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

Luke Wilmot CIU111 Blog 4

CIU118 Blog 4

Week 4

Luke Wilmot

This weeks lecture was titled Secret Interview Techniques and was all about the ways you can, get noticed, self-market and leave a good impression on the people you want  to hire you. This involves actively searching for a job opportunity and being prepared to go though many different stages to get the job.

These stages would include:

– Phone Call, this would more then often be your initial conversation between you and your employer  and acts as a way for you to present yourself naturally and and give some initial info about yourself, your skills and your history to leave the employer with a good first impression.

In terms of myself I have called up employers to try and get part time jobs during high school. One of them was at a golf club and I ended up having to rush done to the club as he wanted to have an interview in half an hour so there was no time to prepare.

– The Interview, is the next major step to getting your job as it involves you having, most often, a face to face meeting between you and the employer and acts as a way for you to demonstrate your skills with knowledge, projects you have done and examples. This also allows you to show off what type of person you are and you behaviours to certain topics and ways of doing things.

In terms of myself I got to and had that interview from the above statement and it involved him asking my current and past work status and then filling out a sheet with some simple job basic maths questions. after that I had to go out to the field and practising basic techniques when on the field.

– Sneaky Questions, these are question that are often used to try and figure out what type of person you are and why. They are often very bizarre questions but revel quite a lot about you and your personality.

In terms of myself I don’t have experience with these so far.

http://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/improve-your-chances-creative-industries

The above link is a post on how to give yourself a better chance to get into your creative fields. this involves putting yourself out there and seeing what happens, try to get more training in your field any way you can, learning how to seal the deal with the company you are trying to work and etc.

I personally believe that interview techniques is a very usful skill to have as the more comfortable you are with speaking your mind and what you have done the better reaction you’ll get from people.

The overall message this lecture is trying to say to me is that you need to be keen and determined to go out of your way and be prepared to do what ever it takes to get the job you want for your career.

References

Davenport, D. (2011, 7 25). How to improve your chances of getting a job in the creative industries. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/: http://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/improve-your-chances-creative-industries

Luke Wilmot CIU111 Week 3 Blog

Today’s Lecture was Titled Your Income and Your Art and was all about how and where you’ll get all your income throughout your career in order to go fourth and achieve your creative goals.

It first when into all the common ways people make an income:

Employee – This is the most common way of making an income for all professions whether you are a graphics designer or work in security. Being an employee allows you to have many benefits like a stable income, pay leaves and holidays along with other bonuses. Being a employee usually also means working with other people and in teams and there for you need to work at certain schedules, ask questions in meetings and work together to make sure everyone is up to date and no one is left behind.

Consumer Sales – This involves being independent and relying on the sales of your creative projects to generate you your income whether its simple a simple transaction or a subscription based fee. Advantages of this is that you have full creative control of the project and how too and much you will advertise and sell your project. However you need the project to sell in order to generate an income and if your inexperienced in ether your creative field or how to market and push your project out then you could have a number of issues when it comes to making your project sell, like it looking unappealing, over priced or just not having a very good project to begin with.

Running your own Studio – involves securing a building to work in, a set of staff and all the creative licenses you need to being work and production. This has greater risk involved then being independent as multiple people will be working on a project for most likely no income and hoping the project will pay off. However this could pay off greatly if done successfully.

Crowd funding – sites like kickstarter and indigogo and a couple of crowd funding sites that allow people to pledge money to a project to be built / made. crowd funding is a more recent emerging trend and has become a great way for companies to get there projects funded as long as they capture the attentions of their audience.

Commissions – Getting paid by a client how has tasked you with making a project that they want. this would often involve no or very little creative input as the client would often already know what they want and you will have to follow.

advertisement – this is also a very common way of making an income and allowing advertisements to run on a website or on your project could help make up an income based on how many people buy your project.

this was everything I found interesting in this Lecture.

Luke Wilmot CIU111 Blog Week 2

Today’s Lecture, Titled “How Are We All The Same”, was about the different experiences that people of all media, whether its t.v., film or games, get to share and how these experiences can help you build and understand new skills and traits that can allow you to become great member in the media industry and new media. These traits can range from from multiple skill sets, time management, creativity, multitasking and much more.

It starts of talking about Entrepreneur-ism and how it evolves you always seeking out new opportunist to creates something new and innovative and have the urge to bring it to the world. In terms of myself, my interests, attitude and habits are all games related and im starting to think about games in more of a designer and programmer state of mind, not just game ideas and concepts but new ways to experience them and even how to make them.

The idea of short term work and taking on multiple projects or a “pay the bills” job was also interesting. Taking on multiple jobs or projects at at time would be difficult at first to handle as you would be constantly swapping between different groups of people with different mind sets, skills, abilities and ways of working. However the benefit of this would be you build up new traits and multitasking skills along with the abilities to switch mind sets when needed to suite the current task. However the issues in doing this would be based on the number and scale of the jobs/projects as multiple large jobs could impact your life outside of work and the risk of exhaustion would be quite high.

Working long hours was important as it usually involves working as a freelancer or your own micro-company and in doing so you need good time management skills and nice balanced between work and life. This is important to me as one of my future goals is to make and build my own game studio so early development of these skills would be benefit me greatly.

Keeping up, Informality and Love the Work were the biggest parts of this lecture for me. Keeping up in terms of the game industry is immensely important as the creation of new technologies and software would greatly benefit you and your company in terms of the game you can make and how people can experience them.

Informality in the work place is something I’ve seen and read about multiple times when looking into different game companies and studios and the idea of “work as play” constantly appears. Creating fun and relaxed work places for not only your self but other employees and is a great way to improve moral and productivity within the work place.

Finally, Love the Work, able to enjoy and be passionate about your line of work allows you to stand out among the rest in the industry and be able to achieve greater things in your career.

This is what I got from the Week 2 Lecture.