Author: Lydia Wilmer

Gaming: Good or Bad?

After watching Jane McGonigal’s video on gaming, I did not have any better thoughts on it. I was expecting the video to tell me about how gaming isn’t so bad, but instead McGonigal talked about how gaming can “save the world.” I completely disagree. Sitting on your butt all day playing games is not going to solve anything. Okay so you’re really good at pressing buttons on your computer, but what is that going to do? Nothing. She says that we’re more collaborative if we play games, and that might be true. But if people are spending their days interacting with others on the internet, they will not be able to collaborate with others in a normal setting. They will be to used to communicating through the game that they won’t learn social skills outside of the computer.

McGonigal also said that the average person spends 10,000 hours on games by the time they are 21, and that a person spends 10,080 hours going to school from 5th grade through high school. We should not be spending the same amount of time on gaming as schooling. I am a huge supporter of education, so I feel like thatg is the top priority. McGonigal makes it seem that school and gaming are similar priorities. They are definitely not. By spending more time on gaming than school, we are not going to be solving these real-world problems she is talking about. All we’re going to be doing is making the world dumber. Going to school will solve these problems, not sitting in front of a computer screen all day.

I realize that this whole post is bashing the video, so I feel like I should say something positive about it. I loved the fact that she talked about the Kingdom of Lydia. Mostly because my name is Lydia, so it was super cool to me to hear about an ancient kingdom that shares the same name. I also liked that her talking about how the Lydians survived showed something good about gaming. Even though I am not abig supporter of gaming, I realize that people like different things. If people love to game, that’s totally cool with me, but I feel like they should also be interacting with the world, instead of just playing games all day.

 

Photo from clip art


Connecting Everything Together

The process of going from puppies to bird's nest soup.

For this assignment, we had to do one of Daniel Pink’s “Symphonies.” There were many different options, like listening to a symphony, reading certain books, painting, and many more.

I did one called “Follow the Links.” This is a Six Degrees of Separation type thing, except with websites. You go to one website then click on another website, and you keep doing this until you’ve been to about 8 or 9 different websites.

I first started off by going to the websites Daniel Pink mentioned. One website never loaded, so I decided to look at the next one. This one was like a search engine, except they gave you a few websites and you chose which one was the most interesting. I clicked on one, but it was very difficult to find completely different webpages.

I then decided to try out Wikipedia. I was wary at first because my teachers have always told me to never use Wikipedia, but I decided to use it anyway. My search was puppies. It was the first thing that came to my mind, and they’re so cute! I didn’t read much of the page, instead I just clicked on a link. This link happened to be about giraffes. This led me to ruminant, and then to cud, bolus, mastication, tongue, saliva, and lastly, Bird’s Nest Soup.

 I was so confused as to how puppies led me to Bird’s Nest Soup. But then I thought, that’s the whole point. I was supposed to connect two things that really had nothing to do with eachother. I wanted to find out what they actually did have in common, and I found it. Bird’s nest soup is made froma nest made out of saliva. Puppies drool and get their saliva everywhere. It’s not much in common, but it is something.

This “Symphonies” assignment made me realize that pretty much anything can be connected somehow. It’s the same as the Six Degrees of Separation. Anybody and anything can be related somehow, if you just try. It’s like what Pink said, that you are “integrating those relationships into the big picture”.


Thinking of an Idea

Throughout high school your teacher always gave you specific instructions on projects. I was used to just going by the guidelines, so this project was a little more difficult to think of an idea. We had to think of a creative “invention” that involved people outside our group, as well as have a problem to solve. When I first heard this, I had no idea what to do. This was definitely a lot different than in high school.

My professor gave us some ideas, like a painting or a skit, to help us think of what to do for the project. For some reason, I kept thinking about the painting, but I could not figure out how to incorporate other people in it. I thought about this while we walked to a different building to work with our groups. I kept thinking that maybe we could have different people paint different parts of a picture, but I didn’t know how it was going to work.

When my group got together there were other ideas like skits or a movie, but we didn’t know how to incorporate other people into it. But then Shannon thought of a great idea. We could take pictures of people on campus doing creative things. Then we would put the pictures together and have them form another picture. The overall picture would be a brain, since our class has a lot to do with being right-brained. This would be perfect since each group member would have to take pictures themselves, plus we can involve other people outside of the group.

Everyone agreed that this was a good idea, but we didn’t have a problem to solve. Finally, we thought that the problem could be that people don’t think Georgia Tech students are creative. Since our project is full of pictures of students doing creative things, it would solve this problem. We then had to think of where we could get these pictures. We all came up of ideas of where people on campus are creative and wrote it on the white board. We thought about going to Ferst Theater, finding dancers, and multiple other things.

Just walking around campus, I see chalk drawings everywhere. Even just that shows Tech is creative, so I’m hoping that finding creative things won’t be a problem!