Sean Bouchard

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Let us examine the system comprised of the tiles from a game of Scrabble, and consider how an analysis of their form, material properties, marked values, and especially the context implied by the alphabetic system relates to the way people play with the system.

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Overview

Scotland Yard is a strategic cat-and-mouse game in which one player takes on the role of a criminal and is pursued across the game board by the other players. The game board depicts a complicated network of numbered nodes that are connected by differently-colored lines: red, yellow, blue, combinations of those three colors, and black. The nodes represent locations in the city of London, and the lines represent routes between them. The colors indicated the modes of transportation that can access the route: taxi, bus, tube, and boat.

I don't know how everyone else interacts with the internet, but I tend to rely heavily on RSS aggregation to keep on top of things. In fact, I rarely visit pages just to see if there's new content. Starting at the IMD has thrown a little bit of a wrench in things, since I want to keep up on what people are talking about, but there isn't an RSS feed that aggregates all the blogs. So that's what I've been working on.

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Overview

Butterfly Garden is a suite of thematically integrated casual games that are played in a highly social context, such as a preexisting social network like Facebook. The premise of Butterfly Garden is that players can design the wings of butterflies and share their designs anonymously. This design could be a simple pattern, like a real butterfly's wings, or it could be a drawing, a picture, or a poem. The player creates a butterfly with a design, and releases it into the wild. The butterfly will then find its way into the gardens of other players, who will be able to see and comment on the design.

(For a CTCS505 assignment.)

In both Videodrome and eXistenZ, director David Cronenberg makes use flesh-objects - otherwise recognizable items that are composed of an undulating, human-like, fleshy organic material - to highlight the central themes of the movie. Videodrome is, at least in part, about the power of mass media to transform foreign ideas into cultural norms. In the movie, the gun is first shown as a normal, mechanical object. Soon after Max Renn ingests the gun through the orifice which opens in his abdomen, he is overcome with pain and unable to move until he has removed it. This demonstrates how the gun, as a mechanical object, is fundamentally incompatible with Max Renn's being. The gun is then subsumed by a mass of fleshy tendrils, which transform it into a flesh-object. As a flesh-object, the gun can be consumed without any ill effect. The transformation of this object represents the transformation of the character: Max, who had previously shown himself to be somewhat resistant to the idea of sadism even within the context of sadomasochistic sexual play, has become utterly impassive about committing acts of homicidal violence against other human beings and, eventually, against himself. With television acting as a catalyst, Max has managed to transform himself to the point of internalizing a value structure that was previously alien to him.

I just posted "Interesting Interactions" over on my personal blog, Softcore Gamer. It's a response to this post by Leigh Alexander at Sexy Videogameland, as well as musings about this post from Jamie's blog last year.