory of the site called profiles, which is exactly what the piece is. John Seabrook is the author of the profile and appears on the video. When perusing the site I found the New Yorker headline with the man in the top hot and monocle alluring, but found the plethora of advertisements quite annoying. There’s a lot going on the page and a hundred different links to click hyperlinked to countless words. This distracted me from the article a little but when I clicked on “view as a single page” I scrolled down and all the extra noise faded away.

The article, written in 2007, is basically about Will Wright’s life and his career as a computer game designer. It depicts the life of Will Wright and what lead him to create these games and the various ways in which he came up with the idea for them. The narrative is charming at times, but toward the middle it became a little tedious as I found myself less and less interested in Will Wright’s personal life and wanted to read more about Spore. Along with the narrative on Will Wright’s life, Seabrook takes you through a rough outline of the history of video games and correlates it to the story. Seabrook relates how he came up with the idea of some of his games. The most interesting of the stories is how he came to realize the idea of The Sims. Wright wanted to connect more with his daughter so he created a digital dollhouse, which evolved into the game known as The Sims. Seabrook makes note that much of Wright’s inspiration came from books. The idea for The Sims spawned from “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander and “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Maslow while his game SimEarth was based on the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock. Spore, however was derived from Drake’s equation and “Power of Ten”. All this leads up to the discussion on the video game spore, and Seabrook speculates if Spore will change gaming like The Sims did.

The video is helpful because it puts faces to names. In the video Will Wright conducts a basic overview of the game Spore. He conveys his motivation for making the game and what he hopes it will accomplish. He mentions the importance of hands-on learning and admitted that it was his education at a Montessori school that programmed him to be the way he is. At this point Wright quickly walks through the game, after which John Seabrook interviews Wright about the themes found in the article.



I’m not entirely sure how to go about completing the second part, but whenever I see questions with numbers attributed to them, this makes me compelled to answer them as they appear.

1. I picked this site because I have always been a huge fan of video games and have been a hopeless nerd gamer for most of my life. I actually didn’t know anything about spore before I read the article and video actually inspired me to purchase the game.

2. When I first entered the site my impression was that of annoyance. I started reading the article and a pop up appeared asking me to subscribe to The New Yorker magazine, obscuring my view of the text. Clicking around the link on the site is amusing, and there are a lot of articles and blogs available. I was a little annoyed with the way the beginning of the text was laid out, because in the middle of the text there is a randomly generated cartoon that has no relevance to the article. I clicked on the link for the cartoon kit, which made me register for the site. After which, however, I was able to screw around with the kit, which is somewhat fun.

3. I wasn’t very impressed with the layout of the site, and as I said the pop-up ad was very annoying. The other aspects of the site weren’t bad. The type is easy to read and the excess of links on either side fades away when you view the article as a single page.

4. The New Yorker is commonly regarded as a legitimate publication. The author John Seabrook is a well regarded journalist and has been writing for The New Yorker commenting on technology and pop-culture since 1993. Since The New Yorker is a business and attempting to make money, there are a lot of advertisements, which in my opinion distract from the scholarly content of the article.

5. Though not explicitly mentioned in the article, the evolution of literacy is now also tied with multimodal texts, such as video games. The common conception of video games is that they increase illiteracy, and is turning the younger generation into fat lazy slobs. Will Wright seems to present a different model that glorifies gaming as a learning tool.

6. The article and the video seem to merely focus on how the game may change gaming while I wanted there to be a little bit more about how it may change literacy. In order to make a correlation to class themes I needed to extrapolate it from passing comments.

7. I would recommend this site to other students and my friend purely for the content. The advertisements are frustrating, but what can one expect from a business’ website?