Video game- Just playing?

1. What are some pros and cons of playing video games for individuals and societies?

        There are a lot of pros and cons of playing video games. It just depends on what games people are playing. For example, people could learn a language if they are playing a video game just not in their mother language. If the player want to win the game, they must know the details of the games. If they need to keep checking dictionary in order to know the content of the game. In this process, the player could learn the language.

        Furthermore, some report said that playing video game would make people more creative since they faced on the digital world a lot. And the imaginative world changed a lot. Also, since the brain of the human would work more while they are playing video game. Therefore, the ability of the brain would enhance somehow.

        But of cause a lot of people playing video games not because they want to learn something. They just want to relax and entertain themselves. Playing some video games regularly but not spend too much time could make you feel relax and stress down yourself. But if the game is too excited that playing the game would event make you feel stressful, like some first-person shooting game. Since the game need to kill in order to win, it will make you feel stressful while playing. That would harm the body. 

2. According the film, is there any evidence that digital games can encourage aggressive values and anti-social actions in the real world? Do you agree?

        It may give negative effect to the player but it is not necessary. If the player play a violence like shooting game for a long time and spend a long time playing the game per day, it would somehow have a "brain-washing" effect. Like killing people is very normal. Since in the game the need to kill all the enemy in order to win. Once they were killed by the enemy, they create a kind of hatred to them and they will just think of killing them all for revenge. They would bring this feeling to the real life and they would do what they did in the video game, like hurting and killing people who they hate.

        But it is a very extreme cases, a normal player would not do what they do in the game in the real life. It is because peopel would have a sense of what is correct and what is wrong. 

3. Should governments have the right to ban a certain game or place age restrictions on it? Why?

        I would agree that government have the right to ban a certain game or place age restrictions on it since some games are not suitable for some age group. For example, some games that would have pornography elements should be restricted that the players should be over 18 since children should not tough on pornography. 

        Besides, I think the government could set a playing time limit per day. For example, people could only play the game 4 hours per day. That in order to sure that people would not addicted to the game and get harm to their body since it is harmful that a person just sitting in front of the monitor and just play the game all the day. The player would feel dizzy if the face to the monitor for a long time.

ASCII History of Moving Images

Question: 

Introduce one example of digital art that you consider to be a work of art. Explain why you consider it to be a work of art, showing how it fits the particular definition of art that you support. To support your argument refer to the work of scholars of digital art as well as the work of scholars who have defined art.

a)  Introduction to the work

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/

Name of the work: ASCII History of Moving Images

Artist: Vuk Ćosić

Year: 1998

Display: UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) NetArt online                          gallery

b)  A detailed description of the work 

    ASCII History of Moving Images, just like film nowadays, is a series of moving pictures. Those pictures are all combined in ASCII. ASCII is American Standard Code for International Interchange. That means the pictures are combined with nothing but just number, alphabet and symbols. Vuk Ćosić uses software created by himself to transform each frame of the original into an image, where the ASCII characters play the role of pixels or dots, creating figures, shadows and objects on the screen. In that year, computer technology is just started. Digital imaging was just like in its infant stage. It gives a function to the computer languages out of writing program or doing computer  work, that is seen as image and video. It create a interesting place where texts can be written as a image. It is a really new idea in that years.

Quote:

"The clips include film footage from the Lumière brothers, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, King Kong, Star Trek, Blow Up, Psycho, andDeep Throat. These clips offer a menu of possible scripts for net.art, from Marxist parable to spectacle society to Modernist utopia."

Richard Rinehart (2010)
Vuk Ćosić: ASCII History of Moving Images
(http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/cosic)

"Cosic’s consideration for the use of ASCII is developed as a critique of the utilitarian logic of the new media and a celebration of their lack of objectivity by spreading a crude method of production to an almost absurd limit, creating animations with a retro-futuristic aesthetic. The unreserved expansion of computer games is seen as a primary means of that nonobjective accession, especially in the Western world."

Sandra Araújo
Deconstructing Vuk Cosic: Data as Language

(http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/deconstructing-vuk-cosic-data-as-language/)

c)  An evaluation of the work in terms of your specific research question

Art Elements

    ASCII History of Moving Images just like digital film, but it just use ASCII languages as it's pixels. It contains almost all the art elements which a film contains. For example, the objects in the video is in three-dimensional. It use different words or symbols to create the light and the shadow in order to create the space. Also, ASCII History of Moving Images, to some extend, is a realism works. It depicts human, landscapes and animals like birds in reality.

Conceptual Art

     Same with many digital network art, to me, ASCII History of Moving Images put the emphasis on the concept and the experience rather than the object itself. Compared to painting, it emphasize on  the object since what we appreciating is the colors, the technique or the expression of the painting. They are very important to the painting itself. But it is not the case on ASCII History of Moving Images since although it is fun and new that it use the ASCII to shape object, we ultimately are not appreciating the ASCII, we enjoy the experience that it give to use while looking at the video. It makes people thinks. That is how conceptual art work.

Mission to Earth

What is new or different about digital cinema compared to traditional filmmaking?

Mission to Earth is a example of "data-base cinema" or "soft cinema" created by Lev Manovich. The "soft" here means software. It is totally different from traditional filmmaking. Except the voice over narrating the story, everything else is constructed by software in real time, including what would appears on the screen, where and in which sequence. The decisions are partly based on a system rules and partly random. Its means that every time you plays the movie, what is shown on the screen is different! The screen are broken down into several frames and the video which appear within these frames selected from a large database.

Eric Sui "Touchy"

    This art work is made by Hong Kong artist Eric Sui and called Touchy. It is a machine that like a camera and after you put it on your head, your eyes become the lens. But you cannot see anything like blind since the lens are closed in normal situation. As we can see in the video, the artist just like a blind people that cannot see anything. But the interesting thing of this art work is that once other peoples touch your skin, the lens would open and after few seconds, the camera would take a photo and there is a screen at the back of the head and show the picture just taken. Therefore, the picture taken would just like what the artist is looking at. If he is looking at the girl, it would take a photo of that girl looking at the camera.

    It is a really interesting art work. It emphasis on the human relationship between others nowadays. In recent years, there is a funny situation that every people just look down to their cellphone or tablet on street or while they are on MTR, even when they are having dinner with other people! They have no communication between others. It is a senses that technology become a wall that separate people and make them have no conversation. This art work highly implied that. Once people interact with each other - touch the others's hand, face etc., the lens would open. The wall between people disappear and people can see the beautiful external world through eyes again! Eyes always seen as the soul of a human. Eye-to-eye contact is rare that nothing can replace with.

    Eric Sui is lived in Japan and this art work seems refers to current Japan social circumstance too. There is a group of people call "Otaku" in Japan. It means they are indoorsy. They will not step out to their home, even their room. They spends all the time to the computer, in video games or animation. They definitely have no communication with people. Just like this art work. They are masked by technology.

    Human is social animal. Communication is definitely very important to human in life. Technology is used to enhance human's life, but not to cover human'soul.

The role of social media in the Occupy movement

        In recent Hong Kong, there is the boycott of classes and then the Occupy movement. It's aims is to fight for the democracy and the "real" election. Social media has became a very important character in this social movement.

        Since nowadays almost every Hong Kong people get a smart phone. It is very easy to access to the social media like Facebook even they have no computer with them. They just need to pick up their smart phone, turn on the application, they can access to the internet world. Since almost every Hong Kong people can access to the social media, it is a very useful tools to spread information and to call student or Hongkonger to join the protest. Since those social movement need a large number of participant in order to get effect, it is a very good way that using the social media to promote the movement. It is because compared to the hard-copy promotion like poster, the poster just can be seen by someone who physically pass by. But it is more convenient to look at the social media online rather than that. More people could see the promotion of the protest. And more seen means more participants. Therefore, Social media just a promotion tool of the protest.

        It is not difficult to notice that there are a lot of groups or pages on Facebook that is related to the protest. They would post on some news on their wall so that although some people do not join the protest, they could know what is happening in the protest area. In this area, the social media become a role of reporting news. They just like the news reporter. Posting what the actual environment of the protest could let the people knows more about how is going on. It could also stimulates more people to join the protest since they would see how the police act unacceptably. It is also a channel for people to record the history. People could just upload the photo, video, audio to the social media in order to share, and to make a copy of that useful material since every information about this protest is very important.

        It is good that social media become a platform to record the true. But it is the case just when they are recording the actual true. Since it is very easy to arouse people through the social media because of the easy-access, some people would just post some fake news onto the social media in order to change people's mind about the protest. For example, there is the case that some anti-protester just post a picture that showing a police-dressing man is bleeding in order to accuse the protester that how violence they are. But the photo finally proved that it is just a photo taken by HKTV and they are just shooting drama. Therefore, the guys in the photo is not a policeman. He is not bleeding either.

        Therefore, as we can see, the social media is playing a very important role on the social movement. It is a critical platform to catch people's support to both yellow and blue stands. But it is really unhealthy and immoral to post fake news onto the social media since sometimes it is very hard to determine whether the news is true and believable or not.  

        

        Also, to the protester, it is also good for them to look at the social media since they may know the actual environment of the protest area. It is sometimes hard to know the situation of the protest area if you are in it. But since people are keep updating news to the social media, so they would know where is the main group of police and they could leave the danger zone before some violence clash happened between two stands.

        In my own experience, it is impossible to connect to the internet since there are too many people in the protest area, they are just keep try to connect to the internet with their mobile devices, That would lead to the clash of the internet service.

Digtigal games - But are they art?

The question "Are video games art" is related to some philosophy question. For example, what is art?

             According to Ernest W. Adams (2007, 256), Art is essentially hedonism that it exists to create aesthetic pleasure. To Adam, art always contain a message. Art has content that is expressing something. Art has an aesthetic determining beauty and ugliness. 

    

        According to Adam, what computer games mean is that "Computer games are personal computer games, home console video games, online games, and most forms of computerized play that involve a monitor and an input device."  That means the player would use the input device like keyboard or mouse, to input, for example, some commands. Then the monitor, as a output device, would shows the consequence of the inputted commands, usually in digital graphic. Therefore computer games always involves in digital graphic. Beautiful graphic also is a strategy to attract people to play the games.

              So is computer games would be art, or a art form? It depends. There is no answer by just talking about this. Video games can be art but not all the computer game is art. It is because according to Adam(2007), being a art should begin to act as a art. That means if the game industry just says that "Let's create a artistic game", then the game would be art since its purpose of creating the game is to make a art, just like painting or making a sculpture. But in the real life, most of the game are not art since the game industry creating games just in order to make "fun" and earn money. Due to the commercial face, computer would not be an art since they just selling something that makes the consumer feel relax and happy, in order to earn, earn and earn. This action is nothing about art.

                

Modern Times, Then and Now

Charlie Chaplin Tempos Modernos

This is a old movie published at 1936. In that time, automatic machine definitely was a new thing to people. Industry appeared and people started to work with the auto-machine. Like the character in the movie, Charlie Chaplin. The conveyor moves fast and Charlie Chaplin need do finish his work before the "object" gone. He is very busy that he even did not have time to argue with his inspector or drive out the fly. His work became a irresistible mission. In some sense, he was forced to the work before it run out.

Finally Charlie Chaplin got a rare rest time. He went to the toilet and have a cigarette. Before he smoked, the screen behind him light on suddenly, the graphic of his boss came out and shouted him to back to work. On that time, the thought of monitoring definitely a new idea!

After looking at the movie, don't you find that there are some similar experience between Charlie Chaplin and us? In our life, monitoring is very common. Almost every elevator get a monitor. The Sai Yeung Choi Street is supervised by police force. In mainland China, a fitting room of a boutique got a monitor in order to pretend someone to stead the clothes by putting them into their bags in fitting room, where a place that was hidden originally. Even what you did at home would be captured by others! The concept of privacy and human rights are violated seriously.

The way that how Charlie Chaplin do his work just like how we rely on the digital social media. Even people is on their way in public transports like bus and trains, 99% of them are looking at their smart phone and surfing on Facebook or chatting with friends on Whatsapp. While at home, people just turn on their computer, open a browser, and type www.facebook.com. After logging in, their would just keep clicking refresh button every 5 minutes and spend the whole afternoon like this. It is somehow like compulsive and become addicted. That is how technology changes the life of human.