English has always been my favorite subject in school. I love to read and write, so when I entered Forms of Narrative I thought it would be the same as other English classes. I was prepared to read books, memoirs, and documentaries and write boring papers that were a million pages long. I was surprised, however, to find that this class allowed me to express a more creative side of myself. The blogs that we wrote allowed us to say what we honestly thought about assignments and different aspects of the class. We were allowed, and encouraged to be funny, straight forward, and unique, even if it meant not following the traditional rules of writing that have been drilled into our heads all through previous years of schooling. The class was made to be very interesting and fun. We got to analyze TV shows, computer games, and comics. To be honest, I never read comics when I was a child so while writing about “Little Nemo” and other comics came easily to many members of the class, this was one of the more challenging assignments that I completed during the semester.

Read more . . .

Where did the days go when kids would get excited about playing tetris, solitare, or a simple racing game on the computer? Those games have been all but forgotten in this new age, and as I was comparing the difference in the old and new games I noticed one major difference. The new games actually speak to you in some form. Whether it be text flashing across the bottom of the screen, or an actual voice, video games these days actually SPEAK to you. As shown in Facade, the characters are humans. This is the case in many games such as Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, and many other modern games. The interaction between computer and player is what keeps kids hooked to keep playing. Almost as if it would be difficult to just hang up in the middle of a phone conversation, children have a very hard time signing off in the middle of their games because the game has actually communicated with them and gotten them to a certain point or level. This is why we see this sad generation of children sucked into their computers and television screens for days at a time, waiting for the next thing to happen. Just like in a relationship with a real person, you gain trust, confidence and friendship.

Read more . . .

For my final project, I will create some type of slideshow or moving picture with subtitles at the bottom to tell the story. The movie will include music along with the photographs and short video clips. The analytical essay will talk about the importance of music and text to set the mood for the photograph. If you look at a picture while listening to happy music, you will get a different feeling than if you look at the picture while listening to sad music, right? The project will include the same series of pictures and video clips in the exact same order two different times. The first time, the pictures will have a happy story and musical theme. The second time, the pictures' order and looks will be exactly the same but more mellow and sad music will be added, along with a sad story. This will show how much music and text influence peoples feelings about movies and slideshows.

For over eight hundred years the mystery of the collapsed Mayan civilization has haunted scientists, philosophers and people of the world. In this fiction childrens book about the disappearance of the Mayans, the reader chooses the path of a journalist in his quest to solve the unknown truth while visiting the ruins of the fallen cities. As stated in "Avatars of Story", this book follows internal interactivity, where the readers themselves are meant to act as the main character and choose the path of the character based on what the person would personally choose to do in a similar situation.

Read more . . .

While we read the "choose your own adventure" books in class, I couldn't help but think that the books are very similar to life itself. Though a much more toned-down version of life, the books teach people to make decisions without help from anyone else. The books that we have been reading, usually less than one hundred pages, are written for a young audience. Though the children reading these books may not realize it, they are learning from these "choose your own adventure" books how to choose their own life. It is a tool to teach kids to pick between right and wrong, good and bad, and what is most important to them. If money is what they seek, then the child will pick the route most likely to lead them to it. If what they seek is friendship, then they will choose the path in the book most likely to introduce them to new characters and friends in the book. Life decisions are obviously much harder than picking which page to turn to next in a book, but since young kids do not have many difficult life decisions to face in their childhood, these books are a way of strengthening them mentally for when those occasions arise.

Read more . . .

When you think of the way a child starts his/her day, what do you think? Their parents wake them up, they eat cocoa puffs in their pajamas while they watch cartoons, and then get ready for the rest of the day. Over many years, that scenario has stayed the same with most average households that have children. One thing, however, has sadly been changed to fit the new modern world. The TV. A child's day used to begin almost identically to the previous scenario with one difference. Instead of watching cartoons, they would go ask their parents for the comic section of the newspaper. I myself even did this not to long ago, before i was consumed with Power Rangers and Captain Planet.

Read more . . .

When a child is born, the first thing that they learn is what they are looking at. They are able to identify their mother, father, and other every day things almost instantly. However, if you put a word in front of them, they wouldn't have the slightest idea what those squiggly things were. One of the first things an infant learns is different words. Even before they are able to speak the words, and long before they are able to read or write them, they can identify the sound that someone makes and what they are referring to when that particular sound is made. For this reason, children's books are more important than would be expected. What a child is looking at when his/her mother flips through a picture book is what they will learn. The words that are printed in a children's book must be picked carefully and perfectly line up with the images on the page above, because the child could care less about what the words say when he is looking at the pictures, but is still listening to the reader tell the story.

Read more . . .