Design Plan

         Purpose: I want people to look at videogames being played competitively in similar regards to sports being played professionally.

         Strategies: in terms of rhetorical strategy, I plan to try to appeal ethos and logos and just avoid pathos altogether. In this argument, I am just trying to show the audience similarities between two different things and I have no clue how appealing to their emotion would help my argument at all so I’m just going to focus on what makes sense to me. I just want to use the photos as my main appeal to credibility by (hopefully) showing the audience that I understand sports and videogames well enough to compose pictures that will help me get my point across. The captions will serve as an appeal to logic and will serve as explaining the basis of what the picture is trying to portray and give the audience some perspective of what they are looking at.

         Medium: for the images, I tried to pick something that the two had in common and then showcase what the commonality looks like in regards to both sports and videogames. The idea is to show the audience something they are familiar with and then showing them something they probably don’t know much about and hopefully make a connection between the pictures

         Arrangement: The way I want to arrange my photo essay is bring up a point that is common between sports and videogames and then display how they relate to the common point as well as each other.

         Communication: I will try to produce the communication with a combination of the pictures as well as the captions that accompany.

Effectiveness: The way to test how effective this photo essay will be is to just present it to the class and listen to their feedback and make any adjustments necessary.  

Narrative: When I first set out to do this project, I thought it would be really easy to just get a couple pictures of people playing sports and people playing videogames and show how alike the two are. As I worked on the project, I realized that getting the message across to people would be more difficult than I originally thought. As I talked to people about my project, I had to explain to them what esports was (I thought it was an easy term to grasp considering people use the word email all the time) and people honestly thought it was weird to watch other people play videogames as a way to pass time. I realize now that I was only considering others who held the same opinion of me and agreed that esports is making a lot of progress, and even though it is, I learned it still has a long way to go. So I made this photo essay to try to compare apples and oranges and show people how similar videogames and sports can really be. 

Sports Vs Esports           Or click here to download

In the end: my design plan was  loosely defined before i started working on the photo essay and as i worked on it it changed into trying to show people how videogames and sports can be thought of as the same. I began this project with pretty low expectations of what I would be able to accomplish and I think that I exceeded those standards that I set for myself

my experience with the photo essay

The photo essay that we have been working on for the past week or two has just been really stressful. I don't like the idea of having to take pictures and trying to make a good argument with them. Most of my problems stem from a lack of creativity as well as ideas. The pictures that i have taken so far feel underwhelming to what I want to get across. Also, I forgot to rotate my phone and take the pictures in landscape view, so all of my photos are in portrait view and all look awkwardly tall and skinny.  The pictures that I have taken so far seem like very basic pictures and it will probably end up being a very basic photo essay with lack luster photos and short captions that just describe the boring photos. I think the reason I don't like this project is that taking photos is something new to me and I'm not very good at it, so trying to do this project and not meeting the standard that I normally try to hold myself to is frustrating. I also get anxious about doing it because I don't feel confident and it's hard trying to work on something that I don't enjoy. I do understand though that this project is meant to be an introduction into new types of publication and is supposed to help us get away from just writing papers all the time considering how the world is changing. However, I know how to write papers pretty well and so straying away from what I have worked on and practiced for so long is difficult.
       All in all, I am not enjoying this project and I cant wait to finish it and move on with my life.