Scholarly article #5

Before reading What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about New Media by Anne Frances Wysocki, I did not know anything about ARGs. I googled “World without Oil,” and I am fascinated by the concept of an alternate reality game that encourages people to consider ways to live without depending on non-renewable energy. However, by using the computer, players will use a product that people made from petroleum. I read this scholarly article on my phone: my phone is made out of nonrenewable materials including crude oil. The creators of “World without Oil” gave people an effective way to add to the conversation about how the world can stop depending on oil. However, gamers depend on products made from oil to play the ARG.

I did not know about the Halo 2 ARG “I Love Bees” either. I enjoy playing the Halo series with my brother-- partly because of the soundtracks: the musical themes change when the player hits a new checkpoint or setting in the story. The people who promoted Halo 2 probably significantly benefited from offering gamers an ARG. 

When I read that the "I Love Bees" players visited payphones to interact with other players, I thought about how the designers of the application Pokémon Go created the game with the idea that players would have to interact with the game outside of the typical application. Players have to catch the Pokémon in various places, instead of just online. The people who created the game catered to a large audience by providing a new way for players to interact.

Anne Frances Wysocki suggests that game designers make games interactive intentionally; therefore, players may forget about immediate surroundings and get lost in the game (437). In Halo 4, the player’s perspective differs from earlier versions of Halo. Instead of the player looking at the back of the character’s head, the player views the screen through the character's helmet visor. The designers probably change the view intentionally to meet gamers’ expectations of a realistic experience. However, I struggle with Halo 4 more than other Halo versions because the view does not seem as user-friendly to me.

Likewise, readers have expectations about new-media interactions. Wysocki says, "audiences using computers regularly expect multimodality." People often expect videos alongside articles on websites. Gamers expect music and multiple user settings. Since a majority of people interact with the web, audiences demand more than when people started using the internet. The webtext project from class demonstrated that writers have to appeal to an audience with increased and increasing expectations.