Further adding onto this notion of using text/caption to accompany the gif, I took a look at trying to build more of a gaming community that allows audience contribution and even participation. Expanding on my first idea – by using hashtags within a gif to set a trend I believe it would be easier ad much more effective to create a community as it allows the audience to follow that trend through their own gaming experience as well as share it. This idea is also met with the notion of ‘suggestions’ – asking the audience of what they want to see, what they want to happen, giving them the freedom to manipulate what they see to an extent.

Through these trials I found that there are multiple ways of establishing a community through highlights. I reckon we should stick to taking in suggestions of what to do by the audience as to establish a highlights reel feed more suitable to showcase for our prototype – where as by setting a trend to the community may be more difficult to display as it’ll be scattered across twitter as a whole – however the usage of tags still applies in this idea as tags make it easier to group certain aspects of highlights that we may want to share and spread.

After getting feedback on our progress last Friday, I’ve decided to expand on this notion of utilizing the caption/text option on twitter to work with the .gif files. Again, as with .gifs, it’s limiting because you’re only allowed 140 characters in a tweet which may or may not hinder the creative process. In my opinion this makes for an interesting way to express yourself, especially when we’re trying to establish a gaming community through twitter. Earlier I used short simple to the point caption to go with my gif tweets, this was directed towards a specific audience, an audience of gamers who would understand what had happened.

I ran the captions under the assumptions that only gamers would take an interest in these ideas, but after discussion, I found that if i were to add a more descriptive caption it would be able to be viewed and understood by a wider audience – hence I’ve expanded on this notion of caption in these couple tweets – adding as much description as I could so the images and gifs would be easier to understand.

After doing this I realized just how many ways I can utilize text on twitter to help create a gaming highlights feed, so it’s really up to how you want to portray your highlights and how you want to build a community that affects how and what the text represents and says.

So after our presentation in front of the panel for Project 3, Apple and I decided to go forward with this idea of a ‘gaming highlight’ within a social network such as Twitter – to see if we can build upon this concept to create something different.

So during week 9’s Monday lecture, after getting more feedback on this concept, we narrowed our idea down for project 4 – the idea of essentially exploring gaming videos through several forms and formats and placed on a social Twitter.

To specify, the title of our work (subject to change) is essentially ‘a gaming highlights vlog/blog’ – what it means is what it sounds like, we plan on exploring how we can utilize how Twitter is structured to create a gaming community through usages of different types of highlights and forms in which they may be presented in – e.g. images, gifs, videos, etc.

I’ve got a two ideas we can work with that I explored through Twitter over here.

The first being an experimentation if I could create a ‘trend’ within the gaming community by using hash tags. This works very much like every other trend however, it’s specifically directed towards the gaming community – allowing for a more narrow and straight forward piece of work harboring a pretty non-narrative structure.

The second experimentation I focused on actually trying to create a ‘timeline’ of events that were apart of a much longer and larger recording session. This felt more like a ‘mini blog’ of what I was doing in the session – something I could expand on if I focused on much more than just the recording session.