Blog 3

Collocation is practically very tough for Chinese English learners because English and Chinese belong to two distinct language systems. And English and Chinese learners always tend to use distinct ways of thinking, that’s the root of the difficulty for Chinese students to learn English. However, during the half of the semester we learned, shared, discussed the new concepts together, I’ve gained much more knowledge than I thought. From analyzing reading materials like Mary Flanagan’s “Critical Play” as well as Ian Bogost’s “Procedural Rhetoric,” to present our understanding and thoughts, the process of translate obscure definitions into our lucid explanations makes every student fully understand and learn something new. The keywords we encountered in the readings and presented are interactivity, procedurality, value goals, design goals, critical play, and play. I noticed that the concepts of some of the words are highly collapsed, like value goals and design goals (they even use the same chart on the presentation); and all the terms are interconnected.

One of the group presentations attracted me and made me think a lot. The definition of interactivity they gave us is that interactivity provides inputs into a system and waiting for a response and interactivity explains how we are connected to the world around us. That is quite interesting to know this definition because interactivity is not that complicated or elusive as proceduality, on the contrary, interactivity is a common word that people mention a lot nowadays. When we talk about interactivity, we used to think the interactivity used in video games or social media; but this group gave me more thoughts about it like even talk to others and open the door are interactions with the world. The forms of interactivity expression are active control which is a voluntary action that influences the controller’s experience like online target advertising, and two-way communication which is a communication from user to user like pop-up windows or registering for a newsletter. The presenters then talked about personal interaction occurred verbally and nonverbally like conversation and paralanguage. They pointed out the importance of nonverbally personal interaction like eye contact, facial expression, or body movement can provide information, regulate interaction, define the nature of the relationship and impression management. They also emphasized the flaws of interaction, that our judgment is not always accurate as we think during the interaction, we may misunderstand what others actually means.

In conclusion, we can not fully understand the concepts of the two reading materials without the analysis of each groups’ presentations. And not only we gain more comprehensions of each term, but also generate some new thoughts from the connection of them.