Parisot – Blog Assignment 2

The first part of our assignment told us two choose of the multimedia examples given on the Foust website, and critique them. I chose the first two examples, not because they were the first two I saw, but out of all of them they were the most interesting.

The first was the MPR Budget Balancer from Minnesota Public Radio’s site.  This definitely evoked memories of playing SimCity back in the day, balancing budgets and such. I kept waiting for a little black and white photo of Wil Wright to pop up saying “You can’t cut our funding! You will regret this!”

The graphics were very basic, seeing as how the entirety of the experience is fiddling with numbers. There was no audio, either, but once again it wasn’t needed.

Every change comes with a detailed explanation of the consequences of the funding change. I wish there could have been greater granularity when making changes, but I understand that this is a radio station, and not a professional games developer.
I played around with it for a good 15 minutes, which is a little above average for your usual internet time waster.

My only real problems with it were a lack of more engaging visuals, and the general ease of the game. Photos detailing my changes would be interesting. It seemed a little too easy to not only balance the budget, but create a surplus. Granted, I might have turned Minnesota into a gambling haven while doing so, but still… if it’s this easy to balance a budget, maybe I’m in the wrong business.

The second site I looked at was the BBC’s Supervolcano game.  This site immediately drew my attention due to the Science and Nature content, which is totally my bag. After playing a few rounds of the game, however, I learned one thing; I hope a Supervolcano never erupts in Texas.

I was familiar with the concept of the Supervolcano; I had watched a documentary on what would happen if Yellowstone National park erupted on a massive scale. The game depicted an imaginary volcano destroying an imaginary area. It was a lot less apocalyptic than the documentary the site was made to complement.

The site also included several other features in addition to the game, including a photo gallery from the documentary, articles about concepts in the documentary, and an article about the “science of natural disasters.” The articles were well written, informative, and they explained the concepts in a way that was easy to understand but not condescending.

The best part of the site was, for me, the Supervolcano game itself. The graphics for the game didn’t exactly blow me away, but once again this is a website, not a video game. The audio for the game was surprisingly engaging. However, completely unlike the little budget balancing game, I supremely sucked at it. Under my command, 274,473 people are feared dead in the eruption. Whoops.

The second part of the assignment asked us to find a story that would work well as a multimedia story, according to the  News Videographer Blog’s criteria. I picked a story that fell under the “Something people just want to see” heading. This particular story was close to my heart, being a fan of video games. The story is about a rest home using the Nintendo Wii as not just a diversion, but a therapy tool. The story combines two things that people go crazy over: cute old people, and video games. It would make for good audio to hear old people talk about playing the video games, with the sound from the games in the background. Given how the Wii is played, there is great movement to record as well. A slideshow would work as well, as long as you got the old people in poses while playing the games.

~ by supernovajesus on February 4, 2008.