No Sleep for the Clio 2 Student

My oh my.  Good news: I just finished making changes to my Atomic Age page to the point where I am at least somewhat satisfied with it.  Bad news: it took me way too long to do.  If all the rest of my pages take equally as long to perfect, I will either not be sleeping for the next three days, or it won’t be finished by Thursday.  More likely the former than the latter.  Anyway, here is the link to the atomic age page.  Feel free to look at it and give me feedback, especially if you have access to IE6, as I do not.  I’ll post links to the other pages as I finish them.

The Revelations of Myst

I was not a fan of this game.  First of all, I too had difficulty finding it anywhere.  I was finally able to download a demo of the game, but when I went to play it, Myst IV told me that my graphics card was unrecognizable by the game.  I even tried a demo from a different website in case it was just that particular file.  So instead, I had to download the Myst V demo from the creator’s website.  That worked, and I was able to test out the demo.  Like Elara, I had discovered that I am not a fan of 3D games where you run around a solve puzzles.  It’s not so much the solving puzzles I don’t like (I love the game Azada which is nothing but puzzles), it’s the having to run around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to press every button and explore every object I come across in order to find the puzzles!  Not to mention I have slight motion sickness, so playing a 3D game like this for too long gives me a headache and makes me nauseous.  I also think that part of my discontent might lie in the fact that I was playing Myst V instead of Myst IV which seemed like it might have been more interesting to me.

I agree that video games certainly have something to teach us.  Like I said, I love Azada, which promotes critical thinking and logical reasoning.  I think if someone were to create a game of a similar nature using a history topic, it would be just as interesting.  Part of what I didn’t like about Myst V was the same thing that everyone was complaining about with The Lost Museum before.  There was a lot of running around clicking on things without any results or instructions.  There was a game that I played a couple of months ago (I wish I could remember the name…) that was the perfect format for what I think a history game should try to emulate.  Basically, it combined logic puzzles with sort of a search and find atmosphere where you had a list of clues to find in a particular location, and then you had to use those clues to solve the various puzzles in order to move on.  You could create a history game in a similar fashion.  For example, you could have a game on the Revolutionary War where someone had to find all the parts to their musket and then put it together before running off to join the militia.  That way, the game is fun and engaging, but still historical.

I think it is going to take a set of history-loving programmers to create something that will be good enough to bring a new name to history games.

Design Assignment

So my design assignment is finally posted after several hours of fiddiling around with the picture at the top to get it just right.  And then of course there was the task of choosing an appropriate font for the subject.  I know that the color scheme may seem a little bland and boring, but it’s how I view the time period and the particular events I am discussing.  However, if anyone has any opinions on what would be some good colors to incorporate, I would be up for testing it out.

On a similar note, before starting my design assigment this past weekend, I went through and did some housecleaning on my site, i.e. fixing links and adding a link to the about page to all of the subpages of the site.  Also, something I have been contemplating, and have discussed with Dr. Petrik, is how to do the overall design of my site.  She said that all the pages need to form one cohesive group, and the layout and design need to be pretty similar on all pages.  My dilemma is that I want to use the map as the background like I did for my reprecussions page, but that particular image does not fit with each page.  So the question is, should I stick with the original design that is on the science page, should I keep the background and design of the reprecussions page for the whole site, or should I keep the same concept as the reprecussions page but change the background image on the pages where it is necessary?  Let me know what you think!

Technology and Visual Appeal

When watching the podcast of Hans Rosling’s talk at the TED Conference, I could not help being hooked.  Not only did the information he presented help to eliminate some of the myths about longevity in third-world countries, but the software he used for his presentation was amazing!  I was a biology major in a former life, and as I was watching his presentation, it made me think how much more impressive my senior thesis could have been if I had a program like that with which to show off my statistics.  That got me thinking about how I could use a similar concept to for my website.

While there are a few charts and statistics I could present on the amount of radiation poisoning for a particular group, I was thinking more about the overall look of my site.  What was it that got my attention about his presentation?  Was it just the moving charts, or was it the colors and the visual appeal of his overall presenation?  I decided it was a combination of both.  His charts were interesting with their moving statistics and what not, but the part I could apply to my site was the overall concept of putting information in a format that the audience can understand and relate to.  The graphs looked good because they were easy to understand, while incorporating a sort of multi-media.  For my website, I need to make sure that the language is scholarly, but still understandable, and try to supplement some of the text with video or audio files that relay the same message.  Watching this podcast gave me many ideas for how to capture my audience’s attention without using fancy programs.