Luke Wilmot CIU111 Blog 5

This weeks lecture was titled: Inclusive Design and was about how to cater your work to different cultures, people and issues along with the method that you can use to help out. These would include Accessibility and catering to, essentially everything but mainly, people with physical disabilities, things like vision or hearing issues or the inability to use a standard controller.remote and how you can help them, like creating alternate colour pattens, text on screen or custom controllers for said people. But this goes far past physical capabilities and, arguably, a much greater issue in accessibility is catering to different races and cultures in terms of content and imagery to make sure they don’t offend or hurt someone unintentional.

I personally agree with this lecture in how you should try to cater to those how have disabilities and can’t get the full experience of your work in the normal ways and you should try to help those people out, whether its creating a specific colour-blind mode, options for subtitles, and alternative controls. I also believe that you should try to completely alienate different cultures and races with your content however on the same note I also believe you can please everyone and no matter how hard you try someone will dislike your work for some reason. Therefore a solution to this would be to try and diversify your games into different markets and cater to different types of people.

http://www.wired.com/2011/07/accessible-games/

The above link is a post about the current accessibility within games and how there’s a lack of in this industry and how its incredibly hard for certain people to pick-up, play and experience those game to the fullest because of them.

Gender issues are also a major issue in the creative industry these days as well, in my opinion as a large portion of all media is advertised and catered for males and nothing else. This can leave female view isolated there fore you’ve lost a massive percentage of potential people who could have gone to see or buy your content. This goes further into games as well as most main stream AAA then to cater to their male audience more then their female one, this involves female characters where skimpier outfits, male characters bulked bigger then the incredible hulk and just overall unappealing to most women trying to get into gaming.

The gender inequality in core gaming is worse than you think

The above post talks more in detail about the affects of gender inequality in games how big it has gotten but also gives solutions on how you can help stop this from happening like keeping your eye on the core matters like the audience and how not to isolate certain sections.

Overall I believe that you should always try cater to as many people as possible so, whether there physically disabled, different race, etc and that diversifying your games can also really help in catering to all markets and audiences.

References

dennisscimeca. (2013, 8 19). The gender inequality in core gaming is worse than you think. Retrieved from http://venturebeat.com/: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/19/gender-inequality/

Schreiker, J. (2011, 11 7). GAMERS WITH DISABILITIES BATTLE INDIFFERENT INDUSTRY. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/: http://www.wired.com/2011/07/accessible-games/

Luke Wilmot CIU111 Blog 6

This weeks lecture Titled: Social Media & Your Career was all about how to get your self noticed by the masses and the methods of doing so. This would involve Setting out your goals, figuring out the demographic your after, setting up different social media accounts, preparing yourself both mentally and physically by being a little more “professional” and learning how do deal with negativity and faults.

I personally agree with the lecture on a lot of its points, I feel social media is one of the biggest advantages that this generation of content creators / creative designers has over the last and acts as a way to help build, not only your career, but communities of people who are just like you and are striving for the same goals that you can all work together on which I feel is a great first step into this industry.

Six reasons why the creative industries should get the social network treatment

The post above is about six reason why the creative industry should use social network and in it explain, in a lot more detail, the same and more reason why I think social media acts as a great ways to get your self noticed like: it acts as your visual credentials so when you go to an interview or someone is looking for specific talent you can take them straight to your social media where they can find all your work and access your ability.

Widening your audience is also something I would be something I suggest and by that I mean use more then just face book or twitter to advertise yourself on. With the internet there are many amazing website that allow your express yourself in a number of different and creative ways along with you starting to build a community. These include: YouTube, where you can post videos of your works, blogs, questions, etc and have people leave comments and suggestions, Pinterest, where your work can be seen by a much large, broader audience. and for more specific works, streaming sites like twitch can allows those in the gaming scene to so of live to an audience and build a community around it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviatemin/2013/12/03/dont-waste-money-make-your-social-media-advertising-smarter-more-original-more-effective/

The link above goes to a post that goes into much more detail about choosing the right social media to advertise on based on the person, company, etc, and how you should look out for new and emerging ways of advertising and try to capitalise on them as soon as possible.

Acting more “professional” is the only things im a little confused on. I can understand that acting “professional” can have its advantages especially if someone wants to try and make a career with an already we’ll know name/company. But when it comes to people who work solo I would argue that that it could be beneficial to do the opposite and not act “professional”  and by that I mean act with the personality that you want and create and show the things that you want. How this would work is that your acting different and due the the nature of social media that different thing will get noticed quicker that all the same(y) “professional” things.

I hope you enjoyed this little blog of mine.

References

Temin, D. (2013, 3 12). Don’t Waste Money – Make Your Social Media Advertising Smarter, More Original, More Effective. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/: http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviatemin/2013/12/03/dont-waste-money-make-your-social-media-advertising-smarter-more-original-more-effective/

Tomes, M. (2013, 3 19). Six reasons why the creative industries should get the social network treatment. Retrieved from http://www.fourthsource.com/: http://www.fourthsource.com/social-media/six-reasons-creative-industries-social-network-treatment-13513