So for this post I wanted to write about a mobile game I have been addicted to for quite a while, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp.  Animal Crossing has always been good at keeping players playing by creating various new events through out the year and including new clothes and furniture.  I feel like the Mobile game, perhaps thanks to it being more accessible on phone as opposed to on a console, is far more addicting.  So, to get more items in the game the player must talk to villagers and give them various items they can acquire at different items.  Each villager has three requests and every 3 hours the 4 villagers at the 4 different islands are resetted.  Thus, the game has significant amount of replayability as there is always a new request to accomplish.  There are some mobile game trappings in this game. For one, the leaf tickets on the top middle of the screen can be awarded if the player achieves enough goals, but to get a substantial amount of those tickets one must buy them through the store.  The game has numerous limited time events such as the one being stated in the top left corner about a rose festival that has items that can only be acquired during that time period.  For completionists, having such limited time events causes players to continuosly be playing to make sure they get all the items.  If they are running out of time though for certain events they could just buy the items instead with leaf tickets, with the rose festival that is not the case though.  Another time aspect is that many items take a lot of time to build, such as the amenity in the second picture.  To speed up time one can also use leaf tickets.  And though for the rose festival a player can’t buy the awards, they can buy the means to the awards buy paying a character in leaf tickets to make sure they capture the items needed.  Overall though I like how often the game is updated and that the notice board constantly updates players on future events and known issues.  And though the game does have the pay-to-win aspect to it, it has enough resets throughout the day that so long as you are playing enough you can reasonably expect to be able to finish the event and get all the items.

Most of my tweaks were just for being humorous. Although a global space exploration program would be nice… as well as auditions to Deke’s next big performance!

For this project I wanted to focus on playing with text and deletion of ads on sites to see how the mood of a site could change, below is google, youtube, reddit and discord.  For Google, I had deleted everything other than the search bar and the text asking for voice.  This I believe throws users for a loop as anyone who searches is so used to seeing “Google” at the top that seeing nothing being promoted as a search engine is rather odd.  For Youtube I had deleted the top ad that tends to take up a lot of space but also changed colors of text like the subscribe button to blue to see how a more facebooky color could change the mood of youtube.  For Reddit I had deleted the side ads and top and and changed the upvotes on the top 3 posts to be incredibly large numbers.  I also deleted any images that didn’t have an actual picture attached (so like blog posts or questions on the top page).  For discord I had deleted all user names and channels images except for one username.  In discord’s case it’s interesting to be able to play with the idea of anonymity, while the space is technically anonymous it could be made even more so.

A couple months ago, I found this app called Seek; it is an application that is sponsored by companies, and it is essentially a treasure hunt. There are “treasure chests” in places all over the world, almost on every other street, and the application tries to get you to open chests– in these chests you can win coins or fragments of prizes (example: fragment 1 out of 4 for a $50 Amazon gift card). The chests with better prizes require keys to open the chests, and you can earn keys by using the coins you find to purchase them in the store located inside the application, or you can use real money to buy them. Essentially the more you play, the more coins and keys you’ll earn for a better chance at prizes; the chests occur in the same places and refresh every 6 hours or so, but the less frequently you have opened a specific chest, the better chance you have at earning a prize fragment instead of just coins. I find this concept very interesting because this application is sort of driving you to get out and “explore” and go to new places and you are rewarded for it— and as long as you consistently play, you’ll have enough coins to buy keys for chests and you don’t have to spend any real money. I have only used it for a couple months and I have only opened chests in the same exact places (my apartment, art and design building, and my walk home), but I have already earned a few gift cards.

My obsession lately has been with Soundcloud. I generally use Spotify and Soundcloud for listening to music. And the reason I don’t switch over to one platform like Spotify is because the benefits of the interface. Soundcloud’s interface is very effective and displaying all types of music that you’d like on your feed. For example as you see in the screenshots, for each new song you like or share, it’ll show similar sound to that particular song. Apple Music,, Spotify, and Google Play do not have algorithms that specific. Also Soundcloud allows you to make account and upload your own sounds, and you can make playlists as well.

One of my favorite things to do to pass time is online shopping, and what I mean by that is filling my cart up with all the things I want and then closing the window out.

While doing this on beautybakerie.com I reached the 50 dollar free shipping minimum and then this popped up on my screen.

This is only a still of the pop up.  The sprinkles were falling like confetti and the ice cream was animated as well.  This made me super excited and I almost forgot that I wasn’t actually purchasing anything and I actually felt bad about not going through with my purchase because this graphic was so fun and encouraging.

For this project I wanted to have a lot of fun with changing text and pictures.

1. Buzzfeed

2. NASA

3. Twitter

This one to me was hilarious just because the people I showed it to had to do a double take and ask the question “Wait is this real?”  It also showed how easily fake tweets can be made and spread on the internet.

4.

For my tweaking project, I decided to mainly tweak text, and see what all I could change. I went for a bit humor but also sarcasm and fear of what each website brings to it’s users.

Turns out you can directly edit the text of tweets, so that was something I immediately tried to do. This was originally about the Super Bowl, but Kylie dropped her baby info (finally I guess) and the internet exploded. Interesting that she did that on the day of the Super Bowl? This is about what a lot of tweets looked like, only everyone knew she was pregnant.

This was more about what I feel Facebook really wants you to do when it asks you for your status. What information will it collect from each status you input? What can it figure out about each user? Does each status let it become closer to cloning us?

This one is slightly more about humor but also how we could be watched by NSA agents, more likely if we are persons of interest. There have been jokes about how they are there to take care of us, in a way, and I chose this email request to show how they might try and push you to be more careful with your information.

Ahh Ebay. This one is pretty self explanatory, but I wanted to show that sometimes buying from random people like it’s a regular shop isn’t the greatest idea. It’s way more of a gamble than normal online shopping. If you buy something off Amazon, it may not be what you wanted, but at least you can really hold them accountable and possibly return it for a new item whereas with Ebay, probably not. Ebay doesn’t really care, in my opinion.

Wikipedia probably should have over 1,000+ different degrees in high school and college. It has saved many of our lives and I just wanted to reflect it’s gold status in our lives. “Don’t use Wikipedia as a source” they said. “I’m not going to” I say, as I source all the references at the bottom of the Wiki page. I changed the background on this one for fun, mainly thinking of Jeopardy and how we use it to solve the little trivia in our lives. I’ll take, “Baseball history” for 500 Alex.

I just wanted to show what we really wanted to see this Super Bowl; the winner of the Puppy Bowl.

Many news websites would not cooperate even with the internet turned off. I spent a long time plugging in content into the NYT’s structure only to have one wrong click erase all my snarky comments. The first alteration I made took a while…they all took me a while I’m getting better at reading the code. 

My alteration of The Guardian home page was a dumping of my most impulsive and angry thoughts which should never be shared out loud. Most of these bitchy comments are what might be found in the comment section of any platform containing the news, but I tried to provide some levity that points back to the unhinged and unproductive nature of the commenter.

The facebook alteration is a little more bitter. I imagined the program actually being designed to truthfully reveal it’s entire infrastructure again in an unproductively grouchy way.

My last two alterations were just efforts at silliness and elegance (and I was struggling to place images in the correct locations in my other attempts so I just wanted a big dog tick to take up space and remove the productive uses of the google search).

1. The front page of Teen Vogue, with the headlines and articles from Wired and a larger emphasis on STEM. I would love to see a world where learning about technology and science is encouraged for girls as much as they are encouraged to learn about makeup and fashion.
2. The front page of the Washington Post with the headlines and articles from the front pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair. I was very surprised to see that an article about Chris Hemsworth’s moisturizing regimen was the first thing on the front page of Vanity Fair, and I doubt that would ever appear on a leading newspaper.
3. Replaced the light-hearted “Trending” hashtags on Twitter with headlines and topics from the political section of the New York Times.
4. How I really feel about the statistics and sharing culture on LinkedIn.

** Posted to Tumblr, but received no interaction.