jonathonsjournalism-blog

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

warframe edited

On the surface, Warframe is an incredibly easy sell: play as a ridiculously powerful cyberninja, known as Tenno in the game’s lore, and assassinate your way across the galaxy, harvesting loot, hoarding cash, and growing ever deadlier with every kill. And the best part? It’s free to play and available on all platforms. Warframe wasn’t always the sleek free to play game it is now. It launched with significant bumps but more importantly vanilla Warframe felt a bit feature-light. Content felt very sectioned off and discrete, progression was stifled, and there wasn’t much of a community in which to find other players to jump in with or to answer your questions about some of the game’s more obscure systems.

 But that was 2013. Fast-forward to the present and Warframe is a completely different animal. The bones are the same, but almost every system of the game has been markedly improved or evolved. Gameplay is more connected now, so it doesn’t feel like every mission is a stand-alone affair, though the game has retained enough bite-sized content that if you want to just dive in for ten or fifteen minutes that’s perfectly viable. And that core gameplay, the shooting and slicing and leaping that continues to be the best part of Warframe’s layered offerings, feels sleeker than ever. It’s power fantasy done right, allowing players to feel powerful and dangerous without making the game’s challenges feel trivial.

 Warframe is also better than ever at serving different tiers of players. A lot of games of its type, particularly MMOs, age poorly. As they age, the barrier to entry gets higher and higher. New players jumping in are overwhelmed by systems and events and currencies they have no context for, and often tutorials that were designed around the game’s launch haven’t kept pace with the rest of the experience, so complex systems are completely opaque, but for all of Warframe’s different components and mechanics, it still feels welcoming, even to newbies. While it doesn’t hold your hand, it has clear language that describes how everything works inside the game. New players don’t need to dive into hundred-page FAQs to understand how different frames (the avatars that determine your play style and abilities) work or where to find the blueprints they want, as Warframe packs all of that data into the game. And the basic way the game plays is intuitive and will feel natural for anyone that’s played an action game in the last decade.

  That kind of loot drive is one of the best ways Warframe has been refined since it launched. Whereas a lot of games, especially other looter shooters, demand a huge investment of time and effort from their players but are very spartan with their rewards, Warframe hews closer to the Destiny approach, ensuring that players are rewarded frequently and meaningfully. Every frame requires a certain number of blueprints to unlock, and almost every time you beat one of the game’s varied bosses one of those crucial blueprints will come tumbling out. I find that even if I’m not actively chasing a specific frame, getting other blueprints (or weapons) feels really satisfying. The dramatically different ways that each frame plays, with suites of abilities that range from teleportation to frost nova’s to sonic booms, mean that every unlock feels new and exciting. Even if you don’t end up loving a new frame, they all provide the chance to experiment with playing the game in a totally different way.

 While a lot of free to play games promise all their content is available for free, this usually means committing hundreds of hours to a brutal, repetitive grind before you finally unlock the content you want (by which time you’re often so exhausted with the game that you no longer want to play with said new content). Warframe does a good job of making all its content attainable in a reasonable way, if and when you do decide to spend some of your money, it provides solid value that feels commensurate with the amount of money spent. It also does an excellent job of not constantly trying to lure you to its storefront. If you want to buy a few items, it’s easy enough to do, but if you’d rather not, Warframe doesn’t go out of its way to make you feel like you should.

 Best of all, if you jumped on the Warframe bandwagon early but haven’t popped in for a while, there's a steady drip of tweaks, improvements, and expansions. Warframe is a game that I find myself diving back into every couple of months, and almost without fail there’s something new to play with or some new feature to test that pulls me back in. It’s a game that knows how to capitalize on the fact that it’s persistent, and with over three years of development under its belt, it’s busting at the seams with stuff to do for those who have never dipped their toes in. To paraphrase that old saw, there’s never been a better time to get your Tenno on.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

monetisation edited

Monetisation in the gaming industry has been evolving in recent years, it dates back to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, this game had a small piece of downloadable content called horse armour, as the name suggests, it added horse armour to your mounts for a small price of £3.99. This is arguably one of the most important instances of customer backlash and It also set a standard for in industry, we would see small microtransactions becoming the norm throughout the industry, we already had downloadable content called expansions, which would be entire games added on to pre-existing games, but the prices of these packs would range from £30 - £40.

 When Overwatch was released in 2016, it popularised a form of microtransactions called Loot Boxes, they are crates that are purchasable with real money, that give you a random item in game, the items can range from game to game and the price of the box itself can range in price, Overwatches loot boxes are £1.59 for one or £5.99 for five they had been around for a couple of years in a game called Counter strike, so its not the first game to add this form of micro transaction. Since the release of Overwatch we have seen pre-existing games and newly released games adopt this form of monetisation, but it was only cosmetic items you could get from these loot box’s, it had never been actual advantages that you could buy in these crates until battlefront 2.

 Star Wars Battlefront 2 has been dogged by controversy ever since the beta for the game revealed that winnable Star Cards gave players stat boosts that improved their performance in competitive multiplayer modes. Since these cards could be gained by purchasing loot boxes with real money, players accused EA of promoting pay to win tactics that gave customers who paid extra for an advantage.  EA responded by changing the progression system of the game and altering what kind of cards could be won in loot boxes, having higher level star cards only achievable by plying the game more and levelling up.

  Some have even petitioned their local governments to investigate whether these loot box practices are gambling, something EA and the ESRB firmly deny. However, the Belgian government's gambling regulatory board said it would investigate whether loot boxes in Battlefront 2 and Overwatch were indeed gambling.  Ultimately, EA's decision comes after a firestorm week that severely affected the game's reputation among potential buyers. The fact that EA will potentially respond by removing the entire microtransaction element is proof that the dialogue had become dangerous for the game.  The microtransactions are gone from Star Wars Battlefront 2, at least for the moment. The fans, with their days, if not weeks, of outrage over the paid content, have won their fight against Electronic Arts. Just like that, the day before it was set to be officially released, the for-pay currency has been removed from the game.

  Even with the removement of the payed economy the effects of paying for power and already been felt by the player base. EA have a subscription service that allows you to play their games, your able to play their games a couple of days before the release of the game to the public, but this trial has a limit of ten hours, but the microtransactions were active to these players, so some players bought crates and gained power, when this economy was taken away when the game was released, these players were already extremely over powered compared to the rest of the player base

 This follows an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, where the game’s developers tried their hardest to convince the fans that the economy was really the best thing, and could be made more functional with a few tweaks. This happened after EA had already slashed the costs to unlock the game’s most popular heroes by 75 percent. This happened after nearly everyone who was interested in the game made it clear that the monetization strategy appeared to exist, so EA could make more profit, rather focusing on making a fun, £50 game. EA saw the passion and frustration of the community and apparently decided that it was better to rethink the entire game’s economy rather than lose the money of all the people who seemed to at least want to buy the game.

 Listening to players’ feedback about the progression system was the only possible thing EA could do if it didn’t want to run one of its most popular franchises into the ground. The damage had already been done; no one trusted anything the company had to say in defence of these microtransactions, and why would they? There was no plausible argument that would lead anyone to believe the multiple currencies and loot crate-based economy were designed for fun and fairness, instead of solely for profit.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

greenlight editied

Steam Greenlight is finally set to disappear entirely later this Spring. The service has been around for almost five years, and while it was largely greeted with enthusiasm, the reality has never justified that optimism. The amassing of community votes for game approval turned out to be no barrier to all manner of games that launched unfinished, indie games, even using stolen assets in some cases on the service, but enough of a barrier to be frustrating and annoying for many genuine indie developers. As an attempt to figure out how to prevent a storefront from drowning in the torrent of of games that has flooded the likes of the App Store and Google Play.

Greenlight isn't disappearing because Valve has solved this problem to its satisfaction. The replacement, Direct, is in some regards a step backwards, it'll see developers being able to publish directly on the system simply by confirming their identity through submission of business documents and paying a fee for each game they submit. The fee in question hasn't been decided yet, but Valve says it's thinking about everything from £100 to £5000.

The impact of Direct is going to depend heavily on what that fee ends up being. It's worth noting that developers for iOS, for example, already pay around £100 a year to be part of Apple's developer programme, and trawling through the oceans of unloved and unwanted apps released on the App Store every day shows just how little that £100 price does to dissuade the worst kind of games. At £5000, meanwhile, quite a lot of indie developers will find themselves priced out of Steam, especially those that are passionate about their product, or new creators getting started out. The chances are that many of the  borderline-scam games with ripped off assets and design will calculate that £5000 is a small price to pay for a shot at sales on Steam, especially if the high fees are thinning out the number of titles launching.

Plenty of creators are making a living at the low end of the market; they're not making fortunes or buying gigantic mansions, but they're making enough money from their games to sustain themselves and keep up their output. Often, they're working in niches that have small audiences of devoted fans, and locking them out of Steam with high submission costs would both rob them of their income, there are quite a few creators out there for that £5000 represents a large proportion of their average revenue from a game and rob audiences of their output, or at least force them to look elsewhere.

In replacing publishers with a storefront through which creators can directly launch products to consumers, Valve and other store operators have asserted the value of pure market focus over curation, the notion of greatness rising to the top while bad quality products sink to the bottom simply through the actions of consumers making buying choices.

Even as their stores have become increasingly swamped with tides of low quality titles, perhaps even to the extent of snuffing out genuinely good quality games store operators have tried to apply algorithms to bulk up market places. Users can vote, and rate things; elements of old-fashioned curation have even been attempted, with rather limited success. Tweaks have been applied to the submission process at one end and the discovery process at the other.

Like the indie developers themselves, some will cater to specific niches, while others will be more mainstream, but ultimately they will all serve a kind of curation role; their value will lie not just in PR, marketing and finance, but also in the ability to say to platforms and consumers that somewhere along the line, a human being has looked at a game in depth and said "yes, this is a good game and we're willing to take a risk on it." There's a value to that simple function that's been all too readily dismissed in the excitement over Steam, the App Store and so on, and as issues of discovery and quality continue to plague those storefronts, that value is only becoming greater.

Whatever Valve ultimately decides to do with Direct, whether it sets a low price that essentially opens the floodgates, or a high one that leaves some developers unable to afford the cost of entry. It will not provide a relief to Steam's issues. It might, however, lay the ground work for a fresh restructuring of the industry, one that returns emphasis to the publishing functions that were forgotten in the initial indie gold-rush. A new breed of publisher may be the only answer to the problems created by storefronts we were once told were going to make publishers extinct.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Article Back up - Greenlight

Steam Greenlight is finally set to disappear entirely later this Spring. The service has been around for almost five years, and while it was largely greeted with enthusiasm, the reality has never justified that optimism. The amassing of community votes for game approval turned out to be no barrier to all manner of games that launched unfinished, indie games, even using stolen assets in some cases on the service, but enough of a barrier to be frustrating and annoying for many genuine indie developers. As an attempt to figure out how to prevent a storefront from drowning in the torrent of of games that has flooded the likes of the App Store and Google Play.

Greenlight isn't disappearing because Valve has solved this problem to its satisfaction. The replacement, Direct, is in some regards a step backwards, it'll see developers being able to publish directly on the system simply by confirming their identity through submission of business documents and paying a fee for each game they submit. The fee in question hasn't been decided yet, but Valve says it's thinking about everything from £100 to £5000.

The impact of Direct is going to depend heavily on what that fee ends up being. It's worth noting that developers for iOS, for example, already pay around £100 a year to be part of Apple's developer programme, and trawling through the oceans of unloved and unwanted apps released on the App Store every day shows just how little that £100 price does to dissuade the worst kind of games. At £5000, meanwhile, quite a lot of indie developers will find themselves priced out of Steam, especially those that are passionate about their product, or new creators getting started out. The chances are that many of the  borderline-scam games with ripped off assets and design will calculate that £5000 is a small price to pay for a shot at sales on Steam, especially if the high fees are thinning out the number of titles launching.

It's worth noting that, for most of Steam's consumers, the loss of some indie games and titles from new creators won't be a concern. Steam, like all storefronts, sells huge numbers at the top end and that falls off rapidly as you come down the charts; the number of consumers who are actively engaging with smaller titles on the service is small. However, that doesn't mean that locking out those creators wouldn't be damaging, both creatively and commercially.

Plenty of creators are making a living at the low end of the market; they're not making fortunes or buying gigantic mansions, but they're making enough money from their games to sustain themselves and keep up their output. Often, they're working in niches that have small audiences of devoted fans, and locking them out of Steam with high submission costs would both rob them of their income, there are quite a few creators out there for that £5000 represents a large proportion of their average revenue from a game and rob audiences of their output, or at least force them to look elsewhere.

Sometimes, a game from a creator becomes a break-out hit, the game the whole world is talking about for months on end sometimes, but not very often. It's tempting to argue that Steam should be careful about its low-end indies because otherwise it risks missing the Next Big Thing, but that's not really a good reason. Steam is just too big to ignore, and the Next Big Thing will almost certainly end up on the platform anyway.

Rather, the question is over what Valve wants Steam to be. If it's a platform for distributing big games to mainstream consumers, okay. If they're serious about it being a broad store, though, an all-encompassing platform where you can flick seamlessly between AAA titles with budgets in the tens of millions and indie, niche games made as a labour of love by part-timer or indie developers, then Direct as described still doesn't solve the essential conflict in that vision.

In replacing publishers with a storefront through which creators can directly launch products to consumers, Valve and other store operators have asserted the value of pure market focus over curation, the notion of greatness rising to the top while bad quality products sink to the bottom simply through the actions of consumers making buying choices.

Even as their stores have become increasingly swamped with tides of low quality titles, perhaps even to the extent of snuffing out genuinely good quality games store operators have tried to apply algorithms to bulk up market places. Users can vote, and rate things; elements of old-fashioned curation have even been attempted, with rather limited success. Tweaks have been applied to the submission process at one end and the discovery process at the other.

One interesting possibility is that we're going to see the focus shift from the extreme position of believing that Steam and its users would make publishers obsolete, to the notion that digital storefronts will ultimately do a better job of selling products. We've already seen the rise of a handful of publishers who specialise in working with indie developers to get their games onto digital platforms with the appropriate degree of PR and marketing support. If platforms like Steam start to put up barriers to entry, we can expect a lot more companies like that to spring up to act as middlemen between the storefront and consumer.

Like the indie developers themselves, some will cater to specific niches, while others will be more mainstream, but ultimately they will all serve a kind of curation role; their value will lie not just in PR, marketing and finance, but also in the ability to say to platforms and consumers that somewhere along the line, a human being has looked at a game in depth and said "yes, this is a good game and we're willing to take a risk on it." There's a value to that simple function that's been all too readily dismissed in the excitement over Steam, the App Store and so on, and as issues of discovery and quality continue to plague those storefronts, that value is only becoming greater.

Whatever Valve ultimately decides to do with Direct, whether it sets a low price that essentially opens the floodgates, or a high one that leaves some developers unable to afford the cost of entry. It will not provide a relief to Steam's issues. It might, however, lay the ground work for a fresh restructuring of the industry, one that returns emphasis to the publishing functions that were forgotten in the initial indie gold-rush. A new breed of publisher may be the only answer to the problems created by storefronts we were once told were going to make publishers extinct.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Article Back up - Monitisation

Monetisation in the gaming industry has been evolving in recent years, it dates back to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, this game had a small piece of downloadable content called horse armour, as the name suggests, it added horse armour to your mounts for a small price of £3.99. This is arguably one of the most important instances of customer backlash and It also set a standard for in industry, we would see small microtransactions becoming the norm throughout the industry, we already had downloadable content called expansions, which would be entire games added on to pre-existing games, but the prices of these packs would range from £30 - £40.

When Overwatch was released in 2016, it popularised a form of microtransactions called Loot Boxes, they are crates that are purchasable with real money, that give you a random item in game, the items can range from game to game and the price of the box itself can range in price, Overwatches loot boxes are £1.59 for one or £5.99 for five they had been around for a couple of years in a game called Counter strike, so its not the first game to add this form of micro transaction. Since the release of Overwatch we have seen pre-existing games and newly released games adopt this form of monetisation, but it was only cosmetic items you could get from these loot box’s, it had never been actual advantages that you could buy in these crates until battlefront 2.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 has been dogged by controversy ever since the beta for the game revealed that winnable Star Cards gave players stat boosts that improved their performance in competitive multiplayer modes. Since these cards could be gained by purchasing loot boxes with real money, players accused EA of promoting pay to win tactics that gave customers who paid extra for an advantage.  EA responded by changing the progression system of the game and altering what kind of cards could be won in loot boxes, having higher level star cards only achievable by plying the game more and levelling up.

However, it was discovered that unlocking a hero character like Luke Skywalker could cost 60,000 in-game credits. Some fans have reported that it would take 40 hours of game time to earn that many credits for a single unlockable character. EA responded by cutting the cost of unlocking these characters by 75 percent, to 15,000 credits. None of these changes have stopped gamers from protesting Battlefront 2. Angry commenters suggested that it would take six years to unlock everything in the game through progression along, something EA also denied.

Some have even petitioned their local governments to investigate whether these loot box practices are gambling, something EA and the ESRB firmly deny. However, the Belgian government's gambling regulatory board said it would investigate whether loot boxes in Battlefront 2 and Overwatch were indeed gambling.  Ultimately, EA's decision comes after a firestorm week that severely affected the game's reputation among potential buyers. The fact that EA will potentially respond by removing the entire microtransaction element is proof that the dialogue had become dangerous for the game.  The microtransactions are gone from Star Wars Battlefront 2, at least for the moment. The fans, with their days, if not weeks, of outrage over the paid content, have won their fight against Electronic Arts. Just like that, the day before it was set to be officially released, the for-pay currency has been removed from the game.

 In a press release EA had this to say about the situation “We hear you loud and clear, so we’re turning off all in-game purchases,” the official statement reads. “We will now spend more time listening, adjusting, balancing, and tuning. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay. The ability to purchase crystals in-game will become available later, only after we’ve made changes to the game. We’ll share more details as we work through this.”

Even with the removement of the payed economy the effects of paying for power and already been felt by the player base. EA have a subscription service that allows you to play their games, your able to play their games a couple of days before the release of the game to the public, but this trial has a limit of ten hours, but the microtransactions were active to these players, so some players bought crates and gained power, when this economy was taken away when the game was released, these players were already extremely over powered compared to the rest of the player base

This follows an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, where the game’s developers tried their hardest to convince the fans that the economy was really the best thing, and could be made more functional with a few tweaks. This happened after EA had already slashed the costs to unlock the game’s most popular heroes by 75 percent. This happened after nearly everyone who was interested in the game made it clear that the monetization strategy appeared to exist, so EA could make more profit, rather focusing on making a fun, £50 game. EA saw the passion and frustration of the community and apparently decided that it was better to rethink the entire game’s economy rather than lose the money of all the people who seemed to at least want to buy the game.

Listening to players’ feedback about the progression system was the only possible thing EA could do if it didn’t want to run one of its most popular franchises into the ground. The damage had already been done; no one trusted anything the company had to say in defence of these microtransactions, and why would they? There was no plausible argument that would lead anyone to believe the multiple currencies and loot crate-based economy were designed for fun and fairness, instead of solely for profit.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Article back ups - warframe

Warframe

On the surface, Warframe is an incredibly easy sell: play as a ridiculously powerful cyberninja, known as Tenno in the game’s lore, and assassinate your way across the galaxy, harvesting loot, hoarding cash, and growing ever deadlier with every kill. And the best part? It’s free to play and available on all platforms. Warframe wasn’t always the sleek free to play game it is now. It launched with significant bumps but more importantly vanilla Warframe felt a bit feature-light. Content felt very sectioned off and discrete, progression was stifled, and there wasn’t much of a community in which to find other players to jump in with or to answer your questions about some of the game’s more obscure systems.

But that was 2013. Fast-forward to the present and Warframe is a completely different animal. The bones are the same, but almost every system of the game has been markedly improved or evolved. Gameplay is more connected now, so it doesn’t feel like every mission is a stand-alone affair, though the game has retained enough bite-sized content that if you want to just dive in for ten or fifteen minutes that’s perfectly viable. And that core gameplay, the shooting and slicing and leaping that continues to be the best part of Warframe’s layered offerings, feels sleeker than ever. It’s power fantasy done right, allowing players to feel powerful and dangerous without making the game’s challenges feel trivial.

Warframe is also better than ever at serving different tiers of players. A lot of games of its type, particularly MMOs, age poorly. As they age, the barrier to entry gets higher and higher. New players jumping in are overwhelmed by systems and events and currencies they have no context for, and often tutorials that were designed around the game’s launch haven’t kept pace with the rest of the experience, so complex systems are completely opaque, but for all of Warframe’s different components and mechanics, it still feels welcoming, even to newbies. While it doesn’t hold your hand, it has clear language that describes how everything works inside the game. New players don’t need to dive into hundred-page FAQs to understand how different frames (the avatars that determine your play style and abilities) work or where to find the blueprints they want, as Warframe packs all of that data into the game. And the basic way the game plays is intuitive and will feel natural for anyone that’s played an action game in the last decade.

But for all that, it doesn’t sacrifice complexity for ease-of-use. For veterans, or even for new players that are looking for a deeper-than-average experience out of their online shooter, Warframe provides lots of moving parts and deep systems to keep you engaged. It’s also piled up the level of content and advanced loot you’d expect from an online game in its fourth year of existence, so there’s plenty of incentive to keep hunting for upgrades or new weapons, even for players deep into the end game.

That kind of loot drive is one of the best ways Warframe has been refined since it launched. Whereas a lot of games, especially other looter shooters, demand a huge investment of time and effort from their players but are very spartan with their rewards, Warframe hews closer to the Destiny approach, ensuring that players are rewarded frequently and meaningfully. Every frame requires a certain number of blueprints to unlock, and almost every time you beat one of the game’s varied bosses one of those crucial blueprints will come tumbling out. I find that even if I’m not actively chasing a specific frame, getting other blueprints (or weapons) feels really satisfying. The dramatically different ways that each frame plays, with suites of abilities that range from teleportation to frost nova’s to sonic booms, mean that every unlock feels new and exciting. Even if you don’t end up loving a new frame, they all provide the chance to experiment with playing the game in a totally different way.

This is another great hook in Warframe’s arsenal. Instead of locking you into one race or class per character, it allows you to sample a huge number of frames with the same character. There’s no rolling a new toon and replaying the same intro content you’ve played a thousand of times, and then laboriously levelling until you get a real taste of what each class offers. Switching frames is as easy as pressing a button, and most of the frames come factory-standard with a representative set of abilities and upgrades.

While a lot of free to play games promise all their content is available for free, this usually means committing hundreds of hours to a brutal, repetitive grind before you finally unlock the content you want (by which time you’re often so exhausted with the game that you no longer want to play with said new content). Warframe does a good job of making all its content attainable in a reasonable way, if and when you do decide to spend some of your money, it provides solid value that feels commensurate with the amount of money spent. It also does an excellent job of not constantly trying to lure you to its storefront. If you want to buy a few items, it’s easy enough to do, but if you’d rather not, Warframe doesn’t go out of its way to make you feel like you should.

Best of all, if you jumped on the Warframe bandwagon early but haven’t popped in for a while, there's a steady drip of tweaks, improvements, and expansions. Warframe is a game that I find myself diving back into every couple of months, and almost without fail there’s something new to play with or some new feature to test that pulls me back in. It’s a game that knows how to capitalize on the fact that it’s persistent, and with over three years of development under its belt, it’s busting at the seams with stuff to do for those who have never dipped their toes in. To paraphrase that old saw, there’s never been a better time to get your Tenno on.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Ethical Essay

Is image manipulation ethical? Should there be limitations on image manipulation, and if so what should they be? What ethical considerations need to be taken in to account?

Image manipulation is a difficult subject to discuss, it can be seen as both a good thing and a bad thing. Typically it is seen as an unethical practice to perform on Images, the manipulation of the human body is another difficult situation to discuss, because you could ask the question “some people don’t mind, so whys there a discussion about it?” but on the other hand body manipulation can set a false representation of both men and women for the younger generation. This is specifically prominent in magazines, such as fashion and sport, these magazines have a sole purpose of trying to make the person look as appealing as possible, for fashion they want the audience to buy that piece of clothing that the model is wearing, or for sport it’s trying to make the person look as physically fit as possible, so it can create this false objective that the reader can never achieve because it’s been created and changed on a piece of software. It’s all for profit, trying to squeeze as much money out of its audience as possible, but it’s also a health risk, there have been many cases of young, impressionable women, starving themselves to achieve this “perfect look”, to look like their idols, even models themselves are becoming paper thin, in an attempt to achieve perfection in the eye of the industry.

It would be easy for a magazine editor to forbid photo manipulation. But as soon as the red eye is removed from someone's photo, the image is altered. Readers will accept fixing flaws, such as correcting colours or lighting. After all, that's what most of them do with their personal photographs before they have them printed. Shooting in black and white or changing a colour photo to appear black and white is technically manipulating reality. Because no deception is involved, this creative technique will not raise ethical concerns. So here is a good area of photo manipulation but it can be take too far and you can see how one slight adjustment can snowball into transforming a person’s body into something it’s not, it’s important to have limitations because of this very reason.

Discuss the representation of women in visual culture. Do you believe that the media is ethical in the way it represents women and people of colour? Do you believe that representation is important? Why?

The representation of women in visual culture is a controversial topic, you won’t see larger women on the front of a magazine, you will see a small and skinny women, and this hits at the crucks of the problem, the women will probably be white as well. The representation of all sizes and colours is extremely important when your magazine can reach a large audience, with this reach and power the magazine can help to normalize all the differences that are represented in people, by normalising something it helps to set a base standard for the industry. This small change can help to balance the scales in terms of representation within the print industry, we are already seeing this change now, and it hasn’t turned away people, if anything it gets a few more people to read that piece of media because they now feel represented but you could also argue that people keep buying these magazines that don’t represent a broad spectrum so they are making a profit.

we are seeing a shift of what is and isn’t acceptable, people are becoming more accepting of different body types so were starting to see a variety of different shapes and sizes on the front of magazines, but these are mostly in rebellion of the standard that the print media has, we are seeing a change I  what is becoming normalised, if you keep exposing people to something different they’ll eventually just accept it, media out lets are already putting the pressure on, and others are following in those footsteps.

Look at the work of Terry Richardson as a case study. In what ways might a feminist suggest his work reflects the "male gaze"?

The male gaze is the act of depicting women as objects of male pleasure, designed for males and by males. Presenting women in this light, creates again another false representation to the younger generation that women are just objects that can be used however you want and discarded whenever you get bored of them. Terry Richardson’s work is controversial to say the least, especially when talking about the topic of “the male gaze”, his work almost represents this idea of the male gaze, if you have a look at his work, it highlights certain body parts that sexualises the subject of the photo, at the same time it can represent a unrealistic view of the person in the photo,. It can normalise the sexualisation of women and to an extent it already has, young men are growing up with this perfect women in mind, and the reality is quite the opposite.

What is objectification? Why do feminists think it's a problem?

When talking about objectification in terms of the way we see women, it is the idea of degrading women to the point where we just see them as objects, similar to the male gaze. This is a problem for feminism because women at being looked at as property to be used, and some forms of the print media help to further emphasise this point and normalise it in mainstream media. This comes along with the normalization of the sexualisation of women within some of Richardson’s, and not just his photography, it is an extremely dangerous situation.

Do you believe that Terry Richardson's work objectifies women? What messages do you feel it communicates? Do you like his work? How do    you feel about his representation of women?

Terry Richardson’s work definitely objectifies women. His photography is controversial for his over-sexualisation of women in the picture he works with, he has also been accused of abuse while on set with these women. Personally I feel like he has already normalised the representation of women in a sexual light for himself and to a certain degree for some of the public. His work is degrading and sometimes harmful to women, but there is a place for that kind of work in the media, I just think it’s important that the audience knows that.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Smartphones and Instagram in Photojournalism Task

Why have smartphones become so important to photojournalism? What advantages do they have?

 Smartphones have allowed everyone to become journalists, if your phone has a camera you can record and document major events as they happen, and because the majority of people have a smart phone, when an event is occurring, you have access to that event from multiple different angles. with the rise of smartphones has came the rise of news coverage on a base level, news organisation cant be everywhere all the time.

What makes David Guttenfelder's images interesting? What makes them powerful? What makes them important?

his images are of North Korea, a society that is extremely private, and not a lot is know about the day to day life that goes on within the country. In early 2013, North Korea made a 3G connection available to foreigners, and suddenly Guttenfelder had the ability to share those glimpses with the world in real time. On January 18, 2013, he used his iPhone to post one of the first images to Instagram from inside the notoriously secretive country. the reason why they are interesting is they are of subject that hasn't previously been explored before, because the country is guarded off from the rest of the world, so the interest comes from the secrecy of the country itself.

What makes Marcus Bleasdale's images interesting? What makes them powerful? What makes them important?

As part of an awareness campaign, Marcus has taken pictures of Central African Republic over the past four years. The conflict is still ongoing and escalating in some areas.

Christian Anti Balaka attack muslim property on the outskirts of Bangui after the Muslim Seleka government fell and the Muslims in the area have fled. The Christian community is taking revenge for the months of harsh Muslim Seleka rule, trying to destroy and loot everything in the Muslim districts. 

This is also a subject that isn't in the public's eye, its definitely known, but i don’t think its a well documented issue, like the subject before, its a topic that is difficult to capture, especially around the society that he was in, the photographer could have been killed, the ease of use of a smartphone, allowed Marcus to capture the subject better, and to show the word this issue, more closely and much more detailed.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Telling a Story Through Pictures Task

Critically discuss the series you have chosen.

Calais: Jungle Life - Photographs and text by Souvid Datta

Why did you find this series interesting?

Migration into Europe, the Calais border crossing has become something of a  debate of immigration, and this series of photos are trying to explain and represent the hidden truth and the undying conditions that these people are living in. Unfortunately, its coverage in the news has often been misinformed  focusing on rare violent breakouts, police clashes and deaths. This has in turn shaped attitudes regarding the refugees. you could also argue that it is a political stance, the photographer allowing the refugees to speak for themselves about their own lives and experiences while being an immigrant.

What insights do these images give us that text couldn't?

it gives us a representation of  people that are living in these sort of condition, it also helps to show a wider audience that these numbers on a page are actually people and not just some scourge to mankind, that there actually casualties of the society that they lived in, and that they don’t want to be apart of it any longer, whether it be there own decision or if they were being forced out.

And what could text give you that these images can't?

text can help to articulate the images that are presented, while i don’t think the text is needed. it is definitely helpful to explain the subject at hand, if i was to look at this gallery without the beginning introduction i don’t know if i would have been able to figure it out from the images alone. so i think that text can definitely help to articulate the subject, and to further explain points.

In your opinion, is this work important or powerful? Why?

This work is definitely important because its documenting a subject area that has been stereotyped by some media outlets as being bad, the people involved being monsters, when in fact there not and this gallery helps the audience understand that isn't the case with these people.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

CHECKLIST FOR MY PROJECT SO FAR!!!

WEEK 1: Done

WEEK 5: Done

WEEK 6: Done - "Reflecting on Your Visit to Dizzy Ink" task (questions for this were on the board - anyone got a photo of them they could share?)

WEEK 7: - "Ethics and Visual Culture" essay

Everything is available on Interact. You can get on to it at home by going to https://interact.nottinghamcollege.ac.uk

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

The Male Gaze

YO! Hope you enjoyed today's lesson. Those of you who didn't, it'll probably be my last theory-heavy lecturey one for a while!

Didn't get time to cover the stuff on The Male Gaze. Check out the last slides on the presentation plus this video, which should help you understand the idea.

The essay is on Moodle in "Week 5 > Ethics and Visual Culture". Needs to be done by next Tuesday (5th Dec). Lemme know if you need any help with it!

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Dizzy Ink

TIME TO WRITE UP TODAY'S TRIP! Use the photos you took to illustrate it.

- What is Dizzy Ink?

- Why does Craig believe that zines are still important and relevant in today's culture? What can zines do that other formats can't?

Craig believes that print based media, mainly zines, are on the rise again but in niche ways. its sort of like and indie magazine, and these niches do well with their small and sometimes large audiences. zines can help bring to light these specific topics to light, where a magazine might not be able to do it justice, but the entire zine could focus on that specific issue.

- What is a risograph? How does it differ from a regular photocopier? What were they originally marketed for? How have people like Craig found creative uses for them?

It is a stencil based printing process, that was originally designed for offices, schools and churches. It is basically perfect for newsletters and similar things. The special thing about it is that it prints in spot colour pigmenting rather than a process called CMYK. There are other ways of doing that, but they are costly, they would involve setting up a lithograph printer and making plates sort of like a stencil, but they are massive machines, they’re quite inaccessible and they can’t take on small jobs. Risograph, on the other hand, is so immediate, so experimental and cheap, in comparison. 

Craig said that one of the reasons why he wanted to use the Risograph was because it was environmentally friendly, it only uses soy-based ink,  really made an impact on their decision to use the machine.

- Discuss the examples of zines you took pictures of. How could the content inspire you? What could you learn from the format (how it is laid out/designed?)

lintel typeface

This zine is about typefaces, and what better way to show off that its about typefaces than to show a typeface on the front cover, just a very simple A - Z front page, with the letters being in blue and the white background, it makes it stand out even more. but you can argue that it makes the zine obscure, that the point though, zines arent supposed to be straight to the point and clear cut, there more educational artistic pieces then a typical magazine that we see in the general media.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Photocopiers

The consequences of being able to easily reproduce information

with the invention of the photocopier it allowed more people to freely spread information, but with the price that came with purchasing a photocopier, the larger population still didn't have access to the technology, publishers and newspapers had that access, so there is still some sort control of media.

Its impact on the publishing industry

with the evolution of the photocopier, it allowed more people to have one at a cheaper price, so publishers lost control over the media that was released to the public, this was in the public hands for the first time.

its impact on politics, especially censorship and control

with less control comes the sense of freedom, a freedom that the public had never experienced before, being able to say what they want when they want and being able to distribute that to whoever they want

Its impact on art and aesthetics, especially grunge and the lo fi aesthetics

the technology was given to the public, this allows the creative freedom of millions of people to change and adapt what the photocopier can be, using it in a way to create art with the ink the photocopier prints by using the photocopier

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

MINI-ESSAY FOR YOUR TUMBLRS!

Explore the advantages and disadvantages of digital and print as platforms for journalism. What can print do that digital can't, and vice versa? What role can print play in a digital world? Which do you prefer?

The decline of print circulation within newspapers and magazines shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who have been paying attention over the past decade or so both digital and print have their pros and cons but the real challenge with both these industries is trying to maintain and build an audience as well as producing content that is engaging and relevant. With ever decreasing attention spans and even more content available people expect a constant stream of personalised engaging, short form content delivered instantly, most of which can be consumed on mobile and tablet.

Reading from print publications offers a memorable and leisurely experience as you fold page corners to save your favourite articles, tossing from page to page and digesting slowly. However, the problem with this is that once you’ve read it and tucked it away you’re likely to forget about it. The beauty of digital publishing is that it makes it very easy to share your favourite articles to spark discussions on social networks that creates a much higher reader engagement, build community, and access a lucrative wider audience. As newspapers and magazines circulation continues to shift from print to digital, the extent of this digital growth is not uniform. The overall print circulation fell 4% year on year according to the UK Audit Bureau of Circulation. In the digital realm, the true strength of digital growth is hard to gauge as several digital editions such as Cosmopolitan, Wired and Daily Mirror saw decline in numbers. Whereas digital editions such as The Economist and Daily Mail have seen an increase year on year. Overall, the National Readership Survey 2016 demonstrates the consumption from mobile and online adds a further 107% audience reach to individual news brands and 68% for magazines.

Most print publications have already migrated to digital in the hope that it will overcome the long-term decline of print. The reading or user experience for the digital age has become increasingly more important as publishers are competing for audience’s attention. Although the digital platform is a relatively new concept for some publishers, digital versions are simply not picking up the slack for the decline of print circulation. The key is establishing where, when and who you are reaching as well designed and packaged print content still creates a unique premium feel that digital content will always lack. We consume content differently on PC, mobile and tablet. Print provides a tactile human experience where the reader can sit back and enjoy “me” time in privacy, without being invaded by targeted digital ads being served up in real-time based on your browsing history or digital footprint. Mobile provides consumers on the go with short snippets of relevant news (content snacking) whilst tablets allow readers to manipulate the content in beautiful ways by touch to scroll and swipe seamlessly.

Shoe-horning a print design format across digital platforms is what many publishers are guilty of. This may be due to the traditional development of print being designed on platforms such as InDesign which is then simply replicated into multiple digital formats with perhaps some added interactivity as an afterthought. This is simply not enough to engage and build an audience that is saturated with content all the time.

 Ultimately, digital magazines provide realistic benefits. The clearest benefit is the feedback that you get to help optimise your products and content. Analytics can show you what kind of articles and features are the most popular, how much time is being spent on a page, how they interact with it and how they share it. This gives huge opportunities for a better understanding on what sort of content to create, saving money and time to leverage that information in building and maintaining readership.

Publishers need to think about what their digital consumer wants, they need to create a point of difference between their various platforms. Just like print, there are many creative opportunities that digital brings - the challenge is playing to the platforms individual strengths.  If your digital magazine is just an electronic version of your print publication, you're wasting a big opportunity! Print will always have its place, but digital allows much more flexibility to reach the audience on their terms. It's safe to say that print and digital will always co-exist together, seamlessly being integrated into our everyday lives. We now live in an always connected world where consumers expect instant gratification, and this is where print will struggle to deliver.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

INDESIGN TASK:

- We identified 5 basic elements of print layout design: 

Image - This is designed to fascinate the reader, to pull them in and make them want to read the article. images an articulate so much about a subject, most of the time a lot more effective than a body of text can. this is important because you want to draw the audience in and you want an image that is representative to the article.

Header - This is supposed to be a short phrase or sentence that sums up what the article is about, while remaining interesting and factual enough to get the reader more interested in the article. This is important because you want the first thing the audience reads to give some information about the article, just enough so that the audience will continue to read.

Sub-header - This is quite similar to the Header they are used for usability and accessibility, to help readers both determine the overall outline of the document, and navigate to specific information on the page.q Much like the Header, the Sub-header is sued to give information to the reader so that they continue to read while also providing some information.

Body text - This is used to explain, inform and articulate the subject at hand, this can go into as little detail or as much detail depending on the subject matter and the person who is writing. It is used to form a story that the audience can read and it is important to do this because it is informative and can explain subject a lot better then pictures can in some cases.

Pull quote - This is a quote that is pulled from the body of text and it is mostly supposed to be interesting, it can also sum up the subject of the article in an effective way. this is important because it gives the audience a taste of whats in the article and much like he header, it gives some information about the article its self.

 - What is the information hierarchy? How does it influence magazine design?

Information hierarchy presents lettering so that the most important words are displayed with the most impact so users can scan text for key information.Without information hierarchy, every letter, every word and every sentence in a design would look the same.

- How can the information hierarchy be expressed through text? (think scale, weight and colour)

words that are deemed important could be in a different font or colour, this adds effective to the word, a sense of meaning, and it also makes the word just look more interesting to the reader

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

Magazine’s

What visual aspects of this magazine do you like?

i like the layout of Transnistria article, because it shows us what the issue is about, which is about outsiders in society, and this article is about a country that isn't recognized as a country.

What elements of the content do you like?

i like how it gets straight to the point, and how it explores unique stories throughout the world, it articulates the article by using images associated about the topic, and how it all comes together to make an article, that allows the audience to read.

What could text give you that these images can't?

text can articulate points and opinions that images may not be able to represent, but i also think that images can do this, to a greater or lesser degree. The text is used to further add depth and detail to the subject at hand, to give infromation

Any weaknesses?

some of the articles have a lot of negative space, which most designers see this as a good thing, personally i don’t like it because its just empty space.

[jonathonsjournalism-blog]

A Day In The Life Part 3 (The desolate centre)