Blog Post 10: The Best of the Showcase

At the DTC Showcase, there we numerous video clips shown to us that we made by groups of students in other classes. Some of them were quite well done, while others were decent overall, but there were still a small handful of rather incomprehensible videos created. There was also the group of our classes games waiting outside the showcase room, one of which I have chosen to discuss. The game in question is one I played on Monday and was quite intrigued by, one boardgame called "Draco's Quest."

Draco's Quest interests me so possibly because of the unique concept that it holds. To play, one picks a dragon token, a player token, and draws a "dragon card." Depending on what character you draw, your dragon token, which moves around the board, gains a special ability. You explore around the board, originally only able to move 2 spaces per turn, and only 1 in you enter or exit a special form of terrain. While exploring, you pick up food tokens around the board by walking onto them, which are portrayed as black hexagons. At the end of your turn, if you have two food tokens, you can use them to "level up" your dragon. On top of this, there are 10 levels overall, and reaching certain benchmarks on your leveling progress results in you gaining an additional movement space. There is also a "random event" pile, which is gotten from picking up a food token with a silver dot on it's underside. Possible events range from positive, such as a free food token, to negative, such as losing a food token, to horrendous, such as Lord Cthulhu the Deep One interrupting the game and attacking everyone for a loss of a level. The game itself has several win conditions that I can recall. These conditions are to be the only surviving player, to have the highest level when the game ends, and I believe reaching Level 10 before anybody else.

Aside from interesting me in terms of game play mechanics, Draco's Quest also linked to several of the things we had spent time learning this semester, most likely due to the fact that it was created by a group within the DTC 375 class. The one that first leaps to mind is the concept of "value" from the Weatherford reading. While it seems strange because there isn't an actual currency in the game, the term value still holds true due to the player's desire to collect more food tokens for their dragon, which they can lose or gain through a variety of events. It creates a desire of sorts in the minds of the players, therefore creating the concept of value about these little black hexagons meant to represent food.

It can also be said that the concept of "pranks" from Bogost also has it's place in the game. Recall the above comment about Cthulhu being a possible random event card? It's not the only ridiculous event card on can pull. Others spring to mind in the form of the WSU Creamery technically being part of the game through said random cards, and one that I actually drew into myself was a card that described you being so shocked by your best friend introducing their latest romantic partner to you, a chicken, that you actually lose your next turn.

Blog Post 8: Bogost Observation

In what we have read in Bogost so far, he has covered the concepts of art, empathy, reverence, music, and pranks. Of these, I'm going to be covering the discussion of pranks in this blog post.

Bogost starts his discussion of pranks by stating that by definition, "Pranks are a type of dark humor that trace a razor's edge between amusement and injury." (Bogost, 37) In simpler terms, pranks are inherently funny due to a combination of risk and reward for the one performing the prank, and the varying ways the target can react in response to the successful execution of a prank. Bogost uses examples from video games such as SimCopter and it's inclusion of "himbos," a bizarre term used for the male bimbos which Jacques Servin programmed into the game to simply walk around and interact with others. Additionally, he shows that the entirety of games can be a prank, such as Syobon Action, a pseudo Mario clone that outright punishes the player for following traditional genre conventions of platforming games.

To extend upon Bogost's writing, I feel the need to discuss the nature of relationship I share with numerous online friends. Specifically, while we get along, none of use hesitate to relentlessly mock and prank one another, though the latter tends to appear far more commonly than the former. This particular story is a prank of sorts I pulled without the intention of it even being a prank, and was just trying to sound as ridiculous as possible. What did I do, you may ask?

I told my friends I was hired as the school cafeteria's official "Pancake Puncher."

To my friends, it makes sense that I punch these into existence. No, seriously.

To iterate, during a somewhat serious talk about jobs, I decide to make my friends laugh by saying I was hired as a "Pancake Puncher" because the school's pancakes were too fat to be considered pancakes, so I had to punch them into shape. The others expressed interest in this statement, and encouraged me to keep talking, at which point I thought they were playing along. Only close to 10 minutes later, after one of my friends left for the night, did I discover that yes, my friends thought I was serious.

As it turns out, they had come to associate me and the exceedingly bizarre happenings that occur to me on an alarming basis as average, and were willing to believe almost anything that flew out of my mouth. In this case, one of my friends actually went to see if he could find a job as a Pancake Puncher somewhere. You have no idea how much I wish I was making that statement up.

Such an event, in retrospect with this reading of Bogost on pranks taught me something seemingly fundamental about them. If you can cast a haze of the bizarre and insane around yourself at all times simply by what happens in your day to day life, you can weave the most ridiculous, pointless pranks into reality simply because your friends and family will have seen and heard stranger things from you. In simpler terms, if the circumstances allow it, you can weaponize the concept of "Truth is stranger than fiction" whenever you feel like playing a prank on your friends.