Month: May 2015

Expanding on our first idea – by using hashtags within a gif to set a trend. Hashtags have the potential to put your content in front of a wider audience – including people who don’t follow you on social media.  Whether they see the hashtag in a post and click on it, or search the keywords and stumble across the hashtag, they are then presented with all of the posts containing that hashtag. Which met with the concept 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 Steve and I found multiple ways of establishing a community through highlights. Like 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 trying to set a trend to the community is difficult to show and control as it’ll be all over the ‘twittersphere’– however the hashtags make it easier to group certain aspects of highlights that we may want to share and spread.

I’ve decided to expand on applying the caption option on twitter after getting feedback on our progress on Friday. Using captions to try to work with the .gif files is restricting` because you’re only allowed 140 characters in a tweet which affects the creative process. However, In my opinion this makes me think out of the box to find interesting way to express yourself, especially when we’re trying to establish a gaming community through twitter.

Previously, Steve and I used short simple captions like: ‘oh no’, ‘fuck’ and etc., this was directed towards a specific audience, an audience of gamers who would understand what had happened in the game.  We assumed the captions would only be read by gamers who took an interest in these ideas, but after discussion, we found that if we were to add a more descriptive caption it would be able to be viewed and understood by a wider audience – hence we’ve expanded on this approach of caption in our latest couple tweets – adding as much description as possible so the images and gifs would be easier to understand.

So the feedback we got for Project 3 from the panel was to forward with our gaming highlight on twitter but try to be more specific and narrow down what we want to explore exactly. Steve 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.

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 such as .gifs, image, video caption and place them on Twitter.To specify, the title of our work (subject to change) is essentially ‘a gaming highlights vlog/blog’ – we plan on exploring how we can utilise how Twitter  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 came up with one idea we can work with that I explored through Twitter by creating 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 concise work and a non-narrative structure.And Steve came up with the second idea which is to focus 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 we were doing in the session – something he could expand on if he focused on much more than just the recording session.