Proofreading

Writing an essay for my Writ 112 Class. Could any of you please proofread this?

Video games had started in the Eighties with the Atari 2600. This form of entertainment seemed found its niche, but the video game market crashed because it had become over-saturated with knock-offs and cheap cash-ins. Nintendo came in and revitalized the gaming industry. Today, Video Games are a popular medium to play on just like the Eighties. A company that has been frequently talked about in the rumor mill is Electronic Arts (EA). Like all other companies, EA has their good moments and their bad moments.

Let's see...

Ra Cailum wrote:Video games had started in the Eighties with the Atari 2600. This form of entertainment seemed found its niche, but the video game market crashed because it had become over-saturated with knock-offs and cheap cash-ins.

I would say something like...

Video games started in the Eighties with the Atari 2600. This form of entertainment seemed to find its niche, but the video game market crashed because it became over-saturated with knock-offs and cheap cash-ins.

Aside from the switches between past tense and present tense, which I don't know if there's a rule for that in your class, the beginning looks pretty good. If there is a rule about using a single tense and sticking with it, I'll try to have suggestions.

One of EA’s famous gaming franchises is Sim City, a video game where the player is in charge of a simulated city and raises it from scratch over a set period of time. At one point, Sim City was used in “the National Engineers Week Future City Competition(TM)”, a competition where students try to recreate various cities in “Sim City” and find out methods to make them sustainable in the future (Lehr, 2006). A few years later, Eduardo Paes (the mayor of Rio de Janiero at the time) talked about proposing sustainable practices in his TED speech: The four commandments of cities.

Paes’ first commandment was that cities have to be “environmentally friendly” (Paes, 2012). A group of students from Valley Middle School decided to choose Chernobyl, the city known for the nuclear disaster in the 1980s, for their entry for the competition. They proposed the city should “harness the radiation's energy to power [itself]” by containing the radiation in batteries and moving the radiated batteries into another part of the city (Lehr, 2006). This proposal follows the first commandment to the letter because the students are cleaning up Chernobyl by cleaning up the city’s air. As a result, the students’ Chernobyl can open up space and use it for large, beautiful parks, raising its citizens’ morale in the process.

Paes’ second commandment was that cities “[have] to deal with mobility and integration [of its people]” (Paes, 2012). A student from a school from Baton Rouge, Melanie Eddington, proposed that New Orleans should use “aboveground, [maglev] trains that can rapidly evacuate the entire city” (Lehr, 2006). This proposal listens to the second commandment because the [maglev] trains enable the citizens of New Orleans to move quickly in case another “Hurricane Katrina” (a hurricane that caused massive devastation at one point) comes their way. This proposal by Eddington also falls into Paes’s first commandment because mass transportation is considered environmentally friendly. Mass transportation uses fewer resources than driving with a car.

Paes’ third commandment was that a city has “to be socially integrated” (Paes, 2012). Jenna Affholter and her team from Michigan proposed that Detroit should have the concept of “safety” (Lehr, 2006). Affholter explains that “safety” helps business integration (Lehr, 2006). Affholter’s proposal falls into the third commandment because “safety” can be used to encourage communities. Communities over time eventually become socially integrated because they interact with other communities, who offer feedback on how to make their cities better. This proposal also falls into the second commandment because “safety” also encourages transportation from other cities nearby Detroit.

Paes’ fourth commandment was that cities “have to use technology to be present” (Paes, 2012). One teacher who worked with a team participating in the competition recalled that her students talked about hybrid cars and talked about “recovering gas hydrates from the Gulf of Mexico” (Lehr, 2006). She also talked about the proposal made by the school in Baton Rouge, which suggested that New Orleans should “[become] a floating city off the coast of Louisiana able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, buffer the shoreline, and replenish wetlands” (Lehr, 2006). These students follow Paes’ fourth commandment perfectly because they had the foresight to keep up with future trends. This also falls into the first commandment because the students brought up future environmentally-friendly technology during their proposals.