Blog: Next New

A new type of media that might emerge, might be Virtual Reality social interactions. A while back, in the early 2000's, there was a popular trend where people where creating avatars and playing a game called second life. While I personally had no interest in it, I recall it a very popular platform to just come and hang out. With the advent of Virtual Reality, I can see more services like this emerging due to the inherit immersion of virtual reality. I can also see this being developed similar to Facebook in someways, since advertisers will want to hop onto the bandwagon if this media does become popular.

Blog: Wiki So Far

For my wiki contributions, I am currently researching the MMORPG genre of video games. One of my favorite pastimes is to play Final Fantasy XIV, a Japanese MMORPG, and with my knowledge of the community there, and the upcoming Netflix documentary FFXIV: Daddy of Light, I believe i can contribute a lot to the wiki page.

Blog: P2P

File sharing is a way for users and business to share their files/data/product with one another. This could be done in a legal, mutually beneficial way, such as with services like Netflix and Hulu, which allow users to watch movies and TV shows online. Other file-sharing sites, such as DropBox and Pirate Bay, allow any user to share any file they upload with other users; this is called P2P or peer to peer file sharing. This could be very useful for distributing freeware from user to user; however, these kinds of services can be very easily abused. Piracy is a very serious issue online, and in the early days of the internet, there were very few ways, for copyright holders to stop pirates from stealing their content.
"Partly in response to the piracy problem, a cornucopia of video Web sites now feature the latest episodes of virtually every broadcast TV show. Movie studios are experimenting with video-on-demand releases and other ways to offer films on demand. Legal alternatives, the companies hope, will stifle the stealing. The music industry, by comparison, waited years to provide legal options for online listeners." (Brian Stelter, Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios )
I personally believe that "if you can't beat them, then join them". The biggest reason why people used to pirate software was that they wanted to sample the product. By uploading the latest episodes of shows online for free, diligent fans will be able to receive the entertainment that they crave legally, and the content holders can profit of their product via advertisement revenue. In this situation both the producer and the consumer win!

Creativity and New Media

Below this post is a picture of my character from, a popular massively multiplayer online game called Final Fantasy XIV. A big factor of every massively multiplayer game is the social element. Players create characters, and within the game world, the can form miniature communities. Some players like to focus on difficult content, some want a more casual experience with friends, and some people even like to role play and make their own stories with each other.
The development history of this game is very interesting, and refers to the topic of Creativity in New Media. The original launch of Final Fantasy XIV came out September 30, 2010, and the game was awful. Bad design choices led to most fans abandoning the game fairly quickly, so the developers of the game, literately, blew up the in game world and started from scratch. Square Enix replaced the entire original development team, and brought in a new team. This new team are veterans of the mmo genera (the lead developer was a devout World of Warcraft player). This new team reworked the game from the ground up, taking elements from World of Warcraft and put them into this new game. The final result was Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, which was a love letter to both Final Fantasy and mmo fans alike. The moral of this story is in order to make a good product, the developers need to know what their consumers want, and this is what this game is. So much love and care went into this game, that players just can't help but be immersed in it world and culture.

Blog: HW Creativity

In our day and age, most people, even casual users of social media, have a certain amount of web skills. This is not to say, that they themselves know how to program, but users of a web services typically know how to make a web service better. The articles :Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers by Claire Cain Miller, talks about how Twitter uses open source tactics to improve its website.
"“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. and author of the book “Democratizing Innovation.”"
The end user of a product, knows what they want. The main goal of producing a product, is to have consumers consume the product. By outsourcing design to the user base, they are able to keep twitter "trending" and relative very easily.

Blog About Twitter

Twitter vs BlackBoard Discussion boards. While these two websites offer similar tools, the way society perceives these two tools is vastly different. I don't usually go to Twitter to discuss about my Academics, nor do I go to the BlackBoard Discussion Boards to find the latest news about what my classmates are up to.
A Twitter Discussion is very casual, as in I don't have to worry too much about the phrasing of my view points, whereas on BlackBoard, I'm forces to use a more refined vocabulary and to be more robust with my sentence structure. While this concept of casual vs professional is most likely a viewpoint unique to me, I will still uphold it since I believe that when I communicate with other classmates, I need to stay courteous and professional, whereas when I speak to random people online, I can afford to be a little less strict with my wording.

Social Networking Sites

The four social media websites that I will be discussing are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. These websites have different primary functions, and since I have used these websites for years, my experiences with them is mostly positive.
Facebook is a website that allows me to communicate with my peers. It has a casual attitude and is mostly a place for users to share the experiences, and for advertisers to sell goods and services tailored to your needs and interests,
Twitter is a website whose primary purpose is following and listening to people. On that website I follower famous YouTubers and Game Developers, because the website offers a unique opportunity to talk with these celebrities. I used to post gaming streams on their for my friends to watch, however, that phase has long since passed.
Reddit is a social media that I visit every day. Its primary purpose is to be a newspaper of sorts, where users can create posts discussing politics, media, software, or generally anything. Reddit breaks up its groups into sub-reddits, where users get the chance to meet with and talk to other likeminded individuals.
Youtube is another website that I visit daily. Youtube allows me to follow other content creators and is generally an entertainment platform first. The sense of community on youtube comes in the form of the comments section, where users get to interact with on another about the video that they had just watched. Many YouTubers use different forms of social media to advertise their videos, as well as to be able to speak with their subscribers.

Project: Steam, PC Gaming, and the Future of Consoles

Once, all life started out as single cell organisms, over the course of billions of years however, we have evolved and taken a drastically different shape then out original inception. In some ways, technology is no different. The first computer, was nothing more a calculator that could only add small digits, yet over centuries, technology has evolved and redefined our society. It has changed the we we view business, social interactions, entertainment, and so much more. What I propose, is an examination into how technology created a video game industry, and how over the generations it has evolved from a simple pass time for children, to a multi billion dollar behemoth. I would like to explore the very first generation of console gaming, to the modern day console war. and based of what the lead companies are doing, I would like to try to make a prediction of the future.