ENG101, section 7. Spring 2020. Emory University.
I’ve always wanted to use a 3D printer, and I finally did. I wanted my game piece to smaller, but I wasn’t exactly sure of what I wanted to print. 3D printing is so amazing because it is a process that takes a digital file and literally forms a tangible replica in 3D space. I went onto a site that had many different “things” I could print. I wanted something cute and that somewhat represented me.
Since my family knows that I want to be an engineer, they have always expected me to use a 3D printer (especially when I got access to one in college). With my family in mind, I turned towards things I knew my mom and sister liked. I am toying with the idea of giving it to them as a gift. Finally I found a section on Harry Potter – something my mom, my sister and I love. What was even better about this find, is that one of my mom and I’s favorite animals is an owl.
I brought to life the Harry Potter mail carrying owl.
Five people convene at the abandoned roadhouse on Main Street. There is a Mayor Johnston who sells drugs on the side to a woman (Sheela) who recently divorced a man (Nate), now left with a newborn baby, whose cousin (Zee) is the bookie for the Commissioner Jordan with a gambling addiction who works with the mayor. We crafted this game based on the die in front of us. Our goal: to get even with this town for what it turned each of us into. This is a story of revenge
I am the Commissioner. I chose to be a 40-year-old man with a position of power – something typically given to middle-aged white men. However, my character, Commissioner Jordan, had a weakness: gambling. He cannot control his urge to make money. While he has been Commissioner for many years, he is still power hungry and making money through the underground crime hub at the abandoned roadhouse, makes him feel powerful.
I developed a relationship as an elected official with the drug-selling mayor on my left. He and I were both corrupt, but the town made us that way. At the abandoned roadhouse, I meet with my bookie who is the person to my right. We had the first scene. It felt weird to all of the sudden snap out of reality and improvise as a bizarre character. My bookie and I did not quite know what the relationship between a bookie and a gambler was like. This is where the rest of the team offered their input at the beginning of our scene.
The five of us worked collaboratively to make our story. We broadly decided the most interesting objects that the die were willing to give us: a newborn baby and a stash of porn with sex gear. Our brains each creatively worked out ways to imagine how this story would unfold. These objects, along with the need to get rich from a misplaced suitcase full of cash, drove our original decisions. I found the suitcase and chose to call the mayor who was my ‘partner in crime.’ This spawned the need for the drug addict to call her ex-husband who went psycho trying to protect his own baby.
The tilt in our story is when we decided to make things as interesting in dramatic as possible. Ultimately, it didn’t change how predictable our story was once we established the main conflict. The couple who split up each still had lingering feelings for each other. Since the ex-husband knew that his wife, Sheela, spent a lot of time with the mayor, I fostered his suspicions of them hooking up. The mayor invited Sheela with full intentions of using his stash of porn and sex gear.
The twist: Sheela had stolen Nate’s newborn baby and brought it with her to the mayor’s house. Once Nate found out, everything blew up. Guns became involved especially with a vengeful cousin determined to bring down Mayor Johnston and Commissioner Jordan. I found as the role-playing game continued, the more you lean into your character and the acting that surround it, the more interesting your story gets. People get more passionate about something when you show you are passionate about it.
Playing Fiasco really pushed me out of my comfort zone. I quickly had to bond with people and reach a level with them that made me comfortable enough to act differently and abnormally around them. You can connect this type of gameplay to the human relationships and networking you do in everyday life. Everybody has something they are passionate about and sometimes our passions are not revealed until you are put in the weird situation of playing a role-playing game with essentially five strangers.
My friends and I got together to play Mansions of Madness. We were all thinking about how we did not have time to play for super long, but we had to get it done. We allotted a good amount of time just in case learning the instructions took a long time. Luckily, we had one person among us who was not a rookie, and he led the ropes.
The interesting thing about Mansions of Madness is that it is a physical board game with an interactive component that allows your story to completely change. I was excited to download the app on my iPad and play narrator. At the start of the game, we were each making our own decisions about where we wanted to explore, but as the game continued on and monsters started spawning, we had to be more strategic. I like how the game strongly encouraged teamwork.
We all had to make group decisions to stop the cult ritual and to eventually escape the mansion. We worked together to make sure everyone stayed alive, and we played our cards so that the strongest attacker could defeat the monster quickly. It got quite interesting when we thought we were being smart by staying out of range of the giant monster. However, it moved again and got directly between us and the doorway.
Here, we were confronted with two monsters, but we had one clear goal and that unified our team. This board game, with the interactive component, made it special. We could fight monsters and unlock rooms in a mansion one adventure at a time. It made the adventure unique to us, and it changed the way we made group decisions.
Overall, we decided that we want to play the game again, but a longer and more difficult version next time. We unexpectedly had so much fun, and when the game was over, I found myself wanting to keep playing.
I wanted to create a photo using the spiky balls that I grew up seeing fall from the trees. I thought it would be ironic to make the spiky balls into balloons because they are the complete opposite texture and color of a balloon.
I paired an image of my friend Zack with a pom pom ball as hair. I created this combination of images because they were both conveniently in the coffee shop I am doing this assignment in. I sat and stared at my surroundings for a few minutes. I could feel the wheels turning inside my brain as I actively looked for items to pair together. It was challenging to find two items that attached together and flowed in some way. I looked up and saw my friend’s straight hairline. I realized it would be fun to put something coming out the top of his head. Now his hair has become the puff ball that sits at the top of my beanie.
After waiting in agony for the game to begin, frustrated after the purchasing process, the game title slowly appears on the screen. I am unamused. Eventually I am thrown onto the front porch, the quality is slow and the camera is jerky which quickly gave me a headache. After learning that the doors were locked, which I already knew, and that I could pick up a cup and put it back, I found a way to change the settings which made my experience a little bit more enjoyable. The rain sounds are soothing, and there is not much I can click on. Finally, I found the key and was able to get inside the dark home.
Contents:
I think a lot of information can be learned about me through the contents of my bag, but only when accompanied with a description. I can craft what you think of me through the way I describe how I use the contents in my bag. I care a lot about academics and organization which you can tell from the lay out and the different notebooks for different subjects. You can also see that I like colors. I like bright colors because they are attractive to me especially blues and pinks! I do not particularly use any of the three hand sanitizers in my bag, so in that way this self portrait is not accurate. A lot of these items live in my bag because they are meant for emergencies. I do not actually use them.
This display of all the contents in my bag showed a certain aesthetic of myself that is fascinating to me. I would not say that it is completely accurate, but maybe it is the way I am portrayed as opposed to the way I wish to be portrayed.
This is my avatar. It is made up of aspects that are very important to me. The dog image is an ink drawing I designed because art is one of my biggest passions. I especially love doing dog portraits because dogs are my favorite animal. I own two big, fluffy beasts, and I love them unconditionally.
When I design a dog portrait like the one I am using for my avatar, I use a reference photo and a black pen that smoothly lines the paper. I leave white spaces for the highlights and emphasize the features that stand out to me. Contrast is important when it comes to these types of drawings because they are meant to be simple and focus solely on the dog.
Lastly, I used a pink stripe and tinted the edges of the photo pink because it is one of my favorite colors. I think light pink shows a certain aesthetic about a person – one that is both soft and gentle but quietly powerful. I think that describes who I am as a person and how I carry myself with this quiet strength.
