Star Wars

Reading:

In the United States you would be hard pressed to find someone who has not seen at least one Star Wars episode and most people have probably seen most or all of them. Since the original episode aired though Star Wars has evolved into a franchise that crosses several media platforms and for people of my generation they may experience the Star Wars product more through games then the movies themselves. I have never been much of a gamer myself but I had friends who owned playstations and had some Star Wars games. I’ve even played some Star Wars games for PC.

I thought that it was interesting to hear that Star Wars Galaxies relied so heavily on user generated content. This definitely seams like something that would excite fans because you now are allowing the fans to feel like they are contributing instead of just being a passive player. I can also understand how this approach would not make traditional game companies happy because they do not have a stronghold on the content. So I was not entirely surprised that the Star Wars franchise eventually decided to make the game more mainstream and put the content creation back into the hands of the studios.

Another aspect of the reading that I found interesting was the issue of fan generated films. I agree that the cost of producing a film has come down considerable and that the internet makes distribution a much easier process. I thought that the decision that parody is OK but creating new plots was not was an interesting perspective. I was also intrigued that most parody is done by guys and that girls generate music videos.

Group Meeting:

During our group meeting we discussed key features that our app would provide. In choosing which features we want to develop we keep in mind not only what is cool but also what is feasible in the amount of time that we have. We choose to eliminate some complex features, such as the GPS tracking, since we were not confident we could implement said feature. The features that will be included will be a calculator for water and trail mix, the ability to post trail photos to facebook, the ability to rate trails and report cautions, and finally to get directions to trailheads by inputing the hike location via Google maps.