Today in class I brought up the question, Are Janet Murrey’s four requirements for the computer just characteristics of discipline (as defined by Foucault)? Procedural = Organic, Participatory = Combinatory, Encyclopedic = Genetic, and Spatial = Cellular.

Jay Bolter made a commit, a little jokingly, that I may have been the first person to compare these two points. Which for one, hey I don’t get to be the first at many things but really as soon as I finished reading’s Foucault’s chapter on discipline it just made sense. Now I’m not saying that I’m a complete expert on everything he writes in his book “Discipline and Punish, but let me break it down.

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A couple of months back I made two mosaic tables based on WoW horde symbols. Here is just a quick recap of how I made them.

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I attending the Journalism 3G symposium today and meet some really nice people. This has been one of the first conferences that I have attended that did not revolve around games. But what was interesting was that as soon as I mentioned that video games was my broad research topic everyone had a story to tell or a game idea. It just goes to show you that video games do reach a wide audience and that a lot of people outside of the games industry have their take on what is happening in the field.

I’ve been thinking how in the world did Portal walk away with Game of the Year at GDC. SM Galaxy had better puzzles, Rock Band is just plan fun at a party, BioShock had a better story, and Call of Duty 4 was more action packed.

So why did it win? Well when I first saw Portal I remembered a cartoon that I had seen as a kid. It was about this scientist who created a substance that could create holes. He had good intentions as most scientist do but someone ended up stealing the hole making material. The criminal went on a crime spree easily breaking into banks since the holes would open a doorway through any wall. Eventually though the criminal gets caught, he dives into a hole to get away and the hole is snatched up, trapping him inside.

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So this is the beginning of my new website. Hopefully I will actually use this one.