My personal project journey started in the summer of 2020. We had already been asked to outline and choose our topic and goal towards beginning of the year, but due to several barriers and obstacles such as e-learning and my final year 10 examinations, I was unable to start working on it until June. The process was tough but it was fruitful as I gained so many new skills and faced many exciting challenges on the way. There were many tough and stressful moments but I am proud of how my final product turned out.
Process Journal entries
These are recordings of my experiences on some of the activities are carried out on this project throughout the year:
Process journal entry 1 (12th April 2020): My brainstorming process first began with me trying to decide what topic to make my personal project on. I did not have much trouble deciding that as a major fascination of mine that I wanted to investigate further is Video Games. However, I did struggle with what exactly I wanted to explore within the broad topic of Video Games. Personal and Cultural Expression was an IB Global Context band I was particularly interested in because as someone who grew up in a country other than their own, I have been exposed to two cultures at the same time with both being distinctly unique from each other terms of language, people, clothing, food, traditions etc. I have always found myself to be a fusion of both cultures, trying to express myself as someone who has an appreciation for my own culture as well as the culture, I grew up being accustomed to. As a result, I was interested in bridging my lifelong love for video games and my lifelong. exposure to a multitude of cultures.
To understand what made these cultural references so impactful, I began to do research online, starting with searching up vague statements such as “culture references in Animal Crossing”. Once I found information, for instance, “Tom Nook is inspired by the Tanooki”, I began to try to interpret what aspects of the Tanooki have been taken to build the actual character not just in terms of its character design but also its personality and dialogue. When I looked deeper into certain topics, I realized that they branched down more and more, and some topics had more than one aspect to discover. For example, when looking at Kakariko village, I learnt that there were cultural references to the clothes, buildings, and infrastructures of the village. I even analyzed preexisting websites of the videogames to get a better idea on how to present my website.
Process journal entry 3 (May 5th, 2020): I started my research by opening a PowerPoint with the name Breath of the wild. I then began separating and allocating slides for several topics such as the introduction and Sheikah folk. Then once I added the slides accordingly, I gathered information from various websites. For the explanation, I simply relied on my knowledge of the game to explain the plot and referred to Wikipedia for data on the game. Then I used Mic.com (Kleinman) to find out about the Jomon influence on Breath of the Wild and put pictures into the ppt. The most important part of my project was to provide evidence, to show that these parts really are inspired from traditions by comparing in game pictures to the real-life counterpart. I decided to take screenshots from my own game to use as examples as all the pictures I saw on the internet were not as high quality or did not accurately show the object as I wanted to. I then put down information on the ‘Sokushinbutsu’ as I had previously seen on a video.
Process journal entry 6 (September 13th, 2020): Similarly to Breath of the Wild, I opened another PowerPoint titled Animal crossing new horizons. I then organized the slides in such a way that I placed a topic at the top to write about in the allocated slide. I went in a formatted order starting with the introduction then going onto the celebration, NPCs, artworks, music, clothing and finally finished with the furniture items. As you can see, I used my initial planning mind map to choose which topics to cover. I used Wikipedia to write information about the game’s sales and reception in the introduction. When covering the celebrations, it was easy to recognize what real life festival the game was trying to represent (for eg. Bunny day was Easter and Toy Day was Christmas). I knew enough about most of these festivals on my own to write about them however there were some I was unsure of. I had to find out about the cultural significance of the Easter Bunny to find out why Zipper T. Bunny was included. I also researched about why cherry blossoms are culturally important. Most of these I knew at least some of it, but I had no idea about one festival. This was Mardi Gras. I had never heard of it previously and was completely puzzled as to what real life festival had colorful feathers and such a fun, exciting atmosphere. I looked into it and was so fascinated and engrossed into it. I loved learning about it and wanted to experience more incidents such as this. I filled the rest of the celebrations section with my game knowledge and researching how the festivals and celebrated and the significance behind them.
Process journal entry 7 (September 18th, 2020): I created this survey to help me answer the question on how to design my website. I wanted it to appeal to my target audience and so I had to collect information about their preferences and tastes in order to design a visually appealing website that could cater to their needs and attract their attention. I decided to keep my survey as short as possible to not lose the audience’s interest. I decided on keeping as few as open ended questions as possible and provide multiple choice questions instead. I sent it to my peer group chat so I could receive the most accurate data as a majority of my target audience was there. I closed the receiving results page as I had collected enough data to use for my website. I received information about the target audience’s tastes and preferences and I used that to make a website that suited their needs the most. However, I realized that I closed the receiving results page too early, but it was too late. While I do believe that the answers provided are accurate, I am unsure whether they are representative of the whole population.
Process journal entry 10 (November 7th, 2020): I had earlier analyzed existing websites based on the games to get a better understanding of the visuals of mine. I had extracted these main stylistic effects and took notes:
Breath of the wild’s main font should be similar to a regal or formal style (Times New Roman, Baskerville Old Face, Century)
Color scheme should be black, golden, and blue
This section should emit a cool, chill vibe
New Horizon’s main theme should be something fun and bubby
Should include a lot of bright and interesting colors
The font could be something that emits a childish vibe (Rockwell Nova, The Hand extra black)
Colors should complement and contrast each other
Text should be readable
The color scheme could change depending on what topic is chosen
The website should have a good understandable directory
Even though I had prepared a lot more notes similar to these to help me, creating the website was quite daunting. I was unfamiliar with the software and was confused on how it worked. I looked up tutorials online and started experimenting with the buttons in front of me. I started off with adding a page for each subsection planned. When I saw how the directory looked in the overview, I realized that the topics under celebrations and festivals and NPCs would not fit so I opted to place them as sub-sub sections. Soon I was able to create a standard layout of the home and each page. I changed the background of each page to match the information on them. I then added the information from the PowerPoint onto the website and its respected page. Making changes along the way to the positioning, formatting, text, colors, and pictures, I attempted to complete as much as possible. Percentage completion: 56%
Action plan and Criteria
The action plan allowed me to create and organize my tasks in such a matter which I could follow easily. The criteria provided me with a basis to develop my website on. I tried to follow the guidelines on the criteria as best as possible to submit the highest quality outcome.