Gaming the System

MC101 classes on Thursday, Dec. 6 will have a non-traditional MediaNote. Your Humble Blogger will lead a discussion about games (i.e. Interactive Media) and learning. This will be an extension of the excellent academic panel that about 70 of us attended on Tuesday evening.

Here are the discussion questions...

•What are the features of a really good game?

•What makes a game addictive?

•Do games build skills? How?

•Do games build wisdom? How?

•People are motivated by money and, sometimes, extra credit. What do games use to motivate people?

(The Monday, Dec. 10 class will not have this discussion because we will need the entire class period to get through the Media Effects chapter Powerpoint.)

GCC's Power Outage and MC101

Faculty and students alike have been thrown off by the power outage that cancelled classes on Wednesday. While Your Humble Blogger cannot speak for all classes or all faculty, he can say that Mass Comm 101 classes are unlikely to be affected in any meaningful way by the class cancellations.

It probably means that the instructional video "The Ad and the Ego" will not be shown in Monday-Wednesday MC101 classes. Instead, those classes will cover Chapter 18 (Media Effects) on Monday, Dec. 10. The same will be true for Tuesday-Thursday classes IF (and this is a big IF) the power outage stretches into Thursday.

For now, YHB is continuing to go through MC101 term papers. You might do well to read Chapter 18 and prepare for finals.

Please note that campus email and the campus home page are unavailable during the power outage. Go to the Glendale College Facebook page for updates on the power outage and class cancellations. Updates on how it all affects MC101 will be posted through Club MediaNote and the MC101 Twitter account.

See you in class (soon, hopefully).

Date Night v. 2.0

The AMC theater chain is trying to give The Great American Date Night an upgrade optimized for multitaskers. AMC wants to give you dinner and a movie at the same time. The chain's Marina Del Rey theater has been refitted with wide aisles, leather recliners, swing out tables and black-clad wait staff. Of course, all this comes at a price.

Here is the Los Angeles Times story.

Questions...

•Why do people go to the movies? What do the movies offer that you can't get at home?

•Do couples want dinner and a movie at the same time? What is good about this? What is bad about it?

•Who is the target customer for this?

•What movies do you show in this theater? What don't you show?

•How widespread do you think this will become?