Descriptive Dan

Much like in Charlsie's post, I quite enjoy imagining all public introductions like a competitive ice breaking event. I go with "descriptive dan" for my personal alliterative moment, because it quite jovially mocks the original purpose of the game.

Ooooh look! I began on a tangent and deftly stumbled back to the subject of the course! Ice-break complete.

I am 23 years running and I spend most of my time as an MAPC student at Clemson. As it goes I am particularly interested in theory (with a knowing nod to this week's reading), and considering threads from stand-up comedy, graphic models of non-linear physics, and the occasional trending meme.

As a gamer, I belong to the lowest rung on the totem-pole, the Madden-ites. I'm a huge football fan, and I find the football games to be a mind-numbing way to spend a free hour. I play other games occasionally, but I bought my 360 for the sole purpose of being able to simulate bears v. packers before a Sunday night game. I'll discuss this further in my second post.

I've also played minecraft over the past few months, and I'm very excited to get a server going. I haven't played around with the circuit oriented features (red stone) yet, but it should be fun to explore this aspect of the game through this class.

On the practical side, I look forward to applying the class to my pedagogy. I taught high school English for a short while, and playing games in the classroom was an integral part of my student's experience. I even found that, while (seemingly!) off-task at a computer station, students would invent strange repetitive games, even if they never left MS Word!

On the theoretical side, I look forward to finding out more about two social gaming processes: griefing and easter eggs. Greifing, especially from my experience with minecraft, is a fascinating site for thinking about comic. A well played greif, not simply destructive but creative, can, at times, can be quickly forgiven by the grief-ee. On the subject of easter-eggs I am interested in their development and implementation. There are all kinds of strange methods for an easter-egg to be achieved, some of which must match up with certain groups of gamers. Furthermore, the willingness of gamers to celebrate a game's design could mean that there might be less distinction between a glitch and an easter egg than we might initially imagine.

Anyway, this should be a fun time.