Anohter semester has ended, and as is my custom, I want to take a moment to bring things to a close and reflect -- in blog entry form -- on how I think things went. I confess I do this mainly for my own purposes, but I hope it's of interest to students in the class as well as to those who found our blog thanks to Twitter. I want to keep this relatively brief, or at least well-organized, so what I'm going to do is simply list what I liked and what I didn't like about this semester. I don't mean this as some kind of final evaluation; instead, I just want a general place to reflect both on my students' work and my own.

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What I liked

• I like my students. Simply put, I looked forward to coming to class every Tuesday and Thursday because of the people I would get to spend that 75 minutes with. That's not something I can say about all of my classes. I threw a lot at you all this year, asking you to take some intellectual risks and step out of your comfort zones. You did so enthusiastically and taught me a lot in the process. That's really what it's all about.
• I like blogging. Blogging has been part of my classes since grad school, and it always works a little differently. It's always fascinating, for me, to see a class's voice emerge, and in this case, it was as strong and engaged as I could hope for. Alternatively thought-provoking, entertaining, challenging and deep, my New Media class really brought their A game.
• I like Gavin the Lonely Gorilla. The ARG we produced was a lot of things, and maybe, as some of you expressed in your reports, it could have been more involving, more balanced, longer-running. Whatever it was or wasn't, it was fun.

In my final paper, basically I argued that both alternate and virtual reality give the player a goal that is larger than themselves, some ultimate purpose or puzzle.  This aspect of gameplay in alternate and virtual reality draws the players farther into the game, encouraging them to suspend their disbelief and transform themselves into the character that they play, in order to meet that goal.

My first example was the movie Avalon. Ash lives a relatively normal life, and has no friends at all, as far as we (the viewers) can see. However, within the virtual reality game of Avalon, Ash is a very powerful Warrior class character, who has the best equipment, and her goal is to be the best in the game, by defeating the enemies that she comes up against, though we never find out who they are. Then we find out that Ash used to play as part of a team (Team Wizard), before it disbanded, because someone called reset - which was something they had all vowed not to do, so when someone called reset, their suspension of disbelief was shattered, and they no longer functioned as a group anymore.

Once Ash finds out that Murphy, the leader of Team Wizard, has found a secret level in the game that caused him to go braindead, or what other players call "unreturned", Ash makes it her mission to defeat this section of the game. She takes on the game itself as her new enemy, in an effort to defeat what is causing players, especially her friend, go braindead, hoping to help them come back. This new goal makes her an atypical character within the game, but it still gives her an overarching goal to complete within the game itself.

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(A long post, I know, but I had so much to say!)

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As briefly discussed in class, I have been analyzing themes in popular entertainment franchises. The big three are all huge moneymakers and fairly distinct from each other: television, film, and video games.

Now remember, this is a focus on franchises. That is, the moneymakers; I'm way more likely to look at Anchorman than an independent film, way more likely to look at Halo than Psychonauts. And actually, the reason I started with television is because it was so easy to identify.

Reality tv has been big since Survivor. Remember the first season of that? Starvation, challenges of strength, eating weird stuff, and the naked guy won. If that show wasn't about schadenfreude, I don't know *what* it was about.

(For those of you that don't know your German loanwords, schadenfreude is the enjoyment one gets from watching other people suffer or fail. Think America's Funniest Home Videos. Ever notice how it's 85% people getting hurt? Yeah, that's schadenfreude.

There's even a song about it.)

And it didn't stop with Survivor. The theme continues in nearly all reality tv, especially elimination-based shows and relationship shows. Cheaters has infidelity, crying, catfights. Flavor of Love has... oh man. That show started so many spin-offs involving skeezy men being chased by drunken plastic women I can't even begin to start.

So, tv's sister is film. Is film the same way? Nooot really. The schadenfreude theme is replaced with its distant cousin, low-brow humor. And if you don't believe that cheap slapstick comedy is the cash cow of the industry, just go look and see how much money Will Ferrell and Rob Schneider make per movie. It's incredible.

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A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with a friend about lucid dreams. At the time I had no idea what they were, but after a brief description I realized I had been having numerous lucid dreams for years. When I told him this he was extremely surprised. I'd never really thought of them as anything special, or really anything at all - they were just kinda the norm. After this conversation I returned to my normal apathetic attitude and forgot completely about it. Until today!

While searching for some academic articles dealing with virtual reality and consciousness I stumbled upon the article "Video Game Play and Lucid Dreams: Implications for the Development of Consciousness," a study theorizing (in excessive shorthand) that extensive videogame play lends to the development of a "higher level of consciousness" demonstrated through an increased potential to lucid dream. The article argued that spending time in virtual reality, which is essentially what videogames are, allows the consciousness to more easily create it's own legitimate VR, the lucid dream. As far as I could discern from the relatively complicated results chart, this claim held true. The article can be found by searching the title in Academic Search Complete from the UMW Library databases.

I realized that I've been playing videogames since I was four or five and haven't taken an extensive break from them, but the last few years have seen a marked decrease in the amount of time I spend playing. Correlatiing with this is a decrease is my propensity to lucid dream - an interesting connection. I thought about the conversation I had with my friend, and remembered that in previous conversations he said that he never spent much time playing videogames or much of any electronic game.

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