Jackson Wedel's Media Blog

  The Game Awards (known as TGA for short) is an annual live awards show streamed over the Internet focusing on highlighting video games from the past year that excel in various categories. Similarly to other award shows like the Oscars, the companies being nominated typically take the show very seriously by investing a large amount of money into advertising at the event. However, unlike most award shows, the majority of the audience is not actually watching the show to see which games win rewards. Instead, most viewers care far more about exclusive trailers and reveals for upcoming games that are showcased for the first time.   Overall, the general consensus surrounding TGA 2019 (which was on Thursday, December 13) was that the show was disappointing for its lack of compelling new information about upcoming games.  The award winners themselves did not cause significant controversy, but the fanbase still viewed the event as a failure purely because they did not get as ma...

  Whenever I was browsing YouTube or Instagram, I always found it odd that it seemed like many of the ads shown appealed directly to my personal interests. While there have always been ads that completely do not apply to my interests at all, a majority of them have at least one aspect of them that seems to connect directly to the types of things I personally enjoy (especially those I searched about online). I did not think too closely about these ads until I watched the film "The Persuaders" and realized that I was most likely a victim of datamining.   The advertisements I receive online all have extremely obvious correlations to the things I search for. I frequently see ads for video games and movies online because those are the types of things I tend to watch videos and read articles about the most. Moreover, the ads I get typically tend to be from companies that I read about more frequently, like Disney and Nintendo. As a result, it is clear that companies are aware of my...

  Pokemon Sword and Shield are the latest entries in the wildly popular Pokemon video game series. While the series originally released only in Japan, the games have since attracted a large American fanbase. This American fanbase is overall highly critical of the new games for a variety of reasons. By far the most prominent, however, is a controversy dubbed "Dexit" (a reference to the Brexit controversy), in which many of the Pokemon characters that have appeared in the "Pokedex" featured in all the games would no longer return in certain installments. At first glance, this outrage might seem baffling. While it is understandable that fans would be disappointed that some of the characters they have grown attached for nearly 20 years would no longer make appearances in newer games, the sheer venom from the fanbase seems like a severe overreaction. However, one of the core causes of American fans' reaction is the series' marketing in America.   In the lead-up ...

  George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" described what he claimed to be the biggest threats to English as a form of writing. It argued that in an attempt to sound more dignified or intellectual, political writers would use overly complex language, which would unintentionally make the meaning of the work far less clear. In addition, those who read such writing typically tried to emulate it, ultimately leading to an endless cycle of a decline in meaning. Based on Orwell's claims, I expected the state of political writing today to be atrocious. However, I was pleasantly surprised about the overall quality of the writing I read.   The article I examined was "Why President Trump's Ukraine Scheme Matters" by the New York Times. The first thing I noticed when reading the article was how easy to understand it was. Compared to the examples of poor English presented by Orwell, it was to-the-point and simple. Instead of becoming a thicket of ob...

  When I first finished watching the movie Avatar , my first reaction was that while it was a good movie overall, I felt somewhat unsatisfied by it. It certainly excelled in some areas, like its visual effects, but at the end of the day, it did not resonate with me as much I expected it to. While I at first expected my cynical feelings toward it to decrease with time, I eventually figured out the real flaw I had subconsciously found in the movie. Avatar  is a movie that tries too hard to be an allegory for real-world issues without putting any thought or creativity into the way those issues were portrayed.   The overall message of Avatar  is that colonialism is harmful, and the symbolism throughout is nearly inescapable. For instance, the alien race being exploited for their resources takes clear inspiration from portrayals of Native Americans in both their design and overall ideology, and most of the villains' monologues sound like they are reading an excerpt from...