THE SPUTNIK
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 30, 2016
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FEATURES
DELLESIA NOAH| FEATURES@THESPUTNIK.CA | @SPUTNIK_NEWS
Shit parents say... Kathleen Binder Photography Editor
“If you keep making that face, it will stay like that. Chocolate milk comes from brown cows. When you become a parent, you grow eyes on the back of your head.” Do any of these sound familiar? Parents say the darndest things. Growing up, many people are told these phrases, or phrases that are similar to these by their parents. Growing up woth my mother, like her mother before her, created a figurative creature named the “Bipper.” Now that I am significantly older, I realize that the Bipper was created to ensure that my sister and I were safely indoors when night rolled around. When the sun began to set, my mum would pop her head outside the screen door and call us in. We’d give her the usual “five more minutes” call back. After calling for us a couple more times, she would holler out “if you don’t come in soon, the Bipper will come and get you!” With that, my sister and I would enter a heated race for the door (often pushing the other to get a head start). A study, published in the International Journal of Psychology, examined the use of “instrumental lying.” This tactic was very common amongst the majority of parents in North America. When Katie Cain was young, she was told that the moon was made of green cheese. “I still remember the teacher asking us what we thought the moon was made of. I put up my hand and proudly answered ‘Green cheese,’ and the whole class laughed at me. This is the only thing from my childhood
that my parents lied about that has caused me grief.” Natasha Flegel, a Laurier Brantford student, remembers when she was a young child she would cry because of her freckles. “I didn’t know why I was the only one in my class [who had freckles]. My mom told me I was born in a strawberry patch, and my freckles were the strawberry seeds,” Flegel said. “Little did she know, I would try to scrub them off of my face and actually gave myself cloth burn.” Jennifer Mansell, a social worker and family therapist, told Today’s Parent that there are no concrete rules about what is acceptable and unacceptable to lie to your children about. She said that it is more important for parents to have a concrete intent behind their fibs. “Our basement was dark and
dingy—not a place for younger kids,” said Fred Fitz, a Brantford parent. “In order to keep my three [children] from going down there, I told them there were monkeys that would get them. It worked until they were 11 or 12.” Fitz mentioned that he utilized his oldest son in his little white lie. “Having an older brother pushing the monkey thing on them caused the two younger to rethink a venture downstairs even when they were older.” I suppose we’ll never really understand why parents utilize white lies, and fib to their children until we are in their shoes weeks, months or even years from now. What I am certain of is that that the legend of the “Bipper” will live on in my family.
Parents tell their children the darnedest things. Kathleen Binder/The Sputnik
Oh joy, it’s the holidays again Anya Enland Staff Writer Christmas is celebrated by millions of people around the world. Disliking Christmas is not the popular opinion, but there are some who dislike it nonetheless. Everyone has a reason, whether it be because of an upsetting memory or because Christmas has become a materialistic holiday. Here is a little perspective on why some people are not fans of Christmas or the holiday season. Their Story: “I dislike the annoying music and jingles and the fact that it’s the same music everywhere. It’s just a spending gimmick to me that the media has totally taken advantage of. [It] makes people stress and fight just for materialistic things. People stress out so much for something that’s for only a day. Seeing people literally fight at malls and get hurt and families fighting for gifts is just ridiculous to me, and it makes me angry that everyone is just blinded and brainwashed by this holiday.”-Stephanie Solorzano “I hate Christmas and the holiday season because it brings up a lot of sad memories from the past. My dad left when I was young, so coming from a broken home, I lost the magic of Christmas. My family does nothing but fight when we’re together, so it makes it difficult to enjoy. I find Christmas and the holiday season in general has become extremely materialized. People are more focused on gifts and extravagant decorations rather than spending time with loved ones. I think about the people who have nothing on Christmas,
the ones living in poverty and on the streets. The ones who don’t get stuff themselves with a grotesque amount of food because all they can afford is a can of beans to share.”-Jane Doe* “I realized Christmas was too much of a bother. I saw how prices went up and the craziness of Black Friday. I figured the corporate greed and the desire for material items overshadowed spending time with loved ones … I have to work harder than usual to appear cheery. It takes a toll on one’s mental wellness. It is difficult to pretend to enjoy the holidays for the benefit of others.” -Meghan Cameron When was the exact moment you started disliking Christmas/holiday season? “I think maybe up until I was about eight or nine years old I started disliking it. My mom is a single mom raising my brother and I. We ended up moving to Utah when I was eight years old. We were homeless a few times in the span of two years. It was a very hard time for me as a child leaving everything behind and losing everything and being separated from all my friends. I was definitely depressed. We lived near the mountains in Utah so it was always cold and snowy. During Christmas we received a couple gifts through the church that helped us but I wasn’t allowed to keep my gifts since we had to move again and we couldn’t carry much with us. So I feel like I just learned not to get attached to the gifts I received because I would have to give them up. I think I just started to not care about Christmas at that point.” -Stephanie Solorzano * Asked to remain anonymous
Why game design takes four years Jelena Vulić Staff Writer It’s hard enough to avoid assumptions around an arts program in university. Many people don’t see the point in pursuing the arts as a lifelong career, especially when there’s the notion that workers in the field simply don’t make a lot of money, or at least not enough to live comfortably - not unless the students get extremely lucky anyways. Throw Laurier Brantford’s Game Design and Development program into the picture, and even more wildly incorrect assumptions pop up. When asked about the most frustrating assumptions regarding the program, professor Scott Nicholson was quick to say that people assume that the program produces programmers for recreational video games. “It’s not just programming,” he stated. “You learn all of the other stuff that’s more important. It’s not recreational games;
the games have some sort of educational value. It’s not just video games, but it’s all sorts of games.” Nicholson has also reiterated on several occasions about how the game lounge located in the Grand River Hall building is not meant to be a recreational space for game design students only. The space’s purpose is to immerse game design students in various games so that they can pick up on certain mechanics of both video games and board games that could be used in their own games. This is to add more tools to their “game design tool kit.” The game lounge also has the purpose of allowing students to test out each other’s games, as. Playtesting is an integral part of developing a game and can be compared to the scientific process. Students, with their newlydeveloped games, have certain hypotheses about how players will understand or interact with their games. It’s hard not to ap-
proach the assumed playtesting results with a bias, as the students understand the mechanics of their own games better than anyone else. The purpose of playtesting is to see where things went right and wrong in a game. A game designer’s theories and work only get better with practice. That’s part of the point of having a game design program, but why have it as a four-year university program? “The goal is to allow people to work with an organization,” Nicholson explained. “To both make a game and to see if that game has a greater impact. That activity alone is a full year. That means that we have three years to get students ready to do that stuff. If we start with the theory and analog approach, that’s one of the years. That leaves us with two years left. Those two years in the middle are there to understand the programming side of games.” “Also, we come back into the
theoretical side. If you look at it like a map, you start in theory, move into analog, then you move into making digital stuff. We then come back around to theory with things like project management and ethics and think ‘Now that we’ve got those skills, we want to understand how to use those in a larger context.’ Then, you’re ready to go out and work with an organisation. If we didn’t have that partnership with an organisation, then we wouldn’t need that fourth year, but that fourth year is critical to make something that’s yours, so that it would be easier for you to get a job.” What students are expected to learn can be narrowed down by Jesse Schell’s Map of the Game Design Process, which was published in his book The Art of Game Design. It touches up on five key parts of game design: the designer themselves, the process of developing the game, the game itself, the players, and the player’s’ experience. As anyone
can see, there’s a lot that needs to be considered within these five parts, including documentation, the game’s theme, the players’ mindset and so much more. Game design is not just a bunch of lazy kids sitting around and playing games all day. They are learning as they’re experiencing the games; they’re picking up on mechanics, narrative, player interaction, and so much more. The games they make have a purpose, such as teaching people about the responsibilities of owning a pet or urging people to do something about gender violence. The program itself is no walk in the park either. Like any program, it may include late nights working away on a paper or taking off recreational time to do more research. However, it’s the students’ passion about what they’re doing and their willingness to put in those hours of work when learning about their future professional field that makes it all worthwhile.