I've been thinking about animation since our last class trying to think of something to write about, which was a bit daunting at first. My thought process was that animation seems to be very similar to TV and film, so it might just be a re-hash of something that's already been said. I began thinking, "What makes animation unique?" I then remembered someone very iconic in our culture. Mickey Mouse.

Mickey Mouse first appeared in the cartoon where he's on a steamboat, which happened to be one of the earlier animations of our time. His whimsical adventures led him to do many a humorous trick for the viewers, and this placed him in the heart of children everywhere. I began thinking to myself that this seems to show a difference in the media types: animation seems to be very silly for the most part.

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When we were talking last class about how to classify video games, I was thinking to myself "Why are video games being treated so differently?" The central question offered to the class was whether video games were a genre or a medium, but here's my question to everyone else on here, couldn't you say the same about every other form of media used in telling a story?

The way I see it, video games are very similar to other forms of narration. For comparison's sake, I'll use movies. There's action movies, comedic movies, romance movies, horror movies, etc. Now, for video games, there are first/third person shooter video games, role playing video games, simulation video games (think the Sim series or Lemonade Tycoon), survival horror video games, etc. Both movies and video games have "prefixes" added onto them to classify them.

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Near the end of class on Tuesday most everyone started to talk about TV shows and breaking the fourth wall, the fourth wall being the invisible barrier that separates the show/text from the audience. Breakage of the fourth wall has been used fairly extensively, albeit it only recently became a more popular technique in the 20th century.

The first notable usage of breaking the fourth wall would probably be the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series (and all books related to it, like the goosebumps books.) These books used the choices of the reader to impact the how the story played out- at the end of teach page there would be instructions to turn to different pages based on the reader's choices (that or the story would end.) In this example, the purpose of breaking the fourth wall seems to be to add a further layer of immersion to the story, allowing the reader to LITERALLY control the outcome of the story.

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