My education was unique, my views became unique, and my opinions are my own. They may not all be right but they are mine regardless. Having not grown up through the public school system I self educated myself in the ways of society through my friends and the internet. Such a learning style comes with downsides of course, but I believe I gained some interesting views through my way of life and most importantly I became a constant critical thinker. Which is something probably not focused on enough in schools today.

One would think that living in this kind of isolation, albeit slight, would make someone not as prepared for the big world. Interacting with people I found was actually surprisingly easy when I arrived at college with minimal adjusting necessary. Following in the footsteps of my early peers I was able to dress for respect rather than souly impression, with minimal fear of social repercussions. If it were even vaguely close to the social norm I’d wear my cosplay tail way more often, but even I consider some limits set by society.

The biggest difference I notice is I was able to avoid adapting the stereotypes of race, gender, and other groups from public schools. The downside was I had minimal experience interacting with other clicks and ethnicities, which lead to minor problems communicating, which I have been trying to overcome with time. Still, I was able to freely and truthfully speak to everyone I met with the same attitude not having to hide any discrimination against the other.

Though my view of the world seems to be different than others I interact with; I have been adapting to social life while retaining my “self” very well. My unique interaction with socialized friends and the internet seems to have had a beneficial effect on my socialization which is now combining with my new experiences to offer me viewpoints and a way of life I’m not sure I would have received otherwise.

It’s rather obvious that I was addicted to customization; though it seems that these days in the world of Web 2.0 and Linux many others love customization as well. Arguably one of the reasons that Twitter became such a success was the ease of customization it offered by allowing a custom color scheme and a background of your choosing. There are countless websites who offer free backgrounds and give advice about how to create your own from scratch with a simple Google search of Twitter Backgrounds. It’s crazy how something so trivial can spawn such a number of websites.

It’s become an art in itself to try and offer a balance between customization, stability, and consistency. A failed example of this would be MySpace, as demonstrated by this parody tutorial , with its atrocious number of visual hacks that makes web designers want to hurl. FPSBanana was a good example of customization until it literally started to fall apart, more than likely due to a lack of proper maintenance. There were so many unstable visual additions being made as the website grew that the site is unfortunately becoming a virtual grave yard as time goes on.

So where do we draw the line? It’s a tough call; Facebook is running smoothly with minimal customization, yet so is deviantArt with maximum customization. Perhaps it all comes down to the time and effort put into the maintenance process that keeps something running smoothly. Linux distributions have been running strong for many years as many keep appearing but nearly all of them have strong teams who keep the code clean and smooth. Perhaps it’s the community that keeps stability, as set in example by Myspace’s twinkling piles of crap. After all, the main reason I still use Firefox is because of the community’s effort to improve customization while maintaining stability. Finally another thing to consider is the targeted audience and their expectations on the amount of customization they wish to see. There’s probably a good reason why Facebook has minimal customization while deviantArt allows for much more.

It’s a delicate balance that’s hard to maintain. I stopped redesigning my desktop weekly these days because it made my own computer unstable after all. Customization is still very important to me but I use it in moderation; to maintain the stability, consistency, and a bit of my personality I expect to be able to see in my virtual world.

So, to compensate I will be changing this blog to a bi-weekly entry release schedule. I feel like a week can fly by before I know what happened and while two weeks may be a long time it’ll have to do. Besides, bi-weekly updates will be better than zero updates I do believe.

I’m writing up some entries in anticipation for a busy Christmas, stay tuned!

Why would someone put so much time into the same game for so long? It’s a fair question that I sometimes just answer with “because it’s fun”. Yet, there are thousands of new experiences out there to explore so why would I choose to replay the same games over and over?

Perhaps I felt the need to play another round of Left 4 Dead while writing this article because we are creatures of habit. When a new game arrives I am either really excited when it is part of a franchise I know or I’m hesitant to try it. It’s not like I’m losing anything by trying a new game demo or playing something new at a friend’s house but I feel more comfortable playing something I’m already familiar with.

More than being familiar, I feel more confident because of my previous experiences. Especially when playing a multiplayer game I’m sure most would rather have skill than being the one in the server asking silly things such as how to fly. Yes this is partly an internal fear to not spread our wings to something new but I can’t see a problem with that. Experience builds our confidence and confidence is why we keep returning to the same game time and time again.

Counter-Strike has earned its reputation by having a steep learning curve with great replay ability. How it’s so replayable is not so obvious because it’s arguably just a generic shooter, but you have to look past its chrome polish finish to see that. Yes it may be generic, but it’s so finely polished and fun that you keep coming back for more.

Garry’s Mod has the advantage of being a well rounded sandbox “editor” with loads of downloadable content by the public there’s nearly an endless amount of possible play time. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto has become so popular mostly due to its similar sandbox freedom.

Portal innovated with new gameplay and time trials/challenges by incorporating short levels with a short story and challenges, allowing the community to create custom content as well. Most importantly though was its unique portal based gameplay, story, and atmosphere which helped it stand out from most other games making you want more.

Don’t feel bad when you’ve reached your 1,000th hour in your favorite video game. Maybe that game has more you haven’t explored or discovered. Perhaps you found that one game that stands tall above the rest. Your skills could be improving as you build confidence at the game you love. Or maybe it’s just so well polished you couldn’t care if you’ve played the same level five minutes ago, it’s just plain fun. Regardless of the reason that’s what video games are all about right? Game on.

One of the first questions people ask me upon finishing a game is “How long was it?” and rightfully so. We pay upwards of $60.00 dollars a game these days, who wouldn’t want to get their moneys worth? However, the last thing we want is for the gaming experience to become long due to repedative dieing.

Most games (asside from arcades) don’t cost a quarter to play, luckily developers have realized this. Odds are most games released in the last few years have an option to save your game in it’s pause screen or at least checkpoints along the way coupled with an auto save. These ways to save have nearly become standardized due to players understanding them and of course because they work so well.

Unfortionately…some games try to hard to innovate.

Yes I’m looking at you Elika, the Prince of Persia’s companion who quite literally makes it completely impossible to die in the game. The latest Prince of Persia adventure decided to completely ditch any notion of a checkpoint/save system and simply respawn you back where you were before you last failed. Sounds good in theory, until you realize you no longer have the connection to care about your invincible character’s life.

Can one exist without the other? Is it impossible to create joy without difficulty? I don’t know. But Prince of Persia lost something significant ^{(1 Kohler)}.

Let’s stay away from the drawing board and focus on what works, save for me or let me save my own games. I’m a perfectly intelligent human being who happens to have a trigger finger for the F6 quicksave key.

Save systems need as much thought put into them as any element of a game. What each game needs as a checkpoint depends entirely on its own gameplay style. Morrowind and Oblivion had convenient quick and slow saving, however it was arguably too convenient allowing you to bypass the luck of being caught whilst pick-pocketing or in-game gambling. Dead Rising had too difficult of a save system, which tried to put the feeling of fear into the player who didn’t want to die but due to the unpredictability of the gameplay it became too tedious running from savepoint to savepoint.

Games will continue to innovate saving systems such as Resident Evil’s successful typewriter saving but generally games should stick to the tried and true checkpoint, manual save, quick save techniques that gamers love.

Citation:
Kohler, Chris Can one exist without the other…?

Was it the people? The low average IQ of the commentors? Yeah that was part of it but a major aspect of my decision I believe had to do with the lack of progression not gained from scrolling through the seemingly endless pages of content laid out before me.

To maintain the interest of viewers I believe there needs to be a feeling of accomplishment gained from visiting a website. Obviously the core of the solution to giving this feeling to the viewer is having good content, but a simple method is to make the user feel like they know where they are on your/any site. Navigation is of course the overhead and probably one of the most important factors, but the design itself should also be there to guide the user throughout each page in obvious and not so obvious ways.

As I spoke about for horizontal spacing relating to backgrounds the same concepts can be applied to your allotted vertical spacing as well. The vertical treatment of your site has to move the viewers eye where you want it to go. All too often I feel disconnected from the content after scrolling down past the majority of a pages main design and want to either finish the article and leave or quit reading and return to the top of the site where I feel safe.

Designs such as these are wonderful and it’s truly a pleasure to visit, however, if too much content is placed on the page of such a site you find yourself in a void of gray as you scroll down to read. Subconsciously you know you want to get it over with and return to the top so you can see the rest of the site. That’s not what we want at all.

So back to our solution: make the user know where they are. We must think of our goal in many ways. Blogs for example must have obvious beginning and ending points for each entry with, preferably, an expected length. Every page needs a title for a sense of place and each entry should feel grouped together as a solid entity that when you are finished reading you feel accomplished at having read it and hopefully even gained something from it. I went one step further and experimented with a repeating gradient background to give a looping sense of progress as you read each entry. Play around with it, go ahead and scroll really fast and see how it makes you feel. I for one thought it to be rather successful.

There are many ways to fix the lack of progression from generic website scrolling. I’d love to see what your solutions are for this web design problem and if you have made or seen any elegant solutions then post them in the comments below I’d be really interested.

If you haven’t created a website before imagine this; you have to fit all of a page’s content into every visiter’s monitor space while not making the site look boring for viewers who have very large displays.

The challenge is trying to design an area that (sometimes) half of our audience may never see. A challenge that can actually be rather inspirational at times.

Twitter embraces being viewed in all resolutions and asks it’s users to upload their own custom backgrounds for their profile. Any user attempting this realises quickly the difficulty and excitement in designing under these constrictions.

Backgrounds can convey information, enforce a theme, express feelings, keep consistency, and move the viewers eye. The trick is getting your website’s background to look nice while not taking away the focus of your content. Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun while you’re at it.

Gradients or textures, fixed or tiled, you have a lot of control over how your background functions for your site. High speed internet becoming the norm, you can design big to match. Modern browser advances are allowing you to have enhanced control over your backgrounds to open up more design possibilities with features such as transparency and multiple layered backgrounds.

Using cascading style sheets a website’s background can perform many neat tricks while still being easy to create. Newer sites with that “Web 2.0 aesthetic”, as some would call it, have very appealing effects because they are simple. For fun, some beautiful examples of amazing backgrounds using basic tools can be found here.

Most successful sites have wonderful attention to detail which includes how their background plays among every user’s resolution. Some constrictions are involved in designing a good background but that’s what makes it fun to experiment and try something new while still being functional. Work from the ground up, start your next web design with a background.

Creating the comments page I spent more time on than I expected and it was because I wanted it to be as simple as typing, then pressing submit. I allowed for anonymous comments without any filters because I believe people will truly express theirselves in this atmosphere. Not every website should use this methodology, but I felt that it fit for my purpose and I believe in it.

To me, the real plus of a blog is that it is a “community” of sorts. On most of the blogs I read, there is the ability to leave a comment after the post. I often find as much, or sometimes even better information in the comments and conversation that takes place as there was in the original post. Different points of view and identification of other resources are the real nuggets that can come from good comments on a blog. ^{(1 Slezak )}.

The above quote by Jerry Slezak discusses blogs without comments but the concepts can apply to any website. If I like something I tend to let the creator know. I browse art, tutorials, news, everything you do and I have every intention of letting you know what I think about it. Upon viewing a comic or reading an article I love to tell you what I think. People interacting with each other is what made Web 2.0 in the first place. It really does disappoint me when I find myself looking for a text box to respond and only find the site’s footer.

Not to point the finger at Globex Designs Inc. but upon trying to compliment on what a wonderful Gmail skin they made I found the only option I had was to email them directly. I was disappointed when I couldn’t tell everyone the satisfaction I had while using it.

I shouldn’t have to think about how to give my feedback. The less hoops users have to jump through to give feedback the better. A jewel of a comic was made, yet I’ll never be able to give the artist the credit he deserves.

I encourage everyone; artists, developers, coders, and browsers alike to talk to each other. If you find something you like then appreciate it. Give a “thumbs up” or a “star rating” or whatever toy the site uses for user feedback. If you’re feeling brave think of some critique or compliments as well to encourage the receiver to continue what they do best. Please make feedback easy to give. Feedback helps the internet grow, feed it often.

Citation:

Slezak, Jerry Is a blog that doesn’t allow comments really a blog?

Once upon a time games were an escape from reality, but it’s questionable if that is still true today. First off, there are many ways to make a game feel real. The game mechanics can work like in the real world, physics can become an essential gameplay element to draw in a, even the methods of controling a character or series of characters could entice our minds into an essence of “real”. However, the easy way to feel real seems to be the simple color reduction/contrast raising gloomy atmosphere that we’ve seen time and time again.

I can’t hide my love for fallout. Everything about it was great except for the art direction. I left the Vault for the first time with the highest of expectations only to see a musky plain of brown desert stretched out before me. Don’t get me wrong I truly understand what the developers were aiming for during the production of the game. I felt alone and that was the point, I got it, but I didn’t feel captivated. It was up to the rest of the game to prove to me that it was good again because the graphic design failed me.

The article “i miss color” makes a good point.

If a game is supposed to be fun, isn’t it ok for developers to make it look fun? ^{(1 smakus)}.

Smakus is trying to point out that most modern games with the “realistic” art style don’t make you feel “light-hearted” or uplifting and I totally agree.

There are quite a few games that could use a little lesson in the use of color. I easily grow bored of the graphics in some of these games because it feels like I’ve seen the same place a million times no matter the geometry of the map.

Games can be fun while performing other purposes as well. How about something that is educational, surreal, expressive, and more? You can gain much more from a game than fun as I’ve expressed in my article about the “Desensitization by Mass Media”.

I found the Zeno Clash (image above) to be a highly successful game with a nice color pallet. At the same time, however, I feel it could have been just as successful without the vibrant surreal colors. Left 4 Dead 2 is bringing a new collection of colors which is nice but the original Left 4 Dead did very well without it.

Some developers should choose a broader variety of colors for their color palette than they use in their games. Games such as Bioshock and Fallout 3 have a limited variety of colors consisting mainly of variants of grey and brown, which can become eye straining after long periods of play. Then there are games such as Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which have beautiful and vibrant color palettes which provide beautiful scenery to enjoy at all periods of gameplay. Even though Fallout 3 and Bioshock have theme’s that require the darker, more ruin-like palettes, there are probably better choices for colors that could have been used. ^{(2 Lewis)}.

Color in games should be treated with care because it is a big mood setter. It’s becoming uncommon that a video game finds the perfect balance of color vibrancy without missing the target audience. There’s difference between a consistent color pallet and a bad color pallet.

Citation:
Smakus i miss color
Lewis, Trevor “Some developers…”

Surveys and other research have been discussing desensitization all over the world. It becomes obvious that the media has a strong influence on how we view our world and form our lives. Children, due to television, are less likely to be shocked when seeing or even committing crimes for example. Video games have been a recent focus for the attention of researchers trying to correlate them to reckless and even violent behavior outside of the games people play.

There is a lot of debate around how media influences our decisions in life, however many fail to question whether becoming desensitized is as bad as it sounds. There are thousands of jobs in our modern world that needs a mentally strong individual to accomplish. Surgeons, police, lawyers, vets, and actors are just some of the general fields of work that require employees to be mentally strong enough to cope with the day-to-day job. When a surgeon performs their first major surgery there isn’t as large of a shock factor involved when doing the operation as if the individual was not desensitized.

In some ways it can even be argued that there is some indirect mental experience that can be gained from witnessing violence and sex performed by others through media. While some may be intrigued by seeing others perform these things it doesn’t always mean that the viewer will want to follow in their footsteps. In fact many would be satisfied simply watching crimes on television rather than wanting to commit any. The same is true for video games, which take this concept to the next level allowing you to virtually disperse any raw urges to commit a crime without harm to anyone. By using media as a way to experience improper behavior we feel less of a need to perform these behaviors in the real world.

In these modern times there are benefits and downfalls to becoming desensitized. Some place the blame for their criminal acts on the media while others credit the media for helping them through some tough situations. When used in moderation there is definitely a place for desensitization from media in our world.