Letter

Dear Professor,

Learning what I learned in this class has definitely helped my writing out but it especially made me enjoy writing a little bit more than I used to before. From the “Bad Ideas About Writing” I really learned that not restricting myself to the things that I thought were standard in writing before, makes the writing much easier to do and enjoy. Prior to coming to this class writing essays have always been like a chore to me, something I don’t fell like doing but it must be done. Through my understanding that the restrictions placed on my writing at a young age were really just a standard for public school work really made the writing experience an all around better form of work that I have come to enjoy. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed speaking my mind onto whatever I wrote like with my individual report on the battle royale genre. Without removing the limiters that had been placed on me, the piece would not have been as good as I think it is now.

In essay writing classes like English and history I think what I learned will prove to be useful. I think I am already well versed in writing document based writing pieces so being able to incorporate myself into it may make the writing better.

Sometimes I do wonder if what I’m saying can be considered the wrong thing to say. I think that it’s moreso the way people interpret certain things but that is something that I always think about when speaking in real life and writing. Something else  I worry about when writing is if I go on for too long. I remember you said that make my writing as long as it needs to be nut it is still pretty hard to judge how much should be said based off of that alone. That may be something that comes to me with time but for right now I find it much easier to have a specific word count to look out for.

 

Unit 1_revised

My goals for college is to now find motivation to continue going through with it. Recently, getting by is not enough for me because I have started losing the motivation to even go to school in the first place. In order for me to “get through it with no complications and unnecessary things happening,” I need to find my own reasoning for going to school otherwise it is all a wasted effort. By this I mean that not having a personal concrete goal as to what I want in the future is holding me back from being able to get the motivation that I need. I had said before that I “ultimately just want to get out of school”; this will be a long journey without something to pull me towards the end, drifting through college may work for some people but it seems this approach will not get the job done with me.

Image result for playstation 4

Image result for recording studio

These two things, my plastation 4 and the recording studio, are some reasons why I just have no interest in school at the moment. Recently getting myself into making music has made me feel really good about it like it was something meant to be but I am not such a dreamer that I would drop out to pursue music when it has such a hit- or- miss audience to it. I also just like playing games with my friends a lot and enjoying games that are pleasing both visually and gameplay wise.

My goals for after college are still unclear and I feel that this is the reason for my sudden uninterest in school. I am well aware that doesn’t sound too promising for someone who is already attending college but right now it is what it is; something like that cannot be determined over night and will not just come to mind out of no where. Going with the flow isn’t the proper approach for me anymore, with that being said, I still have not a single clue as to what goal I should pursue. I would like to continue in my computer science major and see if it will produce any interest to me in that field of work.

Writing fits into both of these because I know I will have to be a well enough writer to get through college as quickly as I want to. Writing also fits into what my new hobby is all about, making rap music isn’t always all broken up words and made up words. The more things that I know, the more I will be able to write and put my experiences into the proper words needed to convey what I would want to show.

Artists Statement

The audience this was intended for were people not new to games themselves but not familiar with the battle royale genre of games. More specifically speaking, people who play and enjoy shooter games.  The reason for targeting established gamers is the fact that adding survival mechanics to a shooter game practically made it a completely different game. I chose to do a quick power point because I knew that I could highlight the good points of battle royales and give a quick run down on the things that can make someone successful when getting started. The only problem was figuring out how to format the slides without overwhelming them with words, having fewer words on the screen is definitely more effective on a presentation especially when the creator is explaining each one quickly. it turned out fine but not something very satisfactory for me, I know that if I had better equipment at my disposal and better planning I could have made something completely different that would have been way better.

Writer’s Statement

Discourse communities are something I am not new to, growing up in middle school I have always been like a group hopper who was cool with everybody so I got into groups fairly easily. Genres was something that I felt like I had always had a grasp on, like the basic concept of it being a specific set of literature that follows a certain pattern and rules for that certain genre. Like I said in my genres blogpost, I feel as if I know the hiphop/rap genre very well throughout the many years i have listening to it. As for discourse communities, it was a word I was foreign to but not foreign to the concept. Regrettably, rhetoric is one concept that I have not gotten a grasp on, I can’t even give you the definition if you asked for it right now. I only know of it as in the context of a rhetorical question but I know that is not the same as rhetoric in literature but i am sure I will get the concept sooner than later. Discourse communities is something useful as well as genres. In my opinion, they seem to be the same because they refer to groups that have something in common with each other so that is one way I help myself remember the two.

 

Genres

1)I feel as if i know the music genre very well, but rap/hiphop music specifically. I grew up listening to whatever my brother listened to which so happened to be rap music and I, over time, began to branch myself out into the type of rap music that I like. A rhetorical feature is story telling through the use of rhyming words and hard punchlines that grab the listeners attention.

3) Being limited helps make writing easier for me, if i know what i have to do exactly then there would be very little room for errors in my opinion. it definitely helps to have some type of form to follow because freelancing writing can be fun but if it doesn’t follow the theme that it was meant for then it is just a wasted effort.

Discourse Communities

In high school I inadvertently joined a discourse group for a group of boys that have and play Playstation 4. It wasn’t really directly me trying to join their but more so I befriended a majority of the group while I was playing online with them. I had already known a few members since freshman year and decided to play with them and found that some people that I didn’t know were already in the gaming session. I usually don’t associate with people I don’t know but I decided to join the session to have a good time for the mean while. The group liked my vibe, said I was one the funniest guys they’ve ever met and invited me to join their PS4 chat. I never intended to join or even knew about the group but I knew for sure that I was interested in play with those guys again.

GOOGLEPEDIA

Search Log:

  • I search on google “the process of making video games” and read the little information box that usually pops up and is posted at the top of the google search results (the information box, from what I know of is mostly linked to Wikipedia ironically).
  • It is always easy to just go into the search bar for google and get the results you need or get closer to the results you need. In my opinion, it is fast and usually a reliable source to get information on the internet.
  • Naturally, after reading the little information box found after a common google search, I clicked the link directly below it that shows where said information came from. It just so happens that this time it was coincidently a Wikipedia search that showed up and gave me the top result of my google search.
  • I stayed and read as much as I needed to see if I can get the answer I wanted from the wiki page. Sure enough, the wiki page gave me exactly what I came for since it explained the different stages of development of a video game and how each process varies.

 

My Findings

During my time reading that wiki page I found that many different teams help develop and produce video games, but that much was something I already knew. What I did learn though was that there are way more stages to the development of a game than what I had originally thought. First off, there are a lot of steps to take before even developing the game, developers have to worry about secure funding for the game through the pitch and concept of the game to see if said game would be profitable. After funding is secured, production comes next and is obviously the main stage of development for the game. Programming, art, designs, level creation, and audio production all occur during this stage until the game is playable and ready for testing. Everything after that I pretty much knew already, the development team gets feedback from the testers and improve the game into its alpha stage where all major features are present in the game. Then it goes into code freeze where they don’t touch any of the assets or add anything in, they just make bug changes until it hits the beta and they get more feedback from testers. After beta it goes into code release where many bugs are addressed and fixed and then sent to be reviewed by console manufacturers. Gold master is next when the game is completed and is used as a master for production of the game.

Portrait of a Writer

Elijah Raymond

Eng 1101

Spring 2019

 

 

I think that as writer, I have always been good at doing what I was told from ever since I started. Teachers from elementary school through high school had all made what they wanted to see in our writing very clearly and I was able to give them what they wanted. I have learned to get used to writing like that and enjoyed doing so; barely putting my thoughts into it which leaves me, the writer of said piece, out of my own writing. I enjoyed the feeling that my teacher and anyone else in class that read my writing would not know who wrote my work unless they gazed at the top of the page and saw whose name was there.

I would much rather write about work that can be cited and proven through the use of facts from a text than to write subjective pieces of literature that puts my mindset onto a piece of paper. I don’t like the idea of writing something of my own opinion for it to be openly shared. People tend to get really agitated and go really hard when you bring up your own opinion so I like to stay away from that. Writing about facts instead of opinions is also an easier process to me, all the information is from a text so it does not require me to put myself onto the paper. I tend to change my mind about things very easily so doing opinionated pieces would probably serve no purpose if what I wrote doesn’t even apply two days later after I have changed my mind on what I wrote. I know something like that can be edited easily but I am the type of guy that would like to do things once, go over it once, and leave it be. That is also how I am on test and why I usually fail them; I like to stick with my initial answer and believe that any doubt I have on it will have a negative effective. It may seem that I went off topic but I believe this and how I feel about opinion based writing are very similar. If I change my mind on an opinion based piece that I wrote, I would, in all likelihood, keep that change to myself and leave the paper as it is knowing that I am just torturing myself by thinking of how what I wrote and what I now think are two different things.

Though these claims are not based on experience since I can’t think, off the top of my head, of when I wrote a serious, opinion based piece of writing. This is all how I feel it would go if I did have to write an opinion based piece of writing which I most likely will do in the future of this class. Maybe I can get better and rethink this mentality I have by actually practicing to write in that way but for right now, this is how I feel on the matter of opinion based writing.