Infinite Pockets

By Michael Champion, Communication ’13

In between studying for visual communication and writing for the school newspaper of the Humanities and Communication department, I, on occasion, find myself gaming. Anyone who has seriously played a video game (series of games with the same title are included as well) at some point in their life should know exactly what I am will be going on about shortly, it is none other than the legendary “hammerspace.”

Anyone who has played the “Final Fantasy” series should know that whenever you go shopping for items, equipment, and a vast amount of other intricacies; should be wondering where exactly the “characters” store all of their items. Even though these items are nothing more than computer code with some mathematical equations factored in to determine their power level, one still has to wonder where this stuff is kept.

Picture this, I have just popped in an ancient copy of the legendary Final Fantasy VII and I go ahead and activate my game editor (when you have played and beaten a game as many times as I have, then it is okay) and I immediately set to work on editing the item values. I max out all of the item values and I place 99 of every item within my in-game inventory. Once my variable editing is done, I save my work and proceed to enjoy my game.

While in the middle of my “adventure” I now think to myself “why do these characters not carry around a giant sack of stuff…which would technically limit their movement if this was the real world?” and then I keep right on playing. Now, given the fact that I am a senior in communication at a technological university, I like to think that one day (perhaps centuries from now) we will have little boxes that we can put our stuff into and pull it out of the box with ease when we need to do so.

The point I am ultimately trying to make is that one should take pride in their skills and also take it upon themselves to be creative. Take Double Bubble (bubble gum) for example, its creation was only a mere accident while Walter Diemer was busy working in his lab on something else. He was in the middle of the creative process and then boom….he ended up with the pink colored bubble gum.

As a communication student, I wonder what “accident” I will stumble upon and where it will lead me. Until then, I’m off to the chocobo races!