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Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game that was developed by Richard Garfield and produced by Wizards of the Coast, the same company that makes Dungeons and Dragons. In 1991 Peter Adkinson, the CEO of Wizards, was working with Garfield on another game that Garfield had developed. Adkinson wanted to make a portable game that could be played during the down time at gaming conventions. When Garfield brought the concepts of the trading card game, which he had been working on as a student, to Adkinson he published the game. Neither of them fully realized how popular the game would become.

Magic went through its first release in 1993 and now there are literally millions of people who play, both the physical rendition and the online version.

Magic is constantly being updated with about four sets released every year and each set containing around two hundred new cards. Once a year a new set comes in that will make three of the sets from two years ago obsolete and unusable for standard play.

There are many different game types, like commander, and archenemy, that get their own specific cards printed as well as a plethora of other ways to play just with the normal cards.

Magic: the Gathering cards exemplify the five principle of new media in a variety of ways. Most cards have a numerical representation for the online version for example. This site will discuss the various aspects of the game as well as how it applies to the Manovich's principles of new media.

Not Just For Gays Anymore: Musical Theater Nerds

A Musical Theater Nerd is not just a person who loves musicals; it’s a person who is obsessed with musical theater! A Nerd knows the names of practically every musical ever produced; knows not only the big name Broadway stars, but many of the ensemble members as well; they tend to perform musical theater numbers at karaoke night; and they may have a shrine or two in their homes dedicated to everything musical theater! A true Musical Theater Nerd knows all the best shows by heart including: Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, Next to Normal, The Book of Mormon, Rent, etc. They have their favorite Broadway performers: Nathan Lane, Bernadette Peters, Sutton Foster, Aaron Tveit, Kristin Chenoweth, Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli. Because of their familiarity with so many varieties of shows, the Musical Theater Nerd has a song that they can sing about any situation happening in their life. This website will be a musical playground for theater lovers and theater virgins alike and will hopefully create new Musical Theater Nerds. The site will be a digital curation based on new media theories by one Lev Manovich, a professor of Computer Science at City University of New York. Manovich’s theories are made up of five principles which are: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding and these ideas will be shown throughout the website. So, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of a Musical Theater Nerd. As Neil Patrick Harris sang in his opening number of the 2011 Tony Awards, “it’s not just for gays anymore!”

League of Legends

League of Legends is an online MOBA or multi-player online battle arena where you play with teammates as a team against another team to achieve victory. This game is an offshoot from the very popular game Warcraft 3 where Riot Games--the company who founded League of Legends--took one of the maps from Warcraft 3 and built it into its own world with different rules and more competitive play. This took place in 2009.

This is the most popular PC game, surpassing World of Warcraft by and any of the other competing MOBA's. Tickets to the world championship for LoL sold out an hour after they were available for purchase. There are 32 million active people playing LoL each month which is only surpassed by the Xbox users, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty. More than 1 billion hours of LoL are played and each month with 90 percent of the players being male. 3 million people is the usual amount of people on LoL in a day more than doubling Call of Duty's 1.4 million. This game can definitely be classified as the most popular video game as of 2013.

This website is specifically engineered to help understand how a simple video game encompasses theories of New Media and what that means for users and observers. New Media has changed the lives of so many and League of Legends is a prime example of entertainment benefiting from the technological progression of media into New Media. Lev Manovich has surgically taken apart this new media and is forcing us to realize how the merging of the old media with the new technology has impacted our life. LoL is a "living" embodiment of the 5 theories which Manovich discusses in his book The Language of New Media.

The principles of numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding are apparent in this video game that has affected the lives of 32 million people and will continue to grow as new media integrates more and more fully into our lives. Unless we take the time to study these changes now and they way they're affecting our lives, soon we will not even be able to distinguish life before new media and the present. 

Stephen - Blog Post #6

    Minecraft is an indie sandbox game. It was originally created by Swedish programmer Markus Persson (AKA Notch) and was later published by Mojang. Minecraft is currently available on PC and Xbox 360, as well as having mobile versions for Android and iOS. Versions are being developed for the PS3 and the upcoming PS4 the Xbox One. All of the versions receive periodic updates to add features and fix bugs.

   Minecraft is a creative building game, which allows players to build out of cube shaped blocks (it is often referred to as virtual Legos). The game has three modes. The first, survival, allows the player to build structures out of blocks that they must gather. The player explores the world and gathers the blocks, which they can then craft into different blocks and materials. There is also combat; players can create weapons and fight off enemies, called mobs. In creative mode, players already have access to all materials, and are able to build huge structures without exploration, gathering, or combat. The third, hardcore, is similar to survival. It is the hardest difficulty and players only have one life.

   Minecraft has become extremely popular, with millions of players worldwide, extensive merchandise, multiple awards, and even the yearly convention MineCon. Their PC stats can be seen on this site: https://minecraft.net/stats. As of October 23, 2013, the game has sold over 12.5 million copies on PC, and over 33 million copies across all platforms.

   This site is a digital curation of web-based Minecraft creations, explained through the theories of Lev Manovich, a professor in Computer Science at City University of New York and a new media theorist. In his book, The Language of New Media, he details five principles of new media, which will be used throughout this site. They are: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.

The Polarization of Competition

 

As in any game or sport, there seems to be two areas of interest--competitive play (and how to improve) and hilarious bloopers. When you watch the replays of a football game on the news, they show both the most amazing, technically skilled videos that inspire others and they show the crazy, funny mistakes. This is applicable to the game of League of Legends as well when you're surfing YouTube.

The videos vacillate between videos on how to improve your play and the best way to make the epic plays featured there. These comprise more than half of all of the amateur videos out there while the other portion is comprised of videos that are deliberately made to incite laughter either through mistakes, memes, or joke-filled commentary about other games.


For the most part, the videos are unedited except for potentially music or commentary or title pages and the like. Usually the content speaks for itself and does not need to be altered. Definitely a lot of montages both in the instructional and parody videos with cuts from professional and amateur streams.

These different types of videos drive the types of personalities that you find within the LoL community. The drive to improve your play and win more and more games creates the need for instructional videos from other players that have figured out the tricks or skills needed already--people to learn and grow from. The pressure to perform, however, can take its tole and the need to blow off steam comes in the form of these gag videos, both to make fun of others' mistakes (which you have probably made a few times) and laugh at the inside jokes of the game.

Blog Post #5

            Most of the youtube videos I found were parodies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. One example took The Lord of the Rings culture and embedded it with BYU/Mormon culture. It is called “The Lord of the Engagement Ring,” making fun of the high marriage rates at BYU. It keeps the basic plot and characters of The Lord of the Rings, but adds Provo’s culture to it.

            There were a few videos that paid homage to the music from The Lord of the Rings movies. Many of these were of amateur performers playing/singing the music. A few (groups such as The Piano Guys and Lindsey Sterling) performed their own adaption of the music.

I suppose the way The Lord of the Rings culture is being changed in these videos is that the people who make them are trying to put of piece of themselves in it. They loved the story (or music) of The Lord of the Rings and wanted to be part of it. Many did this though humor as you can see in the Studio C parody “Gandalf Intervention.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3n-s6rT_6c

Magic on Youtube.

There are several different kinds of videos on youtube that pertain to Magic: The Gathering. People do instructional videos that can teach prospective players how to play. There are reviews of certain decks and creature types. There are videos of players competing at both national tournaments and in their basements. There videos of people opening booster packs and discovering what cards they purchased. Pretty much every aspect of the game has some sort of representation on

youtube.http://youtu.be/OJ6zZS8FjEs

Musical Fan Videos are Hilarious! (Blog #5)

I thought it was kind of hard to find videos about musical theater that weren't strictly performance videos.  There were a lot of videos that were made using the soundtrack with cast album pictures, or people who taped themselves or friends onstage.  One of my favorite channels for musical theater is AngelsBWay Karaoke. I love karaoke and this girl posts only musical theater karaoke, which is my absolute favorite.

Other than those types of videos, I found that a trend is doing humorous videos about what its like to be a musical theater fan. I think they are absolutely hilarious, but I wonder if people who don't know much or anything about musical theater would even get them or understand why its so funny. There are some parodies out there (again it was hard to find fan parodies and not professionals). But there were a few hilarious homages, I guess you would call them. They just kind of make fun what people who love musical theater are like, but they are directed so that musical theater nerds would look at them and say, "that's totally me!"  As an example of this, I am posting a video below of a boy who says all these things about musical theater (and I found myself laughing hysterically and saying "That's totally me!"  . The video is also funny because there's a stereotype of guys who like musical theater being gay, and while some people might find this video offensive, theater people just think its hilarious because they know people like this.

I don't know if these videos are changing any cultural meanings per se. But I think what they are doing is connecting musical theater lovers to each other around the country and the world.  Unless you are in theater yourself as a major or in community musicals, you don't usually run in to too many people who are musical theater fanatics. But it is nice to know that there are other people out there just like you! (I just made us sound like some secret minority or something--and maybe we are!)

Stephen - Blog Post #5

Minecraft is an ideal topic for finding videos on YouTube. It has become very common for gaming channels and just average gamers to post gameplay videos, walkthroughs, instructions, and ideas from Minecraft. Many of these videos are humorous, but it really depends on the players. My favorites of these videos are created by two linked channels: Rooster Teeth and Let’s Play. 

These feature a wide variety of Minecraft gameplay videos in which they come up with, build, and play different games and contests. One series that they have is called Things to Do. In these videos, they give suggestions for players to do in their own game. They are generally fairly short, I have posted one below. These videos are culturally significant because both Rooster Teeth and Let’s Play have an enormous number of subscribers (6,374,506 and 1,085,016 respectively.) Their videos get huge amounts of viewing and very large amounts of response and recreation. They are far from the only channel doing this as well. Minecraft is a very popular source for online videos. 

To tweet, or not to tweet

            The twitter persona I have been trying to create is mainly geared towards technology. I was not on twitter previously; so my tweets have only been the 5 weekly tweets about technology for this class. I have had a few followers from friends and those taking this class, and a couple of my tweets were favorited if they were amusing.

Most of the topics on my feed are concerning technology since Dr. Pepper recommended we follow groups of that interest to see who is saying what about new media. I suppose being on twitter is a part of our class assignments because social media has become a huge factor and influence in the world of new media. Though for the most part, I dislike tweeting. I suppose this is mainly because I do not like to be social in general and it is difficult to say something in 140 characters or less, let alone about technology which is not generally a topic I talk about regularly.

Twittering for the News

Facebook really kicked off a few years after I was a teenager and twitter followed even later. The social media kick does not appeal to me at all and I don't know that it ever will; however, I don't mind trying new things and never want to become the person who refuses to learn new technology or says it's too hard.

A Twitter persona had never crossed my mind. I'm still not entirely sure what is meant by that. It feels wrong to inject anything personal into something everyone sees who I do not know (this is why I stink at social media). I don't even like to put photos up on Facebook. Plus that seems like a lot of pressure. I have tried to post things which I feel are relevant to the class or technology in general. This blog is the closest I get to putting "myself" on the web and I am just hoping that no one will really read it.

My sixteen-year-old brother Favorited one of my technology tweets. I'm not exactly sure why he would care about Google analytics but all right. Not really a lot of followers or retweeting. I seem to like to retweet relevant technology news. In fact, now that I'm Twittering I have actually looked at the news a bit more. I think if I was more pithy or funny maybe I would be retweeted or favorited but that's so much pressure to perform. I haven't really done more than hashtagging the class tag or referencing the people I'm retweeting to promote my account. I feel that if I actually got people to follow me then I would become obsessed and spiral out of control. I tend to be a bit over dramatic if you couldn't tell.

(Midway through post goes and friends people in the class.) Makes sense now why I wasn't seeing anyone's tweets but mine. There seems to be many posts about events or places to be, but these seem to be annoying more than helpful. There is one thing this whole Twitter/Blogger stuff has done for me. In the past, I have known literally no one in the class besides the teacher. I did not want to interact with my classmates and avoided it as much as possible. I know 3 other people's names in the class which is great and have realized that we share some common interests. It's making me more social and empathetic than ever, so I suppose that is a good thing. One item I would like to vent about is the character limitation on Twitter. I'm a freaking English major. I barely get going at 140 characters. HELLO!

Obviously, Twitter shows the integration of new media and digital design. The fact that people are communicating through a digital interface in order to make connections and build relationships at all is astounding. Objects are created and reinvented with new media, opening up the art more widely and enriching our culture to an extent impossible before.