It would seem that morality wouldn’t play into Oregon Settler, the iPad game to which I’ve been addicted for the past six months (embarrassingly enough). Oregon Settler is an app game designed mainly for achievement oriented gamers that combines game playing elements of Farmville with thematic elements of the Oregon Trail. Essentially, the goal is to tend and expand your plot of Oregon land to form a thriving town by building houses and businesses, collecting money, tending animals, and growing crops.

Care is a moral idea that is heavily emphasized in this game. The main goal is to care for a town and help it grow. Especially with the townspeople, with which the town leader (whom the gameplayer controls) has a lot of scripted conversation, the idea of care and harm are very present. Players frequently come to the town leader with problems that need to be solved, and choosing a good solution earns the town leader rewards, like wood for building or extra energy. Also, it is the town leader’s responsibility to aid injured townspeople.

Loyalty to the game is also heavily emphasized through game rewards and achievements. Returning every day earns players additional bonuses, like free houses and experience points. Too much time between visiting houses lowers the townspeople’s moods, as indicated by a red or green smiley or frowny face on the screen. A crop left too long will die. And there’s only a limited space of time in which an ill person can be healed before they die. These are all effective motivators of game loyalty for achievement-oriented people such as myself.

Fairness, however, does not exist in this game. Often, some sort of natural disaster will come by, forcing players to spend large amounts of money to lessen damages and then expend precious energy points to repair the broken buildings and heal wounded animals. These occurrences are often random and unprovoked. Three can happen in the span of an hour, or a town can go incident-free for weeks. In this way, the game is unfair because negative events occur without much reason or predictability. It has nothing to do with how dedicated a player is, there’s no way to strategize and prepare, and there’s not even any sort of warning or pattern that would indicate that something might happen. I suppose along this line we could also say sanctity is cast aside in the game, because it encourages constant change and the randomness of “life-like” gameplay – it’s supposed to be like real life in that sometimes, bad things cannot be foreseen and things change.

The morality in this game does not come from player interaction but rather very predetermined gameplay, which in turn creates a very frustrating but addictive game for the achievement minded player.

At first glance, League of Legends–a competitive online game that pits players against each other in team deathmatches–appears to be a game designed specifically to cater to the killer player type. You are rewarded with gold for killing players and destroying enemy fortifications and minions. Your overall success rate is translated into your ranking, which is then displayed to other players, who will fear and respect you accordingly. However, as you move into more advanced gameplay, the greatest rewards are given not to the killers, but to the social players. As a team game, only the teams with the best coordination and communication succeed. Players whose styles mesh particularly well tend to group up into permant teams–an act which facilitates simple socializing in addition to competitive games. Thus while many ‘killers’ can be found in the game, it is the cooperative or social

As the game has developed over the last two years, the developers have become increasingly supportive of the social playerbase. During this transition, the 5 moral elements become increasingly evident. Fairness is a huge issue in the game, as players are forced to play premade characters. The developers go to great lengths to ensure that the options are available are all balanced, so that players aren’t frustrated by unfair chances.

Loyalty is an incredibly important factor of the game, to the point where victory hinges on your ability to form a coordinated team. Often, certain players are designated as ‘support’ and encouraged to sacrifice for the more offense members of the team. Even out of game, this loyalty is encouraged through an extensive friend’s list and chat features.

The game offers little form of authoritative structure to players, allowing them to form their own hierarchies. While everyone is expected to be a respectful players, there is little way for the company to actively enforce this aside from the typical multiplayer “report” option. Tempers often flare, or independent players may bicker among themselves over matters of personal pride. Due to the high concentration of killer-type players and the high stress, competitive environment, respect is a notoriously difficult thing to find in the game–to the point where the company has implemented honor as a secondary currency, both adding goals for achievement oriented players and rewarding the relatively small population of respectful players.

While respect in League of Legends is rare, sanctity is almost nonexistent. While every player eventually finds characters they favor, the developers regularly release new content. Consequently, every two weeks marks the release of a new game patch, which buffs (strengthens) certain aspects of the game and nerfs (weakens) others for the sake of balance. As such, no aspect of the game is considered safe, and the players’ perception of the game and style of play is constantly in flux.

Considering the aggressive, black and white nature of the game, it’s surprising that so many of the morals are even present at all. It is possible that even in game scenarios, regardless of what behavior is encouraged and rewarded by the game developers, a certain level of real world morals carry over into the game. Alternatively, these morals could be a result of the killer behavior. As players who specialize in hunting other players, it is likely that a worthy rival would merit a certain level of respect and admiration, resulting in killers working together to teach each other, hone their skills, and develop their own codes of honor translating to the morals we see in game.

Kids Down the Stairs, the game I wrote my second narrative on, is a PC game I used to play as a child. The rules of the game are simple. One just has to keep on jumping from stone steps to stone steps in a downward direction, avoiding iron thorns on the ceiling and on certain steps. Once the player gets stabbed by the thorns, his energy decreases, and when the energy bar turns to zero, he dies (figuratively, of course). The player also loses if he falls down the step while jumping. There are two ways to play the game, either in one-player mode or two-player mode, and the focusing elements of the game changes as the player switches his mode.

Not all four elements can be seen in Kids Down the Stairs. Among the four, which are killing, socializing, achieving and exploring, the socializing aspect seems the least obvious. When played in one-player mode, the game has an emphasis on mostly achieving and a bit of exploring and killing. This is because what the player would like to achieve in this mode is to jump on as many stone steps as possible to break his own record. While the player could explore the area by moving around in different directions, it is not the main focus of the game. The player eventually dies, but that is just how the game ends and no actual killing is involved. Neither exploring nor killing is stressed in one-player mode. However, in two-player mode, the players become killers as whoever dies first loses the game. Like one-player mode, achieving and exploring are also noticeable, but not socializing, since players can’t communicate via the game when they play.

In light of the five aspects of morality, fairness is weighed most heavily. Take the two-player mode as an example, where neither of the players has an advantage over the other. Even their characters look exactly the same besides shirt colors. The game encourages fair competition, yet it at the same time discourages care, authority and loyalty because according to the rules the two players are supposed to harm each other to achieve victory. They do not respect or care for each other, and are only loyal to themselves.

I enjoy playing games with simple rules and a clear goal, so Kids Down the Stairs is a perfect match. Although I played games like The Sims before, its lack of emphasis on achieving soon made me lose interest. Nevertheless, if Kids Down the Stairs was made into a more complex game where you can form groups for competition, it may be interesting.

One of my favorite games to play is Borderlands. I own the first game in the series, and I have also rented the second one. I only played the first few missions of the second game. Despite a few upgrades, the formula for the two seems to be roughly the same. For the sake of discussion, I will be referring to the the first game in the series unless otherwise stated.

Borderlands is one of the few games that takes elements from two genres that, at times, can seem like polar opposites. Elements of a first-person shooter game are blended together with role-playing game components. The most obvious aspect of the game is that it turns the player into a killer. The wasteland setting transforms you into a survivor/killer immediately. The first person shooter element completely transforms you into this sort of soldier. It gives you the weapons that are needed to kill. With your character being a treasure hunter, it turns you into an explorer and an achiever. The role playing game ingredient rewards you for your added exploration by giving you loot and more guns to kill with.

The fourth element that this game is missing is the socializing element. This is not a massive multiplayer online role playing game. There is not a lot of socializing that goes on. Many of your quests are given to you in the form of a bounty board. There is little need to socialize with the townspeople except for a few select characters. The max number of players that are allowed to be in the same game at once is four. There is little need to talk. The shooter element greatly outshines the role playing game element when it comes to combat. In Borderlands 2, the difficulty is increased a bit. Boss battles now require more creative action (Like shooting nuclear missiles out of the air). This prompts players to communicate a little bit more, but at the same time, it is not needed (granted you have enough bullets).

When it comes to Borderlands, fairness can be a mixed bag. When in a party, any killed enemy grants the whole team experience. This is great for those who are lower in level. At the same time, it can promote lazy players who like to sit back and observe, rather than help their teammates. When money is collected, the same amount goes to all members of the squad. However, ammunition does not work the same way. Sometimes there are players who sit around and open chests to gather loot and ammo while others fight enemies. Loyalty is also a bit wishy-washy. The game makes a common goal for the different character classes. Rather than create separate warring factions like World of Warcraft, the game encourages looting and treasure hunting throughout the game. It is kind of like an honor among thieves system. The more players in a group increase the strength of enemies. This usually encourages the teammates to revive each other.Other than this, players are free to engage in combat with each other by hitting others with a melee attack.

The large first person shooter element keeps the game itself from becoming a game that centers around care/harm. It also prevents the game from having a purity factor. It is also not too big on socializing either (perhaps due to the fact that parties can only have a maximum of four players). Games like The Sims do a better job at filling in the moral gaps left by Borderlands. Although this genre of game is on the other side of the spectrum, I think that I will still enjoy it. I am a gamer who plays all types of games.

I used wordle to create a visualization of the Shakespearian play, “Hamlet,” using the digital version from Project Gutenberg. Other than “Ham,” which is the abbreviation for Hamlet that signifies when he is speaking, the largest, most commonly used words are “lord,” “king,” and “queen.” These words of political position reveal not only the main characters in the play, but also the nature of the conflict and the power struggle within the play between Hamlet, and his uncle, King Claudius. Some other heavily recurring words include “good,” “well,” “soul” and “heaven” which also demonstrates Hamlet’s own inner conflicts of his desire for revenge and his fear of going to hell. “Speak,” “think,” and “now” further demonstrate his indecisiveness as he puts off his revenge as time continues to run out. Shakespeare also examines human “nature” and one’s “fear” or acceptance of “death” throughout the play. While this is an accurate representation of underlying themes and motifs within “Hamlet” and roughly outlines the plot, it does not explicitly show that Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s death by killing Claudius. However, it does a good job reflecting the overall mood, as well as the significant aspects that one would not necessarily collect from reading a summary. I believe this visualization is an accurate representation of the play.

One tool that would be useful for distant reading, besides a sort of family tree, which already exists, would be a mapping of the characters and their place in time. Since it is a play, it would be interesting to see the position of the characters on the stage, and which direction they are facing. The interface could be just a giant rectangle (like a stage) and the characters could come in an out of the stage, represented by their names or how they appear in the play. The direction the words are facing can represent the way the characters turn or behave.

To compare the two presidential candidates’ views and plans regarding the issue of women in the workforce, I inserted their answers to the question posed in the second debate:

In what new ways to you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?

I included only the first time each candidate spoke about the issue and edited the stopwords to get the most accurate picture.

Governor Romney:

This image shows that the economy was mentioned more than any other word (except women, which he was obviously talking about). There are also many words relating to the economy, such as “jobs” and “work”, but some of the words are a bit questionable. He seems to be focused on the economy as the number one problem for women today, and not just any women, but mothers. Words like “kids” and “flexible” suggest that he believes that the women in the work force are the primary caretakers of their children and they need more flexible work hours than men do in order to function in the economy. From a feminist’s point of view, this word map looks pretty bleak. However, from the point of view of someone unaffected by this issue, it may look promising. More people today are concerned about the American economy than the American women.

President Obama:

This image suggests that Obama is most concerned about the people. Although some words relating to the economy are mentioned, the focus is on the people. The biggest word in the image is “we’ve”, which the president uses frequently to stress what we as a country need to do to fix this “issue” (another frequently used word). “College” and “education” are his proposed solutions for the “young” “women” who are soon to enter the working world. From a feminist’s point of view, this looks pretty darn good. One might even say that our president is…

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3rh1ao/

^^ I made that I swear! I just can’t figure out how to make it work….

actually who else would make such an awful meme? I’m sure you believe me.

For this week’s blog post, I selected a short excerpt from one of my favorite plays, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. The passage I chose is taken from Act 1, wherein a character named Lucky is asked to think for the  entertainment of three other characters; the resulting gibberish is arguably one of the strangest and most difficult to understand monologues in recorded history, right on par with the famous internet phrase “Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?”.

I used Wordle to create a word cloud using the entirety of Lucky’s monologue. When analyzed, I feel that this visualization accurately conveys the surrealism and bizarre nature of the passage. Some of the largest words are “reasons”, “unknown”, “skull”, and “tennis”. It was sounding pretty existential and deep right up to tennis, right? If you look closer, one can see proper nouns, such as, “Connemara”, “Testew”, and “Cunard”; I have no clue what these are in reference to, both in the context of the play and the visualization. This is an example of why I feel this visualization is so successful. One thing that this visualization fails in is the fact that common words such as “the” and “and” are omitted. I acknowledge that I made the choice to omit these words, so as to see the subjects of the speech; however, in omitting the common words, one loses the style of the passage, which is littered with excessive iterations of “the” and “and” (“the” alone is used 73 times in the 700 word passage!).

Overall, I would assert that this distant reading visualization succeeds more than it fails in creating an accurate representation of the passage I chose to analyze. I feel that a visualization tool that created a word cloud that simultaneously gave demonstration of the style would be very useful for texts such as the one I chose, if it existed.

Think. Thought. Just. Know. Maybe. People.

These were the heaviest used words in Clint Eastwood’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Aug. 30 – the same night that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would later speak.

Eastwood’s speech is now known for him lecturing an invisible President Obama, represented by an empty chair, which has spawned an entire meme culture based around “invisible Obama” and the metaphor of emptiness. It is also known for being hardly coherent but wholly hilarious.

The distant reading in fact proves Eastwood’s spontaneity and ambiguity, and possible confusion. The most used words are vague contradictions – “think” and “know,” for example, go against each other as opposing definitive forms. He also used the word “maybe” several times, also hinting toward lack of clarity and further confusion.

None of these words are at all complex. In fact, many of them would probably be in an eight-year-old’s vocabulary – save “bifurcating,” which may have come out of left field. This shows either unpreparedness, a lack of comfort when speaking in front of large crowds (though since Eastwood is in the movie business, that may not be the case) or a simple state of confusion.

However, this distant reading doesn’t even hint to the hilarity within the context of the speech. It is just funnier reading the transcript with the broken phrases, the dashes, the self-interruptions, or watching the video where he actually lectures the empty chair. The distant reading also doesn’t provide the context: the RNC, on a night after hurricanes throughout the south and just minutes before the highly anticipated speech from the nominee is due to happen. The distant reading misses out on this muddled speech in the context of the high-tension situation.

I wish there was a new distant reading tool in situations where the text is also on video (such as a speech, a reading or a monologue from a movie) that could piece together screenshots of the speaker or the scene and match it to each word used. For example, every time Eastwood said “maybe,” scrolling over the word on the visualization could bring up a series of screenshots from the video of the speech, which would be all the times in the speech that he said the word “maybe” and would have his facial expression when saying it. Or, better yet, if there was a video software that could recognize individual words in speeches and piece them together, so for the word “maybe,” you would have also a video of Eastwood saying “maybe” each time in his speech (just one-word videos all pieced together in chronological order).

For pieces of text that are not video format, it would still be nice to have the contextual element as part of the visualization. For long pieces of text, perhaps words could be linked to a list of settings where the word was said to give a better picture of why the author chose to use that word at a certain time, and give the reader insight into context, which is – as seen in the visualization of the Eastwood speech – a very important component of storytelling.

Everybody’s favorite Wisconsin vice presidential candidate talks at the convention.

I also visualized Paul Ryan’s RNC speech, out of curiosity. The distant reading visualization is of Paul Ryan’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Aug. 29, 2012. Ryan spoke in a highly anticipated speech to the convention crowd the night before Romney was slated to speak at the convention. This is a convention that “competed” for national attention with hurricanes and storms in the southern part of the country, and was viewed on some news channels in a split-screen format – a move by the media that was criticized by many.

The visualization suggests that Paul Ryan’s speech wasn’t out of the ordinary in that of his typical political counterparts, using words such as “president,” “Romney” and “Obama,” but also “life” and “country,” signifying his speech was personal, as well.

My extra credit relates to the second Wordle I did about Paul Ryan’s RNC speech and looks into the Paul Ryan Gosling meme. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJfMEiVGl6M

I created a visualization of the text of the first four acts of Homestuck, an online multimedia  webcomic about four kids who must play a very unusual game to preserve reality itself. The four kids–John, Rose, Dave, and Jade–appear prominently in the Wordle, but far larger are their chatroom handles (EB, TT, TG, GG), because all dialogue takes place as online chats, or pesterlogs (a word that is decently sized in the graphic as well), and those handles preface every line of dialogue. While John’s name is the largest of the kids’ names, because he is the main focus of the story and is thus mentioned most in narration,  Dave’s handle (TG) is clearly the largest word in the graphic, indicating that he talks the most out of the whole cast.

The rest of the Wordle indicates that the story is mostly dialogue with the predominance of conversational words such as “like” and “yeah.” The graphic hints at the subject of time travel, a main focus in the story, with the words “future,” “now,” and “time.” Other words related to important plot points–”house,” “package,” and “card.” However, the Wordle does not suggest any overall themes or subjects for the work. This is probably the result of the story being almost entirely dialogue, and thus subject more to the characters’ patterns of speech than a single narrative pattern emphasizing clear themes. Also, the text I entered was only the first four acts (there are six in all, with three intermissions).

The only new feature for this visualization tool that I could think to ask for would be perhaps some way of seeing how different words are connected, like clicking on a word and showing which words often show up near it. This might outline thematic connections more clearly, and help focus on meaningful words without having to delete the extraneous ones (which distorts the graphic).

The Iliad is generally known as the story detailing a portion of the Trojan war. Everyone knows the story of the arrow shot into the heel of the otherwise invincible Achilles. What comes to the minds of most is the bloodshed, glory, and general concepts associated with large scale warfare.

This excerpt from Book I of the Iliad, however, paints a different story than the condensed version typically portrayed to the Cliffnotes reader. For those more aware of ancient Greek culture as well as the social function of the Iliad at the time, it becomes apparent that these selected words reveal the truer message of the Iliad–more than the violence most people remember.

Note the high concentration of personal pronouns, as well as names of gods and high profile characters. This is more than your ordinary utilization of names. A great deal of the story revolves around individual possession and rank. While the story itself details large scale warfare, the heart of the Iliad’s message revolves around individual conduct, and the expected code of behavior. It is understandable why gods and heroes, the paragons of these qualities, would comprise the second most recurring words in these categories.

While the language is not that of the original text, the message remains the same. Words like “with,” “my,” “that,” “son,” and “have,” show that the Iliad was not the story of the battle, but of the individual–detailing not war, but the relations between men.