Medium

The Nature of Animation!

Nov 4 2009

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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Video Games, the new white meat?

Oct 19 2009

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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