theofficialpu

[theofficialpu]

Mods

Mods have been out for a while now. They enhance gaming experience by adding something the game is lacking. These are free, user created content. But with Valve introducing Workshop on Steam, mods are losing their basic, key feature: Playbour.

Before we go any further, I have to say that I have hardly applied any mod on a game. I only play online games and modding on such games are considered to be illegal, so I do not want to do it. The last game that I modded was World of Warcraft(WoW), the DotA Allstars mod. Blizzard, the company that made WoW had a very poor way of checking if a mod was applied to their game, so a team called Allstars made a mod for it called DotA. This got so popular that Valve employed the creators of this game to make DotA 2. Same goes for Counter Strike (CS), initially a mod for the game Half Life. 

So Valve has basically been living off mods their entire life, seeing that DotA 2 and Counter Strike are the two most popular free to plays in the world. There were several mods for the previous generations of CS, a lot of custom maps, gun skins etc. But the newest one, CS:GO does not allow any mod to be applied, and doing so would result in a ban, for cheating. Developers have a pretty good reason to ban such mods, as some of them are just over powered, such as the God mode in CS. It ruins the players experience.

So what does Valve do? They introduce Steam Workshop, where they allow users to upload their mods so that they can moderate it. This seems like a pretty good idea, until you realize that you need to buy the mods later, if the content is approved. This ruins the basic idea of a mod. It is meant to be something that someone creates on his own time, in other words, is sort of a playbour. We spoke about this in our English lecture. Playbour is when users create content for the entertainment of others, but aren’t getting paid for it (Play + labour). A mod is under this criteria, and should stay under this criteria. 

[theofficialpu]

Facebook selling your Information?!

Have you ever wondered how Facebook manages to keep running, even though they don’t ask for money from any member? What if I told you that they make money by selling all your information to advertisers?

Most messaging/social network sites do this actually, even Tumblr, and I feel like this is a breach of privacy in some way. It is kind of odd how you look up a bunch of sneakers on Google, and then every advertisement you see on Youtube is either from adidas or nike. If companies have this information with them, then what else do they keep with themselves about us.

Facebook is somewhat notorious for ads. It certainly is good when you find a bargain through these ads, but the only way you found this was because Facebook literally sent information to other companies that you were interested in such an item. This is all in their terms and conditions when you sign up for Facebook (but lets be honest, who actually reads that?). 

In our Engl108D lecture, we described this as a “playbour”, you scroll through Facebook, liking a bunch of posts, enjoying yourself. Then Facebook sells this information, of what you liked, your age, etc to advertisers who can then based off this information, select to place their ad on your wall. You aren’t losing anything, apart from your privacy. 

Now this might be alright, but there’s other information too that’s being sent to them, such as your marital status, your friends list, your current location etc. I feel like they should not sell this much information about you to so many people in the world. There is a reason people choose to make a private profile, and what is the use of this if any major firm can see your personal data. This data dump is very dangerous if it gets in to the wrong hands. Again to state what I said before, it is a breach of privacy. 

If this wasn’t enough, Facebook can even get information about you from real world purchases too. The company has partnered with a lot of other companies, such as banks, hypermarkets etc, and collects data from them to target ads for you.

I think it is alright to give some amount of information, such as what you liked, age, etc. But giving away some other, more personal stuff, such as your location or your relationship status is a bit too much. And knowing what you bought in real life, is almost at level with stalking.  

[theofficialpu]

The Emoji Language

Emojis have given us a new and rather odd way to chat with each other. I think it helps us express ourselves more while texting. But can the emojis be treated as a separate language? Is it even possible to talk entirely in emoji?

Before you say no, just remember that cavemen used to communicate with stick drawings, and if they could do that, why can’t we communicate just with emojis? Emojis have always been considered as sort of an “add on” to the text messages. They help express things that normal sentences could not convey in a simply way. In his article for the New York Magazine, Adam Sternbergh says that “we’ve stumbled on whole new confusing ways to communicate with each other, so we’ve been given a whole new vocabulary to say “I’m laughing,” or “joy,” or “Well done”.” They help give a more detailed way to tell someone how we feel ( 😍 and “I’m smiling with hearts for eyes” are not the same!). There’s even a council for emojis that adds new ones when they feel like an certain emoji needs to exist. Clive Thompson from WIRED Magazine thinks that the more we use 😂, the less we use LOL and HAHA. Emojis are slowly replacing actual words in texts, and are doing a better job at conveying our message too. I am a long time emoticons user and honestly feel like emojis are waaay better than the written text and emoticons. I had one of my friends who used to use :3 while chatting and I never understood what it meant until one day Google Keyboard decided to release an update that auto corrected all emoticons with emojis.

In our ENGL108D lecture, we were asked to encode a regular sentence with just emojis, and the others in the class were asked to decode it back to English. They were mostly successful but there were a few that was nowhere close to what the person who encoded it wanted to convey.

Now I know what your thinking, “Ha! If you couldn’t interpret some of the messages your classmates wrote properly, why do you think emojis can be treated as a separate language?” To that I have to say, the perplexity of a language erodes over time. If you didn’t understand that (I don’t fully either) I am trying to say that we will eventually learn how to fully communicate through emojis. It is just that we have not used emojis alone, without any supporting text, all this while, and hence we find it hard to interpret some sentences. Some of us also interpret an emoji is based off our past experience (for example, for the longest time, I thought the prayer hands emoji was a high five, and I still consider it to be a high five, like how is it not one!?). Also, a combination of two emojis that don’t make sense when you convert each of them to what they mean make complete sense when you read them together as one emoji.  It’s a new language that we will eventually get fluent with. 

Sternbergh, Adam. “Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue” New York Magazine, November 17, 2014. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/emojis-rapid-evolution.html

Thompson, Clive. “ THE EMOJI IS THE BIRTH OF A NEW TYPE OF LANGUAGE (? NO JOKE) “ Wired, April 19, 2016. https://www.wired.com/2016/04/the-science-of-emoji/

[theofficialpu]

The Consequences of Memes

In one of our ENGL108D classes we discussed about memes. It is a very popular method of communication as it is so easy to make one and post them to the internet. Is there any effects that we ignore when we post a meme?

Memes are generally considered to be made for entertainment purposes, and although it does express the creator’s opinion, it is generally not taken that seriously. But I think that that is slowly starting to change. I don't think it will ever be as effective as an email or so, but people are certainly taking them more seriously.

In his article “The Language of Internet Memes”, Patrick Davidson, he states that when we study a meme, there are three things we should consider:

Manifestation

Behaviour

Ideal

The ideal (which is the idea that is conveyed) decides the behaviour of the meme. It is what the creator wants to convey with the meme. Communicating through a meme can be very affective simply because it is easy to express what you want to in a very few words(And almost anyone can do it!). 

They aren't as affective as a strongly worded essay but it certainly does have some meaning to it. It could act as a way to let the people know that something has happened so that they can look up and read about it later (for example, I got to know so much about Trump’s campaign, just through memes). 

Also, the meme affects the memes contents. The manifestation of the meme is “its observable, external phenomena. It is the  set  of  objects  created  by  the  meme,  the  records  of  its  existence.  It  indi-cates  any  arrangement  of  physical  particles  in  time  and  space  that  are  the direct result of the reality of the meme”(Davidson, 123).

Also if a large amount of memes about one particular event is circulated a lot, it probably is a pretty important event that a lot of people care about(for example, the sudden rise in the amount of Trump and Hilary memes in 2016). It is also an easy way to gain popularity and support as well. Take the “success kid” for example. The child’s parents were able to turn his popularity in to a campaign #SuccessKidney to raise enough money to fund for his dad’s transplant. 

There was a case in Manchester where the police posted a picture of a wanted criminal online, and so many people ended up meming about his big ears that they eventually caught the person as almost everyone in the city had seen his face. Although the memes weren't exactly used in the right way in this case, it certainly did the job of letting people know that he was a wanted criminal. Last year, the Prime Minister of Spain asked to ban memes in the country as he found it to “infringe the honour of a person”.

There are also negative effects to creating them. It creates stereotypes and makes people get unwanted attention. Tim, aka “Thumbs Up Kid” shot to popularity in 2012 after posting his picture online. In an interview with VICE he said:

I think mostly it taught me to choose more wisely what I distribute on the internet, which in itself I think has caused me to experience a lot of self-image issues based on ephemera projected on the web or about me. I mostly feel OK with it being a thing but I'm definitely not happy about it. I guess I am mostly embarrassed... It was meant to be funny; I don't know that I think it's funny now.

This could end up making or breaking a person. I think we should be a bit more careful about what we are creating and to whom we are circulating it to.

Works Cited

Davidson, Patrick. “The Language of Internet Memes” The Social Media Reader, New York Printing Press, 2012. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017.

Pryde, Emma. “This Is What Happens When You Become a Meme” VICE. Jul 9, 2015. https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/yvwk5j/what-happens-to-people-when-they-become-a-meme-078. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017.

[theofficialpu]

Video games should be considered as Social Media?!

In one of my English lectures, we discussed about the various “things” we could classify as social media. When we reached World of Warcraft, almost the entire class agreed on the fact that it shouldn’t be considered as a form of social media. This offends me (not really, I’m just a bit shocked, see GIF).

I have played DotA for almost 4 years now, and I have made quite a lot of friends from it, most of whom I’ve never actually met in person. I might’ve seen their profile picture, or even had a chat with them about strategies and all, but I have never physically met most them. But I do believe that that is the concept of social media, finding other people. Replace “played DotA” with “used Facebook” and you basically have what most people consider that form of social media to be.

In fact, I think DotA is better than Facebook because you actually have something in common with those people(in this case, the fact that you like controlling virtual people so that they murder each other :P). Also, after joining university, most of my close high school friends group up every Friday morning to play the game, and talk about life at the same time.

Someone did mention in class that this isn’t what the chat features in the games are for. But then you could meet a person in a game, and then add them on some other social network*. I have a 56 snapstreak with someone I met while playing Counter Strike(yeah, we homies now). Also, most video games do have a “Social” feature where you can interact with groups,  you also do have the free will to say whatever you want, as long as it isn’t offensive. Who ever doesn’t agree with you would simply mute you in game.

Take Steam for example. Valve’s description of Steam on their website goes like:

Through Steam, fans can easily buy, play, share, modify, and build communities around Valve products as well as titles from other independent game studios. 

It was claimed to start off as an easy way to update their most popular game Counter Strike, but eventually became one of the most used Social Gaming Networks in the world.

So yeah, I really feel like all those people who didn’t think WoW should be a form of Social Media are wrong.

* We had a discussion in class where the instructor said she remembered someone getting married over Warcraft. This thing is getting way too real.

Works Cited

Steam, the Ultimate Online Game Platform. Valve. http://store.steampowered.com/about/ Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.