Over the course of the semester, we have been working on multiple different projects using multiple different mediums all on the same topic. As the semester ends, one last project stands to be the culmination of all the hard work we put in over the semester. This final research paper has to be creative and make an argument as well as challenging myself to learn more about the topic.

            As I think about designing this I realize that this is a research paper that actually gives us freedom to do things other than just writing walls of text. However, for the medium that I want to use, I want to write a text document but insert it with some multimedia to make it easier to read. After doing some preliminary research, it is very clear that a popular way to get information across is through info graphics that could serve well in a research paper. I plan to begin the argument with a brief description of the history of esports, move on to talk about where esports is today and then move in to arguing that esports can be as big as other popular sports in the future. I plan to produce this with many statistics because stats are really hard to refute and make any argument stronger.

The argument I want to make is that esports can grow to be as popular as other sports such as baseball or basketball in the near future. Now others who play and enjoy videogames will most likely agree with this argument because they are a biased, but people whom don’t play videogames often will most likely disagree with my argument. I hope that they would, however, be open to the argument that I’m trying to make and not just blow it off as something stupid that will never be on the same level as Major League Baseball.

            As of right now, I know only a little about esports other than the fact that it is growing fast. The real question is if esports is just a flash in the pan or if it is the real deal and will be around for a while. So almost all of my research will be done online as I don’t think there is a lot of printed work about my topic. Conveniently for me, one of the best places to get articles about esports are the dota2 and League of Legends subreddit, which I have been looking at for the past few months. I have saved a lot of articles about esports and will sort through them to try to find the most relevant and informational articles. I will also make sure to check these subreddits daily to check for any updates. I hope that all of this research will give me the knowledge of what is needed for esports to be as successful as MLB because I really want it to and if I can learn what needs to be done, I can show others and help in anyway possible.

In conclusion, I want to write about esports and its future. We have put in so much work over the semester and I’m really excited to see all of it come together for this final project. As of right now, I know about esports in the present and have no idea where it will go in the future. I want my audience to actually consider my argument and not just blow it off as some stupid fad and I plan to do that by presenting a lot of stats and pictures to convince them. It will be a lot of work, but I can’t wait. 

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.

Rhetorical Analysis

In the world of video games, there are people playing the game and there quite frequently people watching them play. This used to be just taking turns playing a single player game, but as of recently games such as League of Legends have developed such a large audience , that the best of the best end up playing in front of hundreds of thousands of players each week.

League of Legends has become so popular RIOT is funding a professional league known as the League Championship Series (LCS) similar to Major league Baseball where professional players compete head to head each week in the regular season and then move on to playoffs for the championships.
The LCS is considered by many the future of Esports, or videogames played competitively,  as it provides a stable amount of content to be watched by fans as well as putting the competing players on a payroll so they can fully commit to competing each week.

Like the Major leagues, there are also minor leagues where teams breed talent for the major leagues. Coke Zero has very recently created their minor league equivalent known right now as the Coke Challenger series where teams compete to be promoted into the next season of the LCS.

What It's All About:
Harry Wigget, the old manager for Team Fnatic, recently wrote an article about the Coke Challenger Series and its importance to the amateur scene of League of Legends. The article, found here makes a solid effort at using rhetorical appeals, but is very lackluster when it comes to the visuals.

Regarding The Text:

Pathos:

When it comes to the text of the article, Wigget begins with a good amount of pathos to get the reader to feel compassion for those involved in Esports and try to empathize how difficult it can be when he writes, "pro players were either an LCS player, or were sitting at home and watching what they nearly had, the dream" (1). The way Wigget words the sentence at the end makes the reader feel a connection to those players because everybody has dreams and many people can relate to being close to something, but not being able to get it. I believe that this is very effective because the method used is from a very niche community that can be understood by just about everybody. On the contrary, with the idea that this is posted to a website dedicated to esports as well as being linked in the league of legends forum, just about everybody reading the article knows about League Of Legends so I don't believe it was necessary but it worked well regardless. 

Ethos:

Wigget's approach to gain credibility from his readers seems almost nonexistent. According to Gamepedia, Wigget was a part of Fnatic before League of Legends started and Fnatic were the Season 1 World Champs and his team also won both the spring and summer split of the LCS on top of getting all the way to the semifinals in the Season 3 world championships (1). All of this information could be used to influence the reader and Wigget could very easily give himself more than enough credibility to have his ideas be taken seriously. Wigget, though, decided against including any of this information as he probably didn't find it relative to his topic, but I believe adding any of the information would inherently strengthen his appeal to credibility because people respect success and Wigget has more than enough.

Logos: 

Wigget's use of logic in the article is very impressive. Wigget briefly talks about the history of the game and then takes an objective viewpoint on the amateur scene when he writes about the small weekly tournaments in season 1 and 2, how they went away in season 3, and why they could and should come back in season 4. (1). He is writing this article to get people to support the amateur scene and is using the past to show the community that what he is suggesting has seen success in the past and could very likely see success in the future too.

Visual:
Figure 1 of the article is one of the Wigget watching over players with the caption, "Harry in action watching over his developing talent"(1). I feel like this image was not placed in order to get an emotional response from the reader but to instead, separate the intro from the body of text and make it more appealing to readers knowing there will be visuals alongside the text. This picture does help establish the credibility of the author, considering the picture is of himself working with the professional gaming team Fnatic, it visually shows the reader that the author is actually involved with Esports.

Figure 1. First picture of the article

Figure 2 is one of the season 3 world championship, hosted at the Staples Center with the caption
"Where every LOL player wants to compete - the LCS World Finals "(1). If you consider the caption of this picture as part of the visual, then it slightly diminishes the credibility of the author because calling it the LCS world Finals is inaccurate. The Koreans play in a league called the OGN while the Chinese play in a league known as the LPL; to call it the LCS world finals is technically incorrect but doesn't really affect how the reader interprets the image.

What is important in this image though, is the feeling you get when looking at it; when I first saw it, I thought to myself wow, this is how far League of Legends has come. The picture does a good job to show the scale of how big Esports can become. It also makes sense because Wigget is talking about tournaments and how the amateur scene can grow immediately before the picture. Therefore, it is a good idea to include a picture of the biggest event League of Legends has ever had.

Figure 2. The second picture used in the article

The third and final picture of the article is the one seen here with the caption, "Roald Van Buren and FACEIT supporting the LOL amateur scene" (1). This picture with its caption feels awkward to me. The picture is of a man smiling with success and the caption describes it as him helping the amateur scene. The picture makes sense as to why it was added considering Wigget talked at length about how FACEIT is also helping to develop the amateur scene, but the picture is only of a man and could have been more related to esports than it is now.

Figure 3. The third and final picture of the article

How do the two work together?

The pictures and the text have a very odd relationship in this article. The main focus of the article is definitely the text. I think that the article gained very little by inserting the pictures in with the article. Yes, it is nice to look at pictures while reading articles on websites, but the figure 1 and 3 seem like Wigget just threw them into the middle of the text in order to break up the ideas. If the visuals were not in the article at all, I believe the message would be just as strong albeit a little harder to read all the way through.

Overall, I think Harry Wigget did a good job at using rhetoric to convey his message about the amateur scene of League of Legends. He employs pathos very early as well as logos but does skip on trying to establish credibility. The synergy between the visuals and the text was weak and could be related better, but overall the pictures are more or less just eye candy to look at while reading the article. 

Works Cited

Gamepedia. Fnatic. Curse, Inc. 13 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
Hünitzsch Dominik. Happy Birthday hxd. Fnatic. 5 Feb. 2012. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
Wigget, Harry. Coke Zero League- a Saving Grace for Amateur Players. EsportsHeaven. 7 Feb.                 2014. Web. 16 Feb. 2014.

With a Great Blog, Comes Great Responsibility

When making a blog, there are certain standards that the poster should be held accountable for. I think the first and most important responsibility is being grammatically correct (I hope this blog doesn't break that rule). I hate reading posts where something is spelled wrong because it takes away from the post and I automatically think less of the writer. I also think that if you're serious about blogging, that you should post blogs on a semi-regular basis so followers have something to read.
          In regards to communication in general, their a lot of rules to follow that don't even have to be said because everybody already knows the basics of communication when it comes to informal communication. Formal communication though, has more rules and people take classes to better their formal communication. So far in this class, it is very apparent that when communicating, you have to consider your audience in regards to what you want to say. I think that good speakers do this subconsciously but the great speakers make a conscience effort to really appeal to their audience.

My First Blog

Well I don't really know what to write about so i'll just write about my experience in college so far. This semester I decided to be a resident instead of commuting and it has its ups and downs. For starters, I can eat dinner whenever I want and I am on my own schedule. I also can stay up late without having my parents nagging me to go to bed. However, the bed here is a big downgrade from the bed back home. Also, because I have my own gallon of milk, I can drink straight from the container which is pretty convenient. I found that trying to do laundry on a Saturday afternoon is pretty hard considering there is never a machine open. The internet here at first was pretty abysmal when trying to do anything more than checking your email, but since the addition of the new network "LewisWifi" I can actually play online without a problem. Having a roommate is pretty cool except for when I have to get ready in the morning with out waking him up.

This picture is just to practice formatting the blog.