Diaries from The Forest (vol. 3): Shark Attack!

This is the third volume of my particular Diaries from The Forest series. This is based on alpha 0.02. To know more about these diaries, please, have a look at the first and second volumes.

Shark Attack!
I decided to move quickly on this occasion. First collect some items around the wreckage and then move towards the beach. It worked perfectly in my mind, what could go wrong? So, I took some provisions, including two circuit boards from the plane (how can they possibly be useful on an island like this?).

I tried to hit a rabbit with a couple of tennis balls, but I missed. Not a proper way to catch animals, I think. 

After that, I hit a rabbit with my axe. That seems to be a better way to secure food for myself.

I kept collecting things that I consider useful for my short-term future, i.e. some sticks.

I was headed to the beach once again. A sudden burst of painful memories came to me at that moment. I needed a couple of minutes to compose myself. 

I saw a school of sharks in the distance. I decided to have a closer look.

While I was swimming carelessly, I spotted a turtle under the water. Do you know the difference between a turtle and a tortoise? A hint: this is a turtle. And it's in the water. But you can also see them wandering on the island. Walking on soil. I think you've already figured it out.

Out of the blue, a shark started to follow me. I thought it was amazing at first...

... and then I realised that it was coming closer very fast...

...extremely closer...

...

To my shame, I was devoured by a shark. It seems that I have a new enemy on the island. Days survived, 1.

It's interesting to see how PewDiePie - the most famous Youtuber - deals with the sharks in the following video:

Is the introduction of new actors in a game, even supporting ones,  relevant enough to make a difference, to transform the global experience, to make people notice it?

Diaries from The Forest (vol. 2): surviving on the beach

This is the second volume of my particular Diaries from The Forest series. This is based on alpha 0.01. To know more about these diaries, please, have a look at the first volume.

Surviving on the beach

This time I was determined to last longer. The last time I was surrounded very soon, so I decided to get away from the plane crash site as soon as I could. I shortly found what I considered that it might have been a good place to settle: a beach.

I collected some supplies from the suitcases that were scattered all over the beach. I mainly found rags, snack bars, alcohol and tennis balls. A funny loot.

While I was looking for the best spot to build my shelter, I found a dead shark on the shore. Flies were buzzing around it.

Then I saw a turtle. Thinking it could be of some use, I killed it. In the end, there was no use for it. Neither could I eat it nor could I harvest its shell. Poor thing.

I decided to put the shelter next to the lifeless animals. Probably not one of my smartest moves. I started gathering logs, sticks and rocks to build it. I come across some weird things: a bird alighted on the middle of the air and bottles flying from nowhere.

While I was gathering a couple of logs, hostile individuals spotted me. Strangely enough, they didn't come after me, so I continued working on the shelter.

Since I didn't want to attract more unwanted attention, I decided to head towards other parts of the forest to collect the rest of the 'ingredients' I needed for my shelter. In my way to cut down more trees, I stumbled across a corpse. I tried to chop the body into pieces in order to erect an effigy. As many other odd things happening in this beach, I wasn't even able to scratch the thing (wasn't weird enough wanting to make an effigy from body parts?).

After felling a couple of trees, I suddenly found myself surrounded by the enemy. I didn't see or hear them coming.

I backed up cowardly and jump into the water hoping they weren't going to follow me. I hid under some rocks in the waters.

Completely soaked, I took comfort from the view of the rainbow ahead of me. A beautiful scenery for hell.

Once I was sure they weren't around, I gathered my courage and came back to the beach. No sign of them. Good. I made a Molotov cocktail just in case they showed up again.

Feeling as please as punch, I set it on fire. I felt powerful, bigger than the mountains beyond the forest. The Molotov's fire beautifully blended with the last rays of sunshine. 'Come to me now if you dare,' I said to myself. Silly of me.

Inebriated with self-confidence, I accidentally dropped the cocktail burning myself. How ridiculous.

After all that foolishness, I felt tired and decided to have a nap. So far, no sign of foes.

I woke up freezing, with those beasts staring at me. Quickly, I made a new Molotov cocktail. Ha! I got you! I threw the cocktail at them with determination. I missed. Not looking good.

They're on me. I'm scared. Should I confront them? I don't think I'm strong enough. I plunged into water again and swam to a stranded yacht.

The yacht became my temporary safe haven but I could see them lurking on the shore. They are waiting for me. There is no escape. Sooner or later I would have to get out of the yacht if I didn't want to die from starvation or exposure.

So be it. I returned to the beach to confront them. Whatever happens. It's them or me. More have joined the pack to hunt me down. Well, here I am. Five against one. I was clearly outnumbered. I fought bravely. Nevertheless, I went down.

I woke up in the cave. Familiar place, known atrocities. 'Get out here now,' I told myself. No reason to stay more than what is strictly necessary.

I came across two hostile beings in my way out. Vainly overconfident, I attacked them without taking any precaution. Fearless but stupid.

Stronger and faster than me, they killed me in a wink of an eye.

This time I survived 3 days. That's some improvement. I still don't know who these people are and why they keep attacking me or where my kid is. And what about the infection? Does every living creature in the island carry the disease? Too many questions and not a single answer yet. We'll see what happens in future diaries.

Compare my adventures on the beach to this guy's first contact with it:

Source: BaronVonGamez, Youtube.

Diaries from The Forest (vol.1): senseless brutality

In my efforts to experiment with new research techniques in social sciences, I will create two new regular sections: diaries and flash sociological reviews. You can read about the latter here. But at this moment, I'd like to focus on diaries.

What is a diary? You'll probably have already seen those articles on magazines and posts on forums in which the author describes what they've done and experienced during a specific gameplay. It's not a review per se, it's more like a diary entry, where you express what happened in your life that day and how you feel about it. This could be a good example on RPS magazine about the game DayZ. It's probably too elaborated and it's not easy to find those on the Internet, but it's still a very good model to follow. After some time playing the game, I'll try to make a similar attempt.  

I don't intend to imitate those pieces to produce narratives and share experiences about video games (although, wanted or not, I will  inexorably participate in the process), but to take advantage of it in order to analyse and explore those shared and semi-ubiquitous-produced narratives and experiences. By copying social actors behaviour and their way to produce knowledge, I hope to find new ways to approach their reality. The diaries will be brief and will include my own game experiences along with extracts from other gamers  diaries. These diaries will be, at the same time, part of a sociological method and of video game culture. 

As it seems that survival games are prone to this kind of narrative, my first attempt to experiment with diaries will be The Forest. I've chosen The Forest for two reasons: firstly, because it's an open world survival game that has already produced 'diaries'; secondly, because it's on Steam's early access games program, which means The Forest is a game still in development and, therefore, it's the perfect candidate to see up close the process of producing a video game and how the developers and video gamers interact with each other. But that's another story, let's go with the first volume of this Diaries from The Forest that has been entitled Senseless brutality.

Senseless brutality

I was on a plane. Nobody was around me but a little kid who I assume is my son. Something was wrong with the plane, we crashed... I woke up on the floor of the crashed plane,  I looked above and saw someone who had taken the kid (again, my son? my nephew?) in his arms. He doesn't look like friendly (is this a racist or ethnocentric assumption?). They leaved.

I stood up. I was hungry, thirsty and in pain. I ate some meals from the plane's catering. I drank a can of soda. I took everything I saw compulsively, including an axe I found stuck into a stewardess. She was dead. I got out of the plane and started looking for clues on where I was. I felt disorientated and didn't know what to do. I noticed I had a survival guide in my backpack. I opened it and decided to build a shelter. A hunting shelter according to the guide. 

As soon as I was about to place the shelter just next to the wrecked plane, I found myself surrounded by hostile individuals. They seem to be part of the same tribe (ethnocentrism again?) of the man who took the kid. There were four or them, three males and a female. At least two of them were armed with blunt weapons. They're fast. Incredibly fast. They climbed the trees, jumping from one to another. They were really scaring me. They circled me, they wanted to attack me from my weakest point. I fighted back, but I didn't last too long. One of them, the most intimidating one, took me down. I fainted. 

I woke up in the dark. I used my lighter. I was in some sort of subterranean cave. Dead bodies, some of them horribly mutilated, hanged from the ceiling. I took everything I saw: food, medicine, drinks, a flare gun and some flares. I frantically looked for an exit.

I came across a corpse of a man with a rusty axe into his belly. I took it. I made a creepy joke about his t-shirt: 'I love my guts'. I laughed. 

After a fleeting moment of cheeriness, the looming dread of what might inhabit the cave made me shiver. Almost blinded, I made my way towards what I thought was the exit. I missed a step and fell. I was dead. 

Days survived 2. I still don't know where I was, why they took the child and attacked me. I don't understand why they did what they did to those poor people. Senseless brutality.

Compare my first play with another first time experience: 
-The first time I played-
Spawned near a beach.
Grabbed some supplies.
Wacked a bunny over the head with my axe.
Grabbed the bunny.
Built a fire near the coast.
Cooked the bunny.
Saw a mutant in the forest watching me.
It started screaming and 5 more walked out.
They started sprinting at me, so I swam out into the water.
They all stopped at my camp and stared at it. 
5 of them walked away and left one lone mutant.
I was all like "I got this ♥♥♥♥" [shit?] and ran towards the mutant with my axe.
She hit me twice and killed me. 
I woke up in a cave with a bunch of dead bodies hanging from the cave ceiling. 
Found an axe and a flare gun, then slowly made my way out of the cave.
3 naked mutants ran at me and killed me by beating me down with human heads.
11/10, thats some spooky ♥♥♥♥ [shit, again?]. 
Source: Steam users reviews on The Forest (posted: 31 May 2014; user: Rawlson).

To make my first diary reverberate through the same channels, I will post my experience on Steam reviews. I will keep track of the outcome. Expect more diaries soon. 

The three-headed monkey

This blog is written by me - stating the obvious, Daniel Muriel. I'm a sociologist. I have a PhD (good for me!). Now, I'm working on a postdoctoral research project on the video game culture at the University of Salford (Greater Manchester) funded by the Basque Government. OK, enough talking about me. If you want to delight yourself with my outstanding professional achievements, feel free to visit Researchgate, Academia.edu and LinkedIn. You can also follow me on twitter: @danimuriel

Do you remember the classic video game from the early nineties known as 'The Secret of Monkey Island'? If not, shame on you! Google it, and let yourself sink into the embarrassment of your sheer ignorance for not knowing about this masterpiece of our contemporary culture. Now that we're finally on the same cultural page, let me explain what all this is about. The main character of The Secret of Monkey Island is the ridiculous untalented wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood, who carries around the most (apparently) useless and unexpected objects in the world, including rubber chickens with a pulley in the middle and staff like that. Well, he's not completely untalented after all. He can hold his breath for 10 minutes. Not bad. What's more, he even has some legendary phrases such as "I'm Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate", "That's the second [whatever] I've ever seen" or, my favourite, "Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!".

If Indiana Jones has his "I'm selling these fine leather jackets" line as a way to divert his enemies (a line also used, by the way, by Guybrush), our old young mate Guybrush has the three-headed monkey line to distract foes and acquaintances alike. He uses it from time to time along the game with divergent results. The interesting thing is that the only situation in which the actual three-headed monkey appears, nobody cares to look back. Poor Guybrush, he has it right for once and there is no one around who believes him. The exceptional never-seen creature is there and he, who has been mocking all the people about it, is the only one who gets to see it. I didn't name this blog after that line because I will be mainly writing about video games here, nor because I love Monkey Island. Actually, yes, at least in part I name it this way because of that. But that's not the point. What I want to express with that reference is how sociology (or sciences and life in general) usually put us in Guybrush Threepwood's shoes and make us play the three-headed monkey line.

You spend hours and hours everyday looking for the clues, traces and pieces of evidence that validate your hypothesis (or refuse them) and help us enlighten our understanding of reality. No matter how big or small the share of new knowledge we create. It's there, it's ours and, if you're not a greedy scientist looking for fame, money and patents, it belongs to the people and any other creature, fantastic or not, which walks on, flies over or digs in our planet. Therefore, the three-headed monkey is that piece of reality we'd like to know better. And to know it better, we have to chase it, find it, observe it. What the hell, we even have to feed it! So, loaded with dozens of bananas, we keep dropping those on different surfaces in order to use them as bait to attract the three-headed monkey. The more bananas we use, the more we think we see the damned monkey, so we keep saying all the time: "Look behind you, a three headed monkey!". Obviously, the monkey is not there and you get frustrated and the gullible people who dare to look every time become more and more angry. And finally, the three-headed monkey, as a postmodern self-important diva pope of sociology, shows up. You shout once again your line and... nobody looks.

Thus, sociology is, for me, that activity in which once I spot the three-headed monkey, nobody looks back. They even can laugh at you. Loudly and stridently. No harm done. I don't think I would look myself. Why should I care? This blog, then, is mainly about looking for the three-headed monkey in the context of a research project on the video game culture. I invite you to join my monkey-ish crusade. I wouldn't like to do it alone... after all, someone must be there to look when I shout: LOOK BEHIND YOU, A THREE-HEADED MONKEY!