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Radley Spring 2012
Group Final Project Report
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THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
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The world is changed.
I feel it in the water. I feel it in
the earth. I smell it in the air.
Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.
It began with the forging of the Great Rings. Three were given
to the Asian-Indo nations, immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven
to the nations of Europe and the Middle East, great miners and craftsmen of
the mountain halls. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the American nation, who
above all else desires powers.
For within these rings was bound the strength and the will to
govern each nation. But they were all of them deceived, for another ring was
made. Deep in the heart of man, in the fires of human greed and desires, the
sins of men forged another ring, a master ring, and into this ring were
poured cruelty, ignorance, selfishness and the will to dominate all life.
One ring to rule them all.
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Introduction Section
This life is a
game.
You might not
think so, but it’s true. Life is a game we are made to play, by whichever
designer designed it. Most people see life as what it is: part of the way the
world works. Things that need to be done need to be done, pleasures we receive
are meant to be received. How is that a game?
Don’t get us
wrong, we’re not claiming life to be like Halo or Sims—well, maybe Sims—with
zombies and aliens roaming the lands. But there are aspects of the virtual world of games that can be found in the
real world, if only others took the time to see it.
Every aspect of
our day to day life is a game we struggle to win. Reviewing, and editing, and
changing, and meeting the requirements of others is a game of leveling up. From
racing the clock to get to class on time, to balancing our time, bills, and
priorities get to the next stage of our life, we are juggling items, avoiding
obstacles, and learning that we cannot lose.
Jane
McGonagil is one individual who knows that life is a game, who
realizes that aspects of the virtual world do, and should, exist in the real world. Her article on how reality is
broken has spurred our class to try to turn aspects of the real world into a
game—a real life game with benefits, points, and a way to level up. In order to
spread the news, unbeknownst to many, of environmental issues and controversies
surrounding us, our group formulated a game which would help educate each
other, our class, and individuals outside our small knit community about the
dangers of a ring.
What ring?
Why, the Ring of
Unawareness? The one ring, used by many thoughtlessly, was forged by human
desires and sins. We chose to model our game after the epic movie saga The Lord of the Rings, for the journey
of destroying the ring of ignorance is as challenging as destroying the ring
forged by Sauron.
As members of
the group aiming to destroy the ring, we assembled the game The Fellowship of the Ring, taking
the roles of particular characters within the movies we identified with the
most. Nabilah
Deen took on the role of the wizard Gandalf, Trevor Hoy stepped up to be the
elf Legolas, Tim
Radovich became the hobbit Pippin, Gabrielle Lucey the lady Arwen,
and Andrew Harkin
chose to be the hobbit Sam Gamgee.
We began our
game by setting up our game levels and tasks. The levels are listed in the Game
plays and Tasks section on the following page.
Game Play and Tasks
Level 1: Finding the Ring
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In order to pass through Level 1, players must
become educated about the Ring of Unawareness by utilizing social networks,
technologies, and other resources learned in class.
o
Members can either create a Google map, create a
webpage, or other resources that would help relate to the game and our
controversies.
Level 2: Assembling of the Fellowship
o
This level is comprised of assembling together
as a group to watch The Lord of the Rings
for some quality bonding time, and the distribute jobs and tasks.
o
During this time, group members began assembling
their personal portfolios, helping each other with vivid ideas and feedback
regarding their work. This level is crucial for educating other group members
about our controversies and proceeding into final stages of game.
Level 3: Educate Others About the Ring
o
The aim of this level is to spread awareness of the
existence of our controversies to others through online medias. By posting our
information compiled about the logistics of our controversies to our blogs (or
other social media websites) we will allow others to gain acute consciousness
of each controversy.
o
This stage is also crucial for giving
constructive feedback to other group members about the work they have completed
so far (in regards to their final portfolio and tasks) and giving general
feedback on what may present their arguments best.
Level 4: Destroying the Ring of Unawareness:
o
The fourth and final level requires players to
continue spreading news of their controversy in more direct ways.
o
Players are required to discuss their
controversy with at least three new people, post and write a detailed
description of another group member’s controversy on both Facebook and the
Googlemap.
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This final level works to rapidly spread
awareness of our controversies, and to destroy the existing Ring of
Unawareness.
Analysis Section
In order to more
fully capture the purpose of our essays from our first quarter until now, we
thought we could use the basic outline of the Lord of the Rings movies to better grasp the entire goal of
researching our different environmental controversies.
The concept of
our game focuses on using current media as a common bridge between us and our
peers (or larger social circles) who unaware of the environmental dangers
surrounding them. By using common themes and names from the movie, such
as Legolas, Gandalf and the journey of the fellowship to destroy the ring, we are
able to identify and relate to our audience by referencing a medium that is
familiar to them. Similarly, these commonplaces allow our audience to
more easily relate to us, which is a major goal of our project.
The goal of the
game centers on our ring, “The Ring of Unawareness” based on the idea that many
people are ignorant of these major issues that indirectly influence them. Therefore,
in order to win the game and destroy the ring we must actually inform unaware
people of the environmental dangers that surround them.
If people were
unaware of the dangerous beforehand, but chanced upon our Google Map or read
about them through our Facebook, Twitter, or Taskstream pages, we might
successfully provide them a gateway to identify with these current problems,
and perhaps encourage them to research further.
Furthermore, the
game’s visuals, namely represented in the Google map, adds ethos to our
group. We created a literal ring around the United States, highlighting
our controversies and describing them. This literal ring further utilizes
the commonplaces of the movies to help advocate for awareness of our
controversies. Moreover, we used current social media sources such as
Facebook and Twitter to continue to close the distance between our unaware
audiences.
Typically, people
are informed of these controversies through the news or through professionals
in the subject. Our game, by connecting it with current social media and
our knowledge of the controversies, is able to uniquely appeal to people in a
way that they have not yet seen. Ultimately, the different visuals, media
sources and friendliness of our game are what allows us to be successful in our
attempt to inform people of environmental dangers.
Documentation Section
Creating
an argument in a group is a difficult thing to achieve. Having numerous people
in a group means that numerous different ideas and preferences must be taken
into account, and while it allows for more creative thought process, it also
can be constraining and challenging to come to a conclusion on one thing
easily—especially in regards to creating an argument.
Our
argument had to be broad, as to fit each individual group member's ideals and
ideas. Something too specific would have caused a rift in our group, and make
working towards a solution difficult. We needed to be open to everyone’s
thoughts and ideas, and sometimes, give in to our personal wants for the sake
of the group.
At
one point in time, at the beginning of our brainstorming process for a game
theme, our first problem arose. Tim wanted a certain type of theme, Nabilah
wanted a certain type of game, and Gabrielle didn’t know some of the ideas that
were presented. Although most of the group agreed on a theme, a few members disagreed
with majority vote. This bump in the road somewhat set us back: we needed to
create a theme that everyone could work with and enjoy. But at the end, the
hiccup actually benefitted the group as a whole as the group together found
another idea that turned out to be even better than any of the game themes
suggested earlier.
This
is the primary way single author arguments differ from group arguments. Working
as a group helped us expand and build on each other’s ideas, and create stronger
concepts that we, as individuals, would never have been able to come up with
alone. Group arguments often times show more depth, and more contrasting ideas
that demonstrate a more full and complete piece of work. This can be seen
through our Facebook page, our Twitter point system, and the collaborations
made on our Google map.
The
end result of our collaboration was, in our opinion, very successful. It was
far from an easy process, but in the end we all felt like we created a game
that was fun to play, accomplished a strong stance on rhetoric, and utilized
all of our strongest works to their best potential. However, we as a whole still
have room for improvement. Most of our improvement exists in our work
processes. In other words, we could have focused on being more productive and
efficient, and trying to cut down on our disagreements. Perhaps we could have
compromised more on our small disagreements, the disagreements that weren’t
necessarily crucial to our work process.
Synthesis Section
Our game has
been facilitated through numerous media outlets as our primary forms of
communication. The primary form of communication was through the Facebook page
The Fellowship of the Ring created by the lady Arwen
(Gabrielle). Through the Facebook page, we were able to collaboratively communicate
by posting links and documents that we were creating as part of our game play.
The Facebook page contained elements of observations of the group dynamic,
documents detailing the series of tasks to complete the game and level up, and
links to other various social media platforms used within our game.
While Facebook
worked to combine all of the elements, the primary development for the ideas of
the tasks and the game itself revolved around the map created by the endowed Legolas
(Trevor). This portion featured the most significant aspect of the game, the Ring of Unawareness. The ring stopped at the
location of each group member’s controversy including the Keystone Pipeline
starting and ending point, the Bonneville Dam, Indian Point Power Plant and the
Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. After stopping at each of these points the final
destination is in Alaska where there has been a stirring controversy over oil
drilling. The map initially serves to inform our audience of the controversies
in a unique atmosphere, in which to “win” the game they must become aware of
each of the five controversies to ultimately destroying the ring of
unawareness.
In addition to
attempting to step up a level, players attempted to perform creative plays in
order to be rewarded points by Gandalf the Wise (Nabilah), who recorded the
creative game play through the Twitter account The
Ring Bearers. Members would be awarded points based off
of completing tasks, updating accounts or contributing to the group dynamic by their
creative game play while the game was being assembled and played
The final aspect
that was created to go along with the map is the blog through Google Blogger
titled The Ring of Unawareness which
is the final compilation of the multimedia sources that we used in developing
and playing the game. This final interface connects the Google map with a link
on the blog as well as links of the characters behind their game and the
connection to our real life alter egos. The map created by Legolas (Trevor) is
featured along with a montage of pictures from group meetings, descriptions of
our tasks, screen captures of portions of the Facebook page as well as relevant
movie scenes from YouTube.
In documenting
the game through the most influential social media sites used by Santa Clara
undergraduates we are able to encourage our audience to want to learn more
about the controversy through the convenience. For the blogger we have a blog
featuring aspects of all of our different social media sites as well
interesting movie clips to help spread awareness of our controversies. For the
avid Facebook and Twitter user we have created a profile on both sites to
attract them to follow our updates and tweets to learn more about the fellows
working to destroy the ring of unawareness. With this we are able to
successfully attract the interest of students with the diversity in the media
outlets used to destroy the ring of unawareness encompassing our controversies
educating one stakeholder at a time!s
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