The aim of the project is to combine the themes; happiness, the future self and the internet and we are to create final outcomes in both digital and physical formats. What I want to explore: The openness of this project means I can explore a vast topic and can tailor it to my desires and interests. Research and Development: Blog - should include research, methodologies, experimentation, prototyping, synopsis and strategies. Things to look at: Stefan Sagmeister - The happy show: TheFunTheory.com: - piano stairs - 66% more people used the piano stairs rather than the escalator - changing little things the play belt - mixing the idea of safety and fun speed camera lottery, QUOTES: - If you want to be happy, be. ~Leo Tolsto - Happiness is never stopping to think if you are. ~Palmer Sondreal - The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet. ~James - Openheim - Some pursue happiness, others create it. ~Author Unknown Laughing - Prank shows have gone downhill. Why? What is the real message? It’s not about making people laugh anymore. More about getting ‘views’ ‘hits’ and ‘likes’ What makes me happy? - Simple pleasures - Cushions - Soft things - Adorable animals - Being warm What do I want to explore? - Connecting with the inner self (in a way that could be done universally) - Lack of technology - Being at peace with your own mind - Boxing yourself off - Zen - Personal experiences - not dwelling on stats and data - Removing yourself from stress - Not having to rely on others to ensure happiness
When you search for quotations regarding comfort, this is what you will predominantly find; A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.- Denis Waitley Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.- Brian Tracy Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.- Neale Donald Walsch I completely understand the concept of having to break out of your comfort zone and push yourself further in order to achieve new things and progress through life but due to this concept the comfort zone is often shunned and conveyed as a place of weakness. I implore you all to find that zone within you. Don't get me wrong it's massively important to work hard (and play hard if you want to) but it is undeniable that everyone would benefit from embracing what causes them to be the most relaxed version of themselves. All I know is that no matter what I am doing at 40, all I want is to be able to come home, sit down and let out a deep relaxed sigh and really mean it. Find what makes you sigh.
Grand Theft Auto is an sandbox role playing video game which is available on a range of games consoles and allows the user the option to interact with other players worldwide in online mode. Within the story mode the user has the option to play as a handful of characters completing missions throughout to progress through each character's life story. This video game gives the user the opportunity to take part in any activity no matter how illegal or morally questionable, without the elements of consciousness or responsibility. When the user is not committing armed robbery, aiding a drug trafficking operation or having sex with a prostitute he/she also has the choice to indulge in the more average everyday activity within the vast compounds of the map. Throughout the project I
have been focusing on comparing and contrasting happiness gained from experience within the real world and the online/virtual world and when discussing the topic with a friend we began talking about role playing online gaming and some of his experiences. I began to discover that while I expected us to be talking about releasing tension in pillaging the city and gunning people down I learnt that Alex took part in generally normal everyday activities online for example meeting up with friends on the game to play a game of virtual tennis. This encouraged me to talk to Alex in depth about his motivation to take part in realistic activities online rather than in real life.
What is it you like about GTA? It was the first game to offer real freedom. It was great to come home from school every night and just switch off. It allowed me to just relax and immerse myself in a world where I could do exactly what I wanted. Talk me through your game playing routine? I'd usually get on the xbox as soon as I got home from school and pretty much play solidly until my bedtime. The first two hours of game-play consisted solidly of murderous killing sprees but eventually that gets boring. I'm usually in a party (online interactive group of friends) and we all get bored at the same time and decide to do something together. This usually involved just shooting each other but it was bonding all the same *laughs.* Some-
times we'd see how long we could go without shooting each other just for fun. How old were you at the height of your GTA activity? I played from the age of around 15 or 16. It took me a while to convince my mum to let me have the game in the first place because it is rated 18. So did you activity solely comprise of killing people/trying not to kill people, within the game? Not always! There's surprisingly a lot of things you can do on Grand Theft Auto that you probably wouldn't expect. For example occasionally I'd meet up with my friends and play tennis on the game for about 2 hours! On a few occasions we would even meet up online and get our characters changed into flip flops and
shorts and we'd go to the beach! You've got to elaborate on this! Well we would each let our individual characters sleep overnight (around 1 minute in real time) and then get changed into appropriate beach-going attire before hopping onto our mountain bikes and travelling to the beach together. Often the journey itself was the fun part as we would all struggle to fight against the urge to shoot each other. Did you ever get irritated at each other over how you interacted within the game? All the time! We'd all specifically say "right, let's all hold fire until we get to our destination." and somebody would immediately get shout. It wasn't a rare occurrence for someone
to just leave the party after getting too fed up of being shot by one of us. These little tiffs would sometimes even progress into the next day at school but we soon got over it and any grudges would only be held for an hour at most. Do you ever still take part in these kinds of activities nowadays? Sometimes. If anything just to reminisce a little bit. It's not the same now though because we've all moved on and I got a different console and now I'm more into solo gaming. It was mainly something we used to do to kill time by the end. There wasn't much else to do after school and especially in high school my little group struggled with not being too 'popular.' Every so often now we meet up and play a game of tennis on GTA just for a laugh.
Telling her story in a post on Rockstar’s website, gaming member ‘nikkievercetti’ said of her pal ‘@KingDuncan’: ‘Over the last year he has become my very best friend in the world. It’s no secret that we’re often partners in crime in the game but we also became super close in real life.’
‘GTA is just a video game but this crew is a family in its own way and I just wanted to make a mushy post to let you all know how grateful I am that I found it, all of you, and my best friend.’
http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/17/the-touching-story-of-two-best-friendson-grand-theft-auto-who-met-for-real-in-their-favourite-game-location-5201309/
Released onto the market for the general public earlier this year the oculus rift is a whole new way to experience game-play. Allowing the user to interact with a 3D environment through a screen in the headset it allows the user to become truly immersed within the game. Throughout my research I came across a variety of videos whereby the user appeared to be genuinely afraid/excited etc. by their experience as the built in depth perception function makes the player feel as though they are really in the environment presented to them on screen. This smart innovation on the gaming scene has changed the way people see gaming as it is no long a 2 dimensional setting.
As I have already established the most important the concept that is most likely to bring me happiness is the thought of being comfortable and relaxed throughout life. I am not alone as it appears that people will go to great lengths into exploring different techniques which aid the achievement of relaxation and happiness. During the research stage of the project I used the website ‘stumble-upon’ to search through the hedonism category to order to gain further knowledge into other people’s ideas of happiness. While a few articles and web-pages did catch my eye I came across a list of 10 websites which promoted relaxation etc. and decided to test them out myself. This resulted in my questioning the need
for the internet in regards to the pursuit of relaxation. While some websites such as Silk and The Quite Place Project contain activities for the user to engage in to take their mind off other things many of the other websites were just on-screen simulations of real life environments. For example on Relax.li you can pick from 16 dynamic images which range from a burning log fire to a faraway tropical island. How depressing is it that we are looking at a fake landscape on a screen in order to relax us and bring up our mood. It is almost insulting to ourselves to sit there an expect a drastic change in our emotions after looking at a pixelated beach for a while. Other websites centred around the concept of rain and contained dynamic
images of raindrop against a window pane and teamed with soothing sounds. Although rain is not common in every country I couldn’t help that think that watching the rain through a computer screen would not be relaxing to me but rather lead me to contemplating what on earth I am doing with my life. How will I use this research to progress with my project? After this analysis and the interview I undertook with my house-mate ‘Mr. X’ it lead me to begin thinking about why we choose to take part in completely plausible scenarios through the medium of a screen rather than strive to experience them within the physical world.
Image References: Bridge of Skies, Skyfall, Salt, Mission Impossible, Spectre, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Agent Carter, ‘Vodka Martini Shaken Not Stirred’ poster, ‘James’ poster, Skyfall alternative poster, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Bourne Identity, Casino Royale, Kingsman, Spy.
At this point in the project I have explored the concept of online personas and have began to contemplate the connection between the characters, within games such as Grand Theft Auto, taking part and pleasurable activities and whether this results in real life happiness for the user. The concept seems strange and intriguing for me but I have decided that the only way I would understand what effect this had on the user would be to immerse myself into the experience first hand. I first thought about what people get out of online role-playing games and my initial thought was that it is essentially an escape into a virtual world whereby the user
can experience things they may have always wanted to experience. For this reason many people may create a character that represents their ideal desired appearance. I had an initial vision of what I wanted my online character to look like as by this point I had began thinking of displaying my findings in the project as though my online persona was a spy within the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto. In order for my avatar to look appropriate for the part I chose to stick with dark colours and a subtle outfit. I also based her look upon a possible leading role within an action/spy etc. movie after looking at the images presented on the previous pages.
After doing some research and discovering that many people choose to take part in activities online that they could be doing in the physical world I decided to take it upon myself to discover why they do this and what positive feelings maybe be experienced from doing so. I used the format of Grand Theft Auto to explore this by going into the game within online mode and listening to some of the people who had chosen to broadcast themselves throughout gameplay.
I wanted to interact with as many people as possible in an attempt to find out whether sandbox RPGs (role-playing games) were giving people more freedom and whether taking part in activities which would appear to make there character happy, would result in the user’s happiness. As I had already spoken to my house-mate about the activities he takes part in on Grand Theft Auto I decided to essentially use him as my middle man and
encourage him to allow me to be involved in his crew (online group of friends who undertake missions together). I plan to make notes on the people I meet online and compare them to how they have presented their character within the game. At this stage I am unsure as to how I will present my findings.
There is nothing we all love more than a lovely break from reality in the form of a relaxing holiday in the sun and since I have neither the time nor money to travel overseas I decided to take a leaf out of ‘Mr X’s’ book and take my Grand Theft Auto character on all of the adventures I could (be don’t currently have the means to) take part in in the real world. I also wanted to see whether this would give me any real pleasure in comparison to the effects of a real holiday.
I decided in order to get the full Grand Theft Auto holiday experience I would have to take part in as many holiday style activities as possible. I started with replicating my house-mate’s routine of going to the beach in my flip flops which turned into much more when I saw what there was to offer in the surrounding areas. From there I; used a jet ski, went on a roller-coaster, took part in bmxing and even sky diving. Embarrassingly I actually found the whole experience rather enjoyable and used the screenshot feature on the playstation 4 and the snapmatic feature within the game in order to record my
virtual journey. I really wanted to take the research to the next level and take part in all of the cliché activities that people do on holiday. I really wanted to have a laugh with the project too hence the selfie above whereby my character is clearly inebriated and has stumbled into a tattoo parlour after a heavy session. I also couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to take a stereotypically girly mirror selfie. My character would also obviously be a graphic designer so I chose to take some selfies admiring the advertisements at the airport on the final day of the ‘holiday.’
After the experience I found myself looking through the pictures and began pathetically reminiscing over the journey I’d shared with my virtual self and can now see why people find genuine enjoyment in doing these things in a virtual world. My next step is to use my character to explore the virtual world further and see what I can discover about the real people who use the game in online mode. I am thinking about displaying my findings in different ways and want to create a spy-style persona for my character.
I decided to layout my holiday photos in a way which someone would after such an awesome trip! I printed my images out and wrote a little about each of my days in Los Santos.
virtual holiday
brochure After having such an enjoyable experience on my virtual holiday I decided that for my final piece I would design the composition and layout for a magazine brochure which would promote similar holidays to the one I took part in. The magazine would be targeted towards people who already owned GTA and want to experience the holiday of their dreams on a platform that is already accessible to them, for free! Of course the brochure would have a satirical tone behind it, as I am aware that many Grand Theft Auto users would not be interested in undergoing activities within the game which do not involved killing, stealing cars etc. I do however feel that
this would be an interesting way to tie together themes from the online and real world. Creating something you can physically touch which explores in detail the virtual world combines the two concepts and brings the theme of an online holiday into a real world scenario. I plan to use brochures marketed at young people such as club 18-30 etc. for inspiration as they give off fun informal vibes to connect with the younger generation. People can have just as much of an experience online as they can in the real world and hopefully my brochure will portray this well with a fun and attractive design.
My first task was to get to as many holiday promotion companies as I could to pick up loads of free magazines into order to gather inspiration. As one of the main themes of my project is make-believe I had great fun collecting brochures and convincing the people at places such as Thomas Cook that I was somehow an incredibly rich student who wanted to delve into all my holidaying options. While looking through the range of brochures I found that there are certain colours used in the mags which target younger audiences. Ranging from bright
neon shades to more subtle yet equally playful combinations they all played a key roll in the design of these brochures. For this reason I came up with some of my own colour combinations in an effort to aid me through the design process when it came to the finishing touches of my mini magazine. I found that many of the colours which worked well were warm colours which made sense when thinking about portraying holiday themes. When promoting clubs etc. shades of pink and purple give off a sexy yet fun feel.
All holiday firms have a punchy recognisable logo which accommodates for their target market effectively. I found that many of the companies which catered for young people e.g.. Club 18-30 used bright colours and kitsch designs to maintain a playful vibe. After some contemplation I came up with the name ‘Virtual Vacation’ prior to the design process and wanted to include the theme of the alliterative company name while also using funky shapes which would attract my target audience.
I soon found that while minimalism works well in many cases of logo design, it was okay in this case to explore a more complex yet playful design for the logo. In the end I came to the conclusion that the peace ‘v’ symbol was a predominant sign in clubbing and festival culture and while originally meaning peace it also holds connotations of leisure and enjoying life. I thought this would be appropriate to utilise within my work as it could also be used to symbolise the ‘V’s within my company name.
less effort
I thought it would be an effective idea to use some of the characters within the game as examples of holiday reps. Each representative would be tailored towards different interests within a typical holiday setting for example one may be an expert on extreme sports and one on clubbing and leisure etc. As they would in the real world my reps must come equipped with a uniform donned with the company logo. While the game already came with the option of a pink polo shirt for the girls I had to manually colour the male rep’s shirt to ensure they all looked the same. I also thought it would be a cheesy yet nice touch to include the signatures of each rep to accompany their mini biographies as it adds more personality to the characters while also working towards combining themes of the virtual and real world.
I found that in many clubbing oriented brochures the reps said a little about themselves and this was something I considered including within the pages on each rep.
bringing a rep to life The main concept behind creating a virtual holiday brochure for an online experience is forming a union between the virtual and the real world, I wanted to take this theme a step further. Because I enjoyed this project so much I really wanted to get more personally involved and see what it felt like to be a rep myself by getting the
Virtual Vacation logo on the same polo shirts as my online reps are wearing. This also would become something which I could keep as a momento to remember how much fun I had throughout the project. I even tried to pose in similar ways to how my online reps did in their biography photographs.
Overall I really enjoyed getting stuck into this project and was really happy with the final composition and layout of my brochure. I found that looking at other brochures accessible to young travellers was key as there were certain crucial elements which I may not have included without this step. For example in many cases on the inside pages of the magazines I viewed were information posters regarding events which were on in the area and some looked like they had been commissioned from clubs etc. For this reason I created my own
poster for the strip club in Los Santos using colours which I thought would be aesthetically pleasing for my target market. I also did the same with the penultimate page of the brochure using the ‘More experience. Less effort’ poster, included earlier in this document. Other elements I chose to include were info-graphics indicating how exciting, cost effective etc. each activity would be. I did this using the form of a simple bar chart which I stated was based on the feedback of our previous visitors to Los Santos.