One day i will own this car… one day
Minimal Super Mario Bros.
Created by Casey Jennings
A look Back at Looking back (at video games)
Might keep this blog going but as the school semester has ended this will serve as a “final Meta post” (not that i really understand what meta means but hey). so yea Final Reflective post on my blog.
Originally beginning of the blog started out with ease, set up a blog with tumblr and think of a theme (old school video games). then finding a theme that would work with the type of content i would be putting on my site, i went looking through the pre-made blog templates and found the vertigo theme by matthewb, its a simple design with a black background and nice outlines for the content boxes. i chose it because i didn’t want a picture background, i saw a couple other game blogs with the same picture four times on the back and it did not look good at all i wanted all the focus to be on the posts.
As each week task came up i surrounded them with posts based on old games, i may have not put all of the class blog posts in order but they are all there. it wasn’t to difficult to find things to blog about that could also have a similarity to the things in the lecture because video games being a digital art they also tie in with most of the ideas behind the lectures, consider the data visualisation and realise that video games take real life data and turn it into a digital experience like the game Gran Turismo 5.
When it came round to setting up the Google analytic account (lucky one of my other classes asked me to do it as well) i found that my site had a small gathering to it, and that it seemed to rise as it went along. At the beginning my main traffic was from my friends on face book and me telling them to check out my blog, but as the weeks went on, i started following other people and they started following me (mostly i went through all the people in the course and looked at the ones i wanted to follow). not excluding the people already on tumblr i found many people with similar interests though as i went on i realised that they were only interested in one particular part of my blog (posts to do with the legend of Zelda series) and that the main source of views was posts with Zelda themes. My most viewed post being a video about the death of a character in the game.
with the traffic to my site generally it has been low and consistent. the only main outlier was at the beginning with a high amount of views on one day, which can be attributed to me posting a link to my blog on my face book page. the locations of views generally come from Australia , then the united states and a lot of single views from Canada, japan and three European countries. the reason for that is because the main group of people i followed come from Australian mainly, then the US so those others have found my blog through others blogs at over 85% being directed from others blogs.
the most viewed type of content on my blog being video’s i posted taking 40% of the total page views of my site and that’s just the top three posts. also the data shows that most people look at a single post then leave the site with a 72% rate of people leaving the site after the page.
overall i think that my blog could have used a wider audience, i should have made it more available and tried to get it out to more people. the posts were fine, i ended up with 77 posts, more than required for the course but still it was also difficult to find people interested in the general idea of old school games, they were more interested in one specific series or game. though it worked as a means of combining different media together to create the blog, i had my friends on face book comment on some of the posts i would send messages to friends on my phone when they would ask me what my blog was called, so it did work as a networked media device and with more time could also actually get more views.

Its a MAP!!! with plotted Video Game Locations
And if you know of any more locations Please feel free to comment
Gyromite

Gyromite the game for people that want to play a game with a little robot buddy who can only really stack things… then unstack them (Seriously what was the point of R.O.B nintendo)
selling this on my Ebay store might not have this as buyer is looking at it (hi buyer ) but plenty of other nes games and soon to follow with snes n64 ps1 ps2 and assorted others at
http://stores.ebay.com.au/5-dollars-or-anything?_trksid=p4340.l2563
Come on down (please :) )
Three blogs that are like mine
this is long over due as i was meant to write this AGES!! back when i started the blog but anyway NOW! is also a good time
First you have IT8BIT http://it8bit.com/ a old school video game blog that generally sticks to nes atari and sega games based in the 8 bit era, i have rebloged a lot of his posts and will continue to in the future
next is Video Game nostalgia http://blog.videogamenostalgia.com/ similar idea to the IT8BIT except a wider range of games considering they also include games made after 1994
and finally it seems that i have added a lot of Zelda Stuff so i’m going to mention Zora’s Fountain http://zorasfountain.tumblr.com/ lots of pics and gifs to go around from Ocarina of Time and all the Zelda classics
As Admiral Achbar would say… ITS A MAP!!
ok going to use this map to create a mashup… thinking ill do places old school games where set in America. this should be fun, for an example, fallout was based in and around las vegas, gta was set in a fictional town based on new york, and ill find more


