This is a post about both making and taking polls this week. I was excited about the idea of shaping narratives about the class characters with this weeks polls. I’m going to start off talking about then talk about the ones I took part it and then talk about the five polls I made for Wednesday.
I tried to take part in every single one of the polls I could fine on both the #ds106poll tag and the #ds106 tag. I wanted to get in on experiencing all of those polls. It was cool to see the different ideas people had about potential character aspects or how they might react in certain situations. I was interested to see what class mates would guess about my character but unfortunately no one ever made a poll on her. Some characters did get a lot of polls on certain days and other’s none which was a little weird. Agent Zero particularly got a lot of polls though people disagreed on what gender they identified Alex or Zero with. When answering the polls I tried to think what I knew about the characters from their bios or interviews and then answer based on that, because it was more like building on the character already in place not just picking at random. The more open ended polls were what I enjoyed taking. When I made my polls I tried to make sure they were not the same as the previous polls and could offer something new to the class dynamic.
The final results were:
Everyone knows Agent Viper loves bikes how could they involve bikes in their next mission? Mode of escape
Agent Bongo has been involved in some top level coverups lately what is likely his next PR campaign? Cover Up Agent 106
Agent Zephyr always tries to blend in to gain their targets trust. What was their last food service blend in? Taco Trained Killer
Agent Soap has to make a quick flee from a mission and needs to know who to trust for intel. Who should he trust? (This one was a tied vote) Either trust no one or talk to the gnomes
Agent Smith claims to never get detected but what could be their fatal flaw that causes them to get caught? Unable to use baby hands
When I went to make my polls for Wednesday I went through a process to try and understand each of the characters that the poll would be about. To do this I read through their character bio’s then tried to find their interviews. It was kinda hard sometimes to figure out whose blog was which character because they did not always say their name in the interview, but by hunting through their blogs I was able to figure it out. In some cases people forgot to tag their posts with the interview tag so I would go through the blog feed to try and figure out more about their character. It was kinda hard sometimes but worth it to figure out and represent their characters more truthfully. I did this for each of the five agents for that day and I tried to write poll questions or answers based off what I learned from their interviews. For instance in my poll for Agent Viper I could not find a lot about the character but they said they loved working on bikes so I decided to theme their poll on bikes. Then for agent Bongo I used their job as PR person as the backdrop of their poll. Agent Zephyr was hard to find information about at first but going through their posts I found that they like to pose as food delivery workers to gain trust and be in disguise. After learning that I tried to think of ways that a food delivery person could take on a mission. I found sometimes I had to reword my polls because I was exceeding character limit with my poll answers, so I tried to keep the answers pithy. For agent Soap I combined facts about his military career and answers to his interview where he mentioned gnomes would make great surveillance tools. I also did a poll for Agent Smith this poll had answers pulled from his interview questions. Since his character bragged to be infallible I tried to extrapolate from his interview where it could be possible to trip him up. So he could not answer the question about baby hands or feet, and he found garden gnomes terrifying so those questions in particular lead themselves to working as answers. Unfortunately I totally forgot to tag the agents name in each of my polls but I did remember to fully write it out each time at least. It was fun to write the polls and researching people’s characters more deeply made you think on how characters in this class have developed since everyone first posted their bios at the semesters start.
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