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On Thursday, last week, we were put into pairs and set our second short project, to remediation an existing piece media. It wasn’t my fines day as we talked about in the previous post, as I woke up late and had to pretty much leave as soon as possible. Under caffeinated and lacking creativity, motivation and inspiration. The workshop itself was fine (apart from forgetting my avatar), except I don’t fell I fully understood the topics discussed, due to a lack of food and caffeine. By the end I literally just had food on the mind (I think some people call this being hangry) which further happened my inspiration, creativity and motivation (though I was very motivated to get food). Therefore, I don’t feel I had a full understanding of the task at hand (on reflection).
For the last 15-20 minutes of the workshop, we got into our pairs and discussed possible remediation projects. We both agreed that we would like to do something regarding music from the start and began discussing ideas. Pretty early on in the discussion, Darude - Sandstorm was mentioned and we both kind of got stuck on that idea and started coming up with ideas that we could do with that track in particular. The person I was working with, Jeanett, mentioned some alternative version of the track, such as the rock, 8-bit and folk versions of the track. Which made me think, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if you could explore a little world, as you enter areas of the world a different version of the song will be mixed in, allowing the user/player to create their own remix of all the different versions’. We both decided the scene should be set in the desert; however, I didn’t really consider how I could actually achieve the technical aspect of idea, nor did we discuss how the audio clips would need to be formatted. At this point it was the end of the lecture/workshop, we probably should have stayed to develop the idea further, but I really needed food as I could no longer think clearly, so I made a break for it at the first instance (politely).
Although this is a form of remediation, I can’t help but feel that we maybe missed the point a little in regards to the brief as it didn’t really improve upon or remedy old technologies, but rather incorporated two forms of media into a single media, referred to as hypermedia [(1)[#c1]]. Furthermore, we never really discussed whether or not to take an immediacy [(1)[#c1]] or hypermediacy [(1)[#c1]] approach to the project.
The next day I set out to start building the world and programming the mechanics for the game. But while doing so I realised that we had maybe missed the point a bit, which further increased my procrastination cycles and made me worry about what we were going to do to justify the slight misunderstanding. Furthermore, it strengthened my creativity block that I’ve been experiencing and eventually I quit the application in a bit of a panic as I began to feel overwhelmed, with not knowing what to do.
The following day, I realized I had to get my act together and began by breaking down what we already know down into a more structured list of ideas and tasks that could be digested much more easily, rather than the mess in my head. The overall process helped me to organise the concept in my head and turn it into an actual achievable project (with in the time constraint). Furthermore, by having a list of tasks, helped me focus on what needed to be done and reduced my procrastination, since I now had a set of objectives that I know I could achieve.
Throughout that process I also tock the time to consider the reasons behind my procrastination as suggested by the TEDx talk (mentioned in the previous post). Which talks a lot about the relation that self-worth and fear of failure has with procrastination. This made me further reflect on the stuff I talked about in the first post of this series, about (the frustrations of being dyslexic)[./journal_0]. But as we discussed in that post, dyslexia is not a limitation but a challenge to overcome and I strongly believe that I can achieve what I want to regardless of being dyslexic. So, I concluded that this was not the reason behind my procrastination. Which made dig even deeper into how I’m feeling and soon realised that I was extremely anxious about returning to university. But what was causing the anxiety in the first place? Well, to be honest it never really sunk in that I was returning for a 4 year to complete a masters in AI and therefore not mentally prepared. Furthermore, over the 4-month summer break I didn’t really develop anything, just enjoyed the much-needed time off. However, this made me recognise that I was anxious about getting back into the flow of development. This was making me question myself. ‘What if I can’t get back into development?’, well… ‘You’ll fail’, so do know what, I’ll procrastinate (subconsciously).
This is very much in line with the theory discussed in the TEDx talk. It gives the perfect excuse for failure without blaming your own ability. I know I can develop games and application, so that can’t be the reason for failure, but the fact of being distracted can be. Therefore, I believe procrastination could possibly be a ‘self-protection’ method from my personal experiences (I had a similar experience when writing my dissertation). So I began to reason with myself, that if I can just get through this small project, it will show (myself) that I can still develop software and therefor get back into it. I also reasoned that it didn’t really matter if we had potentially missed the point of brief, it more of an ice breaker project and anyway the module is more about the reflection process rather than creating amazing and highly polished applications.
With these realisations, I shifted my focus back over to the to-do list and started tackling each task one at time (not that you can really do any more at once), rewarding myself with a short break in between objectives. Before I know it, I had become relatively focused on the tasks at hand and I actually started to enjoy myself now I had clear objectives! Over the remaining 3 days of the project I started to become more motivated and the brain fog has begun to clear. Now I’m looking forwards to working on the next small project, that’s been set today.
Anyway, here’s what we made, it doesn’t quite hit the points of the brief and I don’t really care anymore. I enjoyed myself creating this little project (it’s not my finest), it bought a little smile to others in the cohort and all-in-all we all had a good giggle. That’s the important part and why I got into developing games in the first place, to bring joy to others as well as myself. We at least accomplished that with the project, so it was nothing other than a success!
[Fig. 1, GAM 701 Remediation Project Demo, by Ashley and Jeanett]
[1] D. Blakesley, “A review of remediation: Understanding new media,” Kairos, vol. 6, no. 1, 2001
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