Well, I must say, I’m a bit disappointed with the outcome of my presentation, partly because of my delivery, but also because I don’t feel like I adequately demonstrated my creation enough. There are so many cool things about Half.com that I could have spent more time on, but didn’t. I can’t say that the presentation was a complete failure from a personal standpoint because the experience in and of itself was great and I learned a lot. Three things I will try to improve for my next presentation during my college career is 1) have more eye contact, 2) to not have a pessimistic outlook after a failure 3) and probably most importantly, stick to the substance and cut out the excess.

With that said, I’ve been very impressed with the rest of the group member’s presentations. A lot of them were very well prepared, confidently executed, and well crafted. Some of the memorable presentations for me were:

*Finale music presentation because one of my hobbies include playing the piano. I have never learned how to read notes or to write music, but I do have a semi-strong ear and can recreate some simple tunes through trial and error. I also have a song I’ve written throughout the years and have no idea on how to go about and creating sheet music. I’m considering buying Finale and possibly learn more about music. I can also create sheet music for my song and release it to the world!

*Gaia presentation because for the longest time my sister has been a big fan of the website and I never understood why. Well, I *gasp* went to Gaia.com and as hard as it is to admit it I’m starting to get addicted to it. Those games, although simple, are surprisingly fun and rewarding, especially because of the gaia gold that you earn. WHY IS VIRTUAL MONEY SO ENDEARING?

*Amazon.com presentation. THAT is how my presentation should have been like. I liked how the presentation focused on the review portion of the website and the video about buying milk was relevant to the topic and very entertaining. It was overall an excellent introduction to the site and even got me interested in starting a store on Amazon. At least I have a model to work off from for my next presentation about half.com (if ever given the opportunity again, that is).

*The presentation on videogames. There’s no explanation really needed for why, other than it was really well written and had a strong direction and flow. The video was funny too, although I gotta say, that song was stuck in my head all day.

If your presentation wasn’t mentioned above, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, it’s just that I could relate more to the four above.

I’d just like to say that I’ve had a great semester and want to thank Dr. Campbell personally for a superb class that was well-worth the money. Hopefully this won’t be the last you’ll hear or see of me. In fact, maybe it won’t be that long at all if I can schedule the Intro to film studies class!

Attention: All New Media Studies students in Dr. C’s class MUST watch this absolutely hilarious scene from South Park. I don’t know whether or not I should warn you guys or not, considering you’re all college students, but what hel….heck…there’s mild language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmefyHF-3g8

What do you guys think? Is it over-exaggerated, or do you think our reaction would be similar?  Humor aside, I think the South Park writers have hit the nail on the head in terms of the chaos that would ensue based on the lack of internet access.  Quite possibly the most genius line ever: “Don’t you get it?! There’s no internet to find out why there’s no internet!” Hilarious!

I’d like to begin my presentation with a short little video that is indicative of the positive impact that videogames can have on children.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aXrI3c2fkA

As you can all clearly tell, the excitement that little Billie felt about getting a brand new Nintendo 64 touches our very hearts and souls. This thoughtful gift from his parents, although some naïve observers would consider it reckless, has had a long-lasting effect on Little Billie’s outlook on life. Today, Little Billie is not so little anymore. He is twenty years old, is an optimist, and a hard-working student at MIT. He is majoring in both computer science and engineering and his dream is to create videogames much like the videogames that he grew up playing. Videogames have effectively introduced Big Billie to computers, one that has shaped his very character.

Now on the opposite side of the spectrum, this video shows the negative impact of videogames.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKwCQWjTyI0

The story of Jonathan White is very sad indeed. He was a kind, gentle, and compassionate child who thought he had a family who really cared for him. However, last Christmas Eve, his dreams were shattered by a family who played a cruel practical joke and as a result, his innocence was lost forever. On Christmas Day, Jonathan should have been playing his brand new Xbox 360, but instead, he found a knife on the kitchen table, and as much as he tried to convince himself that what he was about to do was wrong, nothing could stop him from seeking vengeance on a family that should have loved him more. Today, Jonathan White serves an undisclosed amount of years in juvenile hall, never to achieve his dreams because he never had any to begin with.

Disclaimer: The two stories above are fictitious and thus should only be taken with a grain of salt. They were created for the sole purposes of entertaining the audience and also to transition from the attention-getter to the body of the speech.

Fortunately for me, my childhood was unlike Jonathan’s. My childhood was akin to Little Billie’s and to Jarish’s from Turkle’s essay, Video Games and Computer Holding Power. Jarish, too, had been positively influenced by videogames. Turkle writes, “Just as pinball gave way to video games for Jarish, video games are starting to give way to the computer” (504). Although I differ with Jarish and Little Billie, in that, videogames haven’t introduced me or interested me to programming, I know many gamers, actually many students in the Computer Science department of UMW, whose main purpose for majoring in Computer Science is to design and program a game. Thus, videogames can and do have positive impacts on children’s lives, no matter how much the media tries to convince you otherwise. Just as a brief side note, the stories that the media focus on are extreme circumstance situations, which are not representative of the whole videogame population.

Now that you all know a little bit more about Little Billie and Jonathan, and have already read about Jarish, I should tell you a little bit about me before I show you what I’ve created. I was born in the USA; however, I grew up speaking Armenian at home, so English was not my native language. Thus, when it was time for Elementary school, I can remember my writing, reading, and speaking skills were way behind my contemporaries. At school, I would barely speak to any of my classmates, I would barely read any of the readings that were assigned, and I would barely do the homework given. And when I say “barely,” I really mean that, on the surface, I actually did finish my homework, and actually read the books that were assigned mainly because my parents forced me to, but I never learned anything. This trend continued until, I’d say, about second grade or so.

My parents quickly took note of how playing videogames was the only thing I was interested in. They could have taken videogames away from me, and I may have ended up like Jonathan, but instead, they used my obsession to their advantage in a genius way. I believe it was by the third grade my dad brought home a new Toshiba computer with a ton of educational games (the Jump Start series to name one) just for me. By playing these games, I indirectly learned math, reading, writing, etc. and had fun. I used the computer daily. In fact, because of what I had learned from the computer, I began speaking to more of my classmates and the teacher at school because I was more comfortable with the language and, in turn, I learned more from them as well.

A year or two later, my family got dial-up and I was introduced to the World Wide Web. Naturally, the first website I went to was www.videogames.com. This website has arguably been the most influential on my education as it was a website dedicated to previews, reviews, and commentary on a topic that I was interested in (not to mention that everything was well-written by educated writers and editors). Thus, my skills were even more enhanced and by the time I made it to fifth grade, I was on an equal playing field with my other classmates. Perhaps I was even in a better position than a lot of them because of what www.videogames.com brought to my education.

And so you see my interest in games have engendered an interest in computers. Additionally, videogames have also cultivated an education outside of school. I think Illich would be proud that I learned something meaningful outside the boundaries of an institution. In fact, he says that the same people who defend the institution of education, when “pressed to specify how they acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often outside than inside school…Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading…” (Illich).

Although the World Wide Web wasn’t available when Illich wrote his article, Deschooling Society, he alludes to many ideas that we now use on a daily basis. He says, “The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity” (Illich).

This peer-matching network to some degree exists within the Half.com community, albeit in a more business-centric environment. Buyers search for items in which they are interested in buying, and when they search for that item, the computer sends back a list of all sellers who have that very item to sell. Allow me to demonstrate with my shop:

 http://shops.half.ebay.com/sonicartin_W0…

(brief history while link is loading: Half.com was created by an American entrepreneur named Josh Kopelman in 1999. A year later, Ebay.com bought Half.com for about $350 million (wikipedia). Unlike Ebay.com, Half.com is a website that is solely dedicated to selling items that have UPCs in order to make the experience more user-friendly and does not allow bidding. Instead, the prices are fixed. Half.com does not charge you to list items, however, once you have sold an item, Half.com will take a 15% commision off the amount you sold it for. Just like Ebay.com, Half.com has a robust feedback system that helps maintain high ethical standards.)

There is a loop, as I hope you all have seen, in my presentation. My interest in videogames lead to my interest in educational computer games, my interest in educational computer games lead to my interest in learning more about the English language, my interest in learning about the English language has lead me to appreciate websites dedicated to professionally written videogame commentaries on the internet, and my appreciation for videogame sites were a result of my interest for videogames. Videogames have also encouraged me to start my very own business in which I sell videogames, because let’s face it, as Illich would say, I’m a registered student who is submitting to certified teachers in order to obtain a certificate of my own, and that certificate doesn’t come free. However, at least I can say that in one class, I didn’t have to walk on a bridge that leads to nowhere. I’m walking on a bridge that leads to the bank.

Sources:

Illich, Ivan. “Deschooling Society.” Reactor Core. 15 Apr. 2008. <http://reactor-core.org/deschooling>.

Turkle, Sherry. “Video Games and computer Holding Power.” The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. MIT Press: London, 2003. 499-515.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half.com

It’s kind of funny how naïve people from my generation, including myself, can be about the internet. When people from older generations tell us how they had to walk fifteen miles through rough terrain without shoes just so that they could reach a library, we laugh at the ridiculousness of their tell-tale stories. And yet, as over-exaggerated as the stories are, we can’t help but feel a sense of wonder after the striking realization that the internet hasn’t been around forever, in fact, it hasn’t been around for that long at all. Perhaps that is the genius of the W3, that because of its complexity, and its seemingly infinite nature, we ascribe an everlasting quality to it. This is why it was so surprising to read the authors of this week’s reading telling the reader, “if you haven’t experienced the Web, the best way to find out about it is to try it” (792). If the article was written today, he may as well have been talking to three of four individuals on this planet, but back in 1994, I presume access to the internet was sparse. That should come as no surprise, but it does, because I can’t imagine a world without the Internet. But can you blame me?

The W3 has evolved extremely rapidly from a “pool of human knowledge,” where only a few people had access to its confined and finite body, to a “vast sea of human knowledge,” a body of information that extends to every human being who happens to have access to the shore. It is a body of information that has infinite possibilities, or a “boundless information world in which all items have a reference by which they can be retrieved” (793). All of this information is easily obtained, and the W3 is no doubt the simplest access to information available. No more going through card-catalogs or searching for reference numbers in order to find a certain article from the library (these methods seem all too ancient nowadays).

Prepare yourself. I’m about to go off-topic, but I have a point to make…I think.

Now, I had a lot of trouble reading the article because I am not technically savvy yet, and all this about W3 client-servers, HTML, HTTP, etc. left me in disarray. I’ve been feeling lost at sea without a beacon to guide me in the right direction. But yesterday, the light had shined upon my face as I watched the Compassion Forum with Hillary Clinton on CNN. There was something she was saying about God’s grace, and although I didn’t understand any of the mumbo-jumbo spewing out of her mouth, I still had a revelation. When I heard “God’s Grace,” the only thing running through my mind was Google. The first reason was because it was perfect alliteration (you know, Google, God, grace), and the second reason is because I realized that it didn’t matter if I didn’t understand the article, because I didn’t understand Hillary Clinton either! And thus, I went to Google.com and searched for God’s grace, and low and behold, I got this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_grac…

I was on a roll. I then searched for client servers and I got this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-serv…

And then I searched for HTTP, and I got this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP

And so you see, ladies and gentleman, if you don’t come to grips with complex ideas, then you are not alone, because someone is thinking about you on the internet. It may not be God, it may not be Hillary Clinton, but someone out there has created a Wiki just for you so that you are not left in the darkness ever again. The Wiki has been thrown into a river of knowledge that is Google, and Google is thrown into a sea of knowledge that is the W3.

 Well, before I discuss why I enjoyed Turkle’s article so much, it is important to understand how I became what I consider myself to be: an avid gamer.  As cliché as it may sound, I’ve been playing games ever since I was old enough to hold a controller in my hands.  Although I wasn’t lucky enough to have grown up with the “first generation” of gamers in the Pong or Atari era, and thus wasn’t able to embrace the beginnings of what would quickly become one of the most revolutionary and influential industries of all time, I still consider myself fortunate for having the pleasure of playing videogames when the industry as a whole was booming.  

I was born three years after Nintendo saved the gaming industry in 1985 with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment console after lackluster movie to game adaptations (Looking at you E.T.) on the Atari 2600 left a bad taste in the public’s mouth and resulted in what videogame historian Steven L. Kent describes as “The Crash of the Gaming Industry.” Having been born in 1989, and turning four years old by 1993, I was alive during what I personally believe was the golden age of gaming.  My first system was a Sega Genesis which introduced me to the dynamic world of gaming.  As my username indicates, one of my favorite gaming mascots of all time is Sonic the Hedgehog who was as inspirational to me as Pac-Man or Space Invaders was to gamers in the 1980s.   This introduction to video games got me excited and interested in all aspects of video gaming on every level.

I don’t think I enjoyed Turkle’s article because of the subject matter, because trust me, I took a freshman seminar last year, and some (not all) of the readings about videogames were a snooze-fest.  Rather, I enjoyed her article because she seemed to defend videogames just when I was starting to lose faith in them.  I’m sure many of you guys remember when I first joined Dr. Campbell’s class, I jokingly shared my “gaming addiction” with the class.  Well, although I was over exaggerating a bit, as I got older, I’ve been told that videogames were a mindless activity, as Turkle so successfully argues against.  I loved how she countered the “videogames are like television” argument, because “games demand skills that are complex and differentiated” (501).  I’ve always contended that gaming is an active and engaging activity, whereas television is a passive and lazy activity (although there is such a thing as “active viewing,” but a great majority of people do not engage television this way).

I believe that the negative rep that videogames get is because of the mere fact that the name “game” engenders notions of child’s play or toy.  Most of the negativity comes from the high brow Literature, Film, and Theatre experts who, in order to keep their medium from dying, feel the need to dissuade people away from videogames, as they are a serious threat to their very careers. 

It was actually very recent that I was forced to go to a reproduction of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I tried to make the most of it, and pretended to be excited, so I began casually conversing with this lady who was sitting to my right before the play began.  We talked (well, actually, I just bullshitting) about Shakespeare, and then eventually we began discussing such topics as George Washington (because I told her I went to Mary Washington), and then we talked about her kid who was attending the “very prestigious school of Oxford,” as if to make a big deal.  And then, when discussing what career I was pursuing, I told her that I would love to be a videogame critic or possibly a designer.  All of a sudden, she looks at me awkwardly and then immediately turns her neck and begins conversing with the person sitting to her other side (presumably about herself and her amazing daughter).  Well, I didn’t think much of it, because I could care less about her, but when the play was finally over, I was kind enough to tell her that, “I wish your daughter the greatest success in all her future endeavors,” to which she replies, “Why how thoughtful of you.  And you stay away from those videogames” as she wagged her finger at me.  I, of course, said “I’ll try,” however, in my mind, I was saying something along the lines of the girl at the cafe in the beginning of Turkle’s essay.

To get back on track, I also enjoyed Turkle’s article because of the personal connection I had to gamers like Jarish.  I know for a fact that I, too, shared his dream of one day creating my very own videogame.  One of my favorite lines in the article was, “just as pinball gave way to video games for Jarish, videogames are starting to give way to the computer.” Although I never played pinball, I can agree that videogames were the main reason I decided to use a computer daily.  At a young age, I dedicated much of my time on sites that focused on gaming and tried to read and soak up as much information from the nation’s best critics, improving my writing skills along the way (no thanks to school. Just kidding…to an extent).  Although I differ with Jarish, in that, videogames haven’t introduced me or interested me to programming, I know many gamers, actually many students in the Computer Science department of UMW, whose main purpose for majoring in Computer Science is to design and program a game. 

Another point that Turkle made in her article, and is very relevant today, is the notion of achievement in games.  Arguably, that is one of the main selling points of videogames.  Although high scores are all but obsolete (as are arcade machines, to a much lesser extent), just recently the gaming community has seen the impact of achievements.  The Xbox 360, for example, has a very simple idea appropriately called “Achievement Points.”  Essentially, every game has up to 1,000 points that you can unlock if you do certain predetermined tasks, whether it be completing certain chapters, finding secrets, getting ten headshots, etc.    I know that this idea has been a phenomenal success, because people have been buying 360 games over PS3 games just for the mere fact that the PS3 doesn’t offer those points.  To be honest, I’m not too obsessed with getting the achievement points as some people are (as they play even the worst games in order to get the points), but I do feel good when the little box on the bottom of the screen pops up and says “100 points for your 500^th kill.” 

  Anyways, Turkle’s article was probably my favorite reading so far, and has helped me regain faith in videogames.  My generation’s job is to help raise the status of videogames from just games, to an intellectually and emotionally stimulating experience.   

Some have said that I could never hope or dream of selling a single item over the internet. Some people have told me that I am too naive and too optimistic with my pursuit for success. These skeptics and cynics have unequivocally expressed their unavailing pessimism by equating my aspirations with the impossible. They say, “you can never do it.” Well, you know what ladies and gentleman? YES I CAN. Why? Because I sold not just one, but THREE items on my new Half.com store. To all the skeptics and cynics out there, as Obama would eloquently say, “what now biatches!?”

I have finished my “about me” page, which if I do say so myself, is flawless. Check it out by clicking the “Me” icon in the link below. My store has roughly 40 or so items so far, of which a great majority of them are exquisite literature. Most of the items are from my own private collection, so it was kind of hard to see some of my video games, movies, and great works of literature go, but it’s something that I have to do. However, I found a couple games in a bargain-bin at Target and I found out my margin of profit would be decent, which is why I have a couple video games listed as “brand new” rather than “like new.”

My prices have been quite competitive with the market, so I’m expecting to sell a few more before my project is due. I haven’t gotten feedback yet, but that’s because I shipped the items just yesterday, and shipping normally takes 2-3 days. Although I don’t want to brag about how much money I’m making, let’s just say that of the items that I’ve sold so far, I’ve made triple of what I would have gotten from a pawn shop or Gamestop.

Without further ado, here is my beautiful store. If any of my classmates or Dr. Campbell are interested in any of the items, I will surely sell it to you for the listed price minus shipping cost.

 http://shops.half.ebay.com/sonicartin_W0…