Upon arriving in class for Seeing Sideways, I wasn't sure what to expect. I certainly didn't expect to be seated in a chair, and told if I wanted to leave the room, that I had to wheel the chair out with me. This of course happened during one of our breaks and, while entertaining, was thought provoking as well.
Returning to the classroom had yielded in one of my coeds asking what would've happened if we had left the chairs. The resulting answer was simply nothing, as nothing was defined on that regard. So again I wondered why we all had conformed and gone with it. Perhaps it was because we were answering to a higher power of authority.
This leads into the main topic. To me, this experiment felt confining. I was told to stay within a limit, and I stayed within that limit. While enjoyable, it had more bad than good. Mobility, accessibility, practicality, all of it was bad. Upon finding out the restrictions were merely an illusion afterward, the experiment began to feel more freeing. We were free to go where we wanted and do what we normally did, but in these chairs. In a way, it added a sense of freedom. To me, this experiment taught me that you can feel free or confined based on the context of a situation.
My final point I'd like to address about this is when do we have too much freedom or too much confinement? This was one of our main talks in class, and I'd like to draw upon situations I've found where these kinds of things come into play; Video Games.
I'll start with a classic. Super Mario Bros. It's a super simple game, Move to the right, jump on this, jump over that, touch this, don't touch that. It's very confined and not free in the slightest, you can't even go back if you move too far to the right. Yet this is one of the most enjoyable games out there. Why is that?
The next game I'd like to review is an Role Playing Game (RPG) called Secret of Mana. This is a game from the 90s for the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo) and focused on open world exploration and general fantasy fun. By no means is this a bad game, but sometimes you wonder where the heck you want to go. Even during combat, you have so many options of attack later on in the game, you can never truly find the most effective way to fight an enemy. It becomes pretty mind numbing, and sometimes overwhelming unless you're really focused on the hundreds of different variables that are present in each battle scenario. All together this game is too free.
Taking this out of video game terms, I believe we, as human beings, need some form of confinement, just not too much, and not too little. Too much, and we feel trapped. Too little, and we feel like we don't know what to do with ourselves. The margin between the two is so little that I doubt there is a true center where everyone will be happy, however there is no doubt that there needs to be a balance of these in our lives.
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