OMG Its Jakob™

We’ve been told ever since we were small kids that murder is wrong. Capital punishment is in essence one person killing another person. This is the definition of murder. Then why are 32 states in the USA still performing this act, that we’ve been thought is wrong? It is old-fashioned and unethical, and definitely not something that should occur in the modern USA, the world’s leading superpower. These 32 states still performing this horrible act, should abolish it as it’s violates the human rights, fails to secure the innocent victims and is economically insufficient.

All human beings are equal and worth the same. This is one of the main principles behind the Declaration of Human rights and a commonly accepted thought amongst people living in the western part of the world. In my opinion, this equality implies that killing someone, whether it’s done as a crime or sanctioned by law, is wrong. Amnesty International states that ‘The death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights[…]It violates the right to life as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ’

By removing the death penalty, you will eliminate the risk of an irreversible mistake. When it comes to crime investigation, one can never be 100% sure that the suspected person actually performed the crime that he or she is accused of. Should a convicted person at a later stage be found innocent, he or she could be released from prison, however not revived from death.

One of the main arguments from people supporting death penalty, is that it’s a more cost effective way than keeping criminals prisoned for the rest of their lives. However, according to deathpenalty.org a study done in California shows that this is not the case. This is due to the long and complex judicial process required to ensure that innocent men and women are not executed for crimes they did not commit. According to this study, California could save 1 billion USD over a period of five years by replacing death penalty with permanent imprisonment. The money saved could go towards further development of the society and programs attempting to prevent horrible crimes.

Sadly enough, death penalty is still legal in 32 states despite the criticism and disadvantages. The modern civilized country that USA wants to be should not be practicing death penalty as it puts USA in company with Iraq, Saudi Arabia and China, countries that fails to recognize human rights.

List of sources:

Web articles:

Unknown author (2013) – deathpenalty.org about why death penalty should be illegal

http://www.deathpenalty.org/section.php?id=13

downloaded 09.02.15

Uknown author (2013) – Amnesty International about why death penalty should be illegal

http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty

downloaded 09.02.15

Imagine you have just returned home from a one-year trip to Europe. You’re excited to finally get home and meet your family again. Instead you find an empty house filled with secrets and mystery. Welcome to Gone Home.

Gone Home is a first person game where you play as Katie, a 20 year old girl returning from a trip to Europe. When you arrive at your house, which you’ve never seen before since your family moved when you were away, you find a piece of paper on the door. Written on the piece of paper is an apologize from your sister for not being there. She also tells you not to go looking for her. Once inside the house you find your parents missing as well. Then you start exploring the house, attempting to discover what has happened to your family.

Gone Home has a unique gameplay unlike anything I’ve ever played before. There are no action packed missions, nail biting time limits or anything like that to ensure you won’t stop playing. It’s you and an empty house to explore and yet I found it difficult to stop playing. And this is what creates the unique gameplay of Gone Home. Your urge to discover just another tiny little bit of information that might help you solve the puzzle. A puzzle where small pieces of information hidden in the details leads you to a bigger picture. Because that is what Gone Home absolute strength is. The details. An innocent note on a wall, a bottle of vodka on the desk. Small details, that when added together reveals the truth behind the behavior of the family.

Gone Home is a game with relatively few weaknesses. One being that the game is simply too short. You can expect approximately 2-3 hours of gameplay before you’ve fully explored the game. The concept has the potential of filling many more hours of gameplay and the fact that it doesn’t is kind of disappointing. Another weakness is the fact that some of the objects you’re supposed to find is located at some rather improbable places. A letter containing very sensitive information about the family is easily found on a bureau. On the other side, this could be a conscious decision from the game developers to indicate the fact that things are not as they should in this family.

The atmosphere in Gone Home makes you expect something scary to happen any second. You are inside a dark house, with lights flickering and an ongoing thunderstorm outside. This, combined with the creepy discoveries you do, makes your heart beat at a higher rate. The graphics were nice, nothing too fancy nor too poor. What really stood out in this game was the amazing voice acting in Sam’s journal. It does an excellent job describing the emotions going on in the head of a teenager. A brilliant piece of artwork, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in a game.

I highly enjoyed Gone Home. The way the game tells you a story, as if you were reading a book fascinated me. I especially found the non-violent environment appealing. I definitely recommend this game as I think it has a unique gameplay that everyone should experience. This is the first game I’ve played in category, which focuses more on telling a story then on gameplay. I think the gaming industry will produce more games of the kind, and I’m definitely looking forward to that.

On Monday we started the Gone Home project by playing a couple of hours in class. We had gotten strict instructions not to open the game before class and me being the perfect student had not done so. But as a result of my perfectness I had gotten fairly excited to play.

We were given a task by our teacher; explore the porch and the foyer and gather some information about the family. Then we were supposed to write down our discoveries and include a screenshot as evidence. This means that the only thing I know at this point is various pieces of information about the family.

This means I haven’t gotten a single clue about how the story will unfold. I’ve kind of gotten a tiny suspicion that this is some sort of a horror game. I mean, she gets home from Europe in the middle of the night, there’s a thunderstorm going on and the house is abandoned and creepy. Personally I enjoy a little adrenaline boost during a somewhat sleepy day of school, so I wouldn’t mind a couple of jump scares.

As for the storyline. There is definitely something fishy going on in the family. Her sister has left the family, apparently without saying good-bye to her mum and dad. The parents doesn’t show up to welcome their daughter home from a long trip to Europe. Something is not as it should be.

I think that I’ve got a long and horrifying story in front of me, with quite a few scary moments. Definitely looking forward to this!

‘Only when all members of a society are totally equal will there be peace and stability’

Nah, I don’t think so. Yeah, sure. If all members of a society where to be totally equal I think it would be easy to accomplish peace and stability. But as things are right now, we’re still far away from a society of total equality. However, peace and equality can still be accomplished.

A society where everyone is as intelligent as everyone else, runs as fast as everyone else and has the same amount of money as everyone else is not needed to create a society with peace and stability. First of all, imagine a society where all people are completely identical. Yeah, completely. Both physically and mentally. Peace and stability would definitely be accomplished, but the society would consist of humans walking around doing exactly the same. Or something like that. It’s quite hard to imagine something like that because it’s so surreal and it’s not going to happen. It is not going to happen. Exactly. However, it does not mean that peace and stability is not going to happen.

The Norwegian society is a good example of this. Most people will agree when I say that Norway has peace and stability in their society. But the Norwegian population is far from equal. They have different interests, religion, level of intelligence, and money. Still they get along really well. Yeah, not all Norwegians are the firmest of friends, but their society is still peaceful.

Let’s take a look at the world. Sadly enough we’re as far from equal as we can get. In some parts of the world people are starving and in other parts of the world people are sitting on tons of tons of food. Same thing with economy and overall general life quality. The world is not equal. Nor is it peaceful and stable. But what if those people without food and a roof above their heads got this? Would the human society become peaceful? Not completely but we would have taken a gigantic step towards a more peaceful world.

So what’s my point? Well, a society of total equality would bring peace and stability. However such a society will never take place. A peaceful society is fully possible without total equality, but the differences between the people living in this society need to be minor such as in Norway, and not big, such as in the world.

I was quite positive in front of this project, and my expectations were high. I was convinced that this was the beginning of something way above the average awesomeness level. And it was! Playing games, and learning from games was more fun then I thought. However, I’m still not sure if whether or not my expectations were met. Why?

The teacher canceled this project early, in my opinion a bit too early. Because of that, I feel that we never got the chance of experiencing this project to its full extent. I had just learned how to play the game and then we stopped it. Therefore I feel that the only thing I really learned was playing the game. No, that is a lie. I did learn a lot, but I feel that I had so much more too learn and therefore I am somewhat disappointed.

That being sad, I do think that games has a great potential when it comes to education. Especially games like CIV, which is such a good replica of the real world. Games definitely increases the level of engagement among most of the students in a way powerpoints and books just can’t do. Therefore I’m hoping to one day find myself playing games in the classroom again.

War and peace, two words of complete opposite meaning. One leads to love and harmony the other leads to chaos and pain. They do not need any further explanation. However, how does Civilization IV explain processes in international relations when it comes to war and peace compared to the real world?

The first thing I noticed when playing the game, is that the world is divided into large civilizations covering huge parts of the earth. (In my case, there were three civilizations). When I played my first, and so far the only, ‘round’ of Civilization, things did not turn out that well. I managed to lead a somewhat successful civilization (depending on how you look at things) until the year 1660 when Peter, whom I first thought was my friend, backstabbed me and destroyed my poor civilization. This means that I’ve only played the game until I enter the year 1660. I didn’t get the opportunity to explore the modern world where international relations play an important role due to increased globalization. But I did, however, discover several interesting things.

Almost instantly when starting the game, you stumble upon a leader from another civilization. He offers peace, and you get the choice of whether or not to accept this deal. I quickly considered my options, and figured that declaring war at this stage was a straight out dumb idea since I had neither warriors nor resources. Later on, he offered an open borders agreement. I said yes and we started exchanging various items and people had the opportunity to move between the different civilizations.

I created this alliance with the civilization next to me for various reasons. Together we could grow big and powerful to withstand the potential threat from a third civilization. This can be compared to NATO, a military alliance established in 1949 to withstand the growing threat from the USSR. NATO has led to peace in Europe after World War 2.

When I played the game, I soon got to know Peter from Russia. We became good friends and cooperated for the common best. At least I thought so. Peter became more than twice as powerful as me due to my unstrategic decisions. After some thousand years, he declared war and refused to talk. For me, this marked the beginning of the end as mentioned earlier. He destroyed me rather easily.

This was a conflict of interest, where the resource we fought about was my territory. Having watched my tiny civilization for years, Peter couldn’t resist the tempting idea of simply invade my precious land. If we look back at the real history, we do find similar examples. In 1941, Germany broke their ‘non-attacking’ agreement with Russia and invaded them with no declaration of war. An alliance, similar to the one between Peter, and me was destroyed.

Of course, the game has limitations. A game will never be able to simulate a perfect reconstruction of the world. The game can only offer pre-programmed reactions to various decisions made by the player. The reactions are based upon how the game creators think the real world behaves. This will not cover all the possible situations. The game gives a good simulation of the world, but the world is more complex than a game can ever simulate.

Today we’re starting what we have all been waiting for, The Civilization game project. This is going to be epic!

As a 16 years old boy, playing videogames is always fun and exciting. Playing video games in class, without the teacher throwing your head across the classroom sounds even more exciting. You get my pont right? I’m excited,

When it comes to the playing part of the project its got to be awesome right. You cannot possibly get a better start to the week then by beeing told by your teacher to pick up your computer and play more video games, and your assigned homework the following week will be to continue playing. Aaah, living the dream aren’t we?

Well, of course there is some sort of educational side to this aswell and we’re probably supposed to be writing about some educational stuff which might not be as fun as playing the game, but come on, if you want to learn something, no matter what, there really is no shortcut to the information. But by playing a game, i think the students will be way more excited then if they were to listen to their teacher rambling about some boring stuff in front of a boring powerpoint.

You’ve probably always wondered, what is typically british, but you’ve never quite figured it out. Well dont worry anymore, because I’m here to save you! 😀

Typically English:

England has taken public transport to a whole new level.

Who needs an iPhone when you’ve got this?

Irish:

He may look like a nice old man, but if you try to touch his gold, things could get nasty

If you’re irish, you’ve probably done this a couple of times

Scottish

‘

Pashion for fashion.

This instrument creates poetry for your ears

Welsh:

Best sport ever, right?

Symbolises the people of Wales, doesn’t it?

*Please insert poetic ending here*

– 🙂

Aaah, The UK. The United Kingdom of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Four beautiful countries cooperating and creating one perfefect union for all of the members. Well, almost…

The union was founded in the year 1707, and no one goes through 300 years with out a little bit of fighting. Same for the United Kingdom. There has been som fights about various things during the last 300 years, but come on, they’re all still good friends!

Or?

As you’ve probably seen in alomst every newspaper nowadays, Scotland is about to leave. Or to put in a more correct way… They are as close to leaving as they will ever be. In just a couple of days the scots will be facing the choice of their life, as the are about to vote for wether or not they’re still gonna be a part of the UK.

*Please insert poetic ending here*

– 🙂