final reflective post

According to the blog instructions document, we're supposed to have made a final post this week reflecting on the unit and the blog. I thought it was next week, but it says week 12, so...

The blog: I enjoyed using the blog for tutorials. Having the conversation spread over a week or so gave us more time to think about and discuss the ideas that came up and pursue different lines of thought related to the readings and lectures. I liked having the time to think about what I wanted to say, carefully consider other people's points, look at the articles again and so on before I posted my comments.

A disadvantage, I suppose, is that without the immediacy of a live tutorial, people could forget to post or just not be bothered. Possibly some people were also intimidated by the technology. Most of the time there didn't seem to be many people actively posting - or they would make their one post for the week and that would be it. (I was guilty of this myself a few times.) Many weeks had very little that you could call a conversation. (On the other hand, I've been to plenty of face-to-face tutorials in various units that have been like this too...)

The unit: The tutorial blog was one of my favourite things about this unit. But I liked a lot of things about this unit: the workshops, the reader, the lecturers... and it was very well-organised, which is always helpful!

Am I a cyborg? To be honest, I'm still inclined to agree with what Liam said right at the start of the unit: it depends on how you define "cyborg". And since "cyborg" is a very politicised concept, just accepting one person's definition - Donna Haraway's, for instance - and running with it seems to miss the point.

But I love technology and I'm happy to consider myself a cyborg. I don't believe there's going to be a techno-utopia or anything radical like that. Whether technology's effects are good, bad or benign depends on the way we use that technology, and humans don't have a great track record there. But I'm excited about the possibilities that technology is opening up to us - new ways of communicating, new artworks we can create, new abilities to improve life for some members of society - and I want to be part of that. In any case, like Donna Haraway, I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

reliability of Wikipedia

Relevant to yesterday's discussion: Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth

Technorati: State of the Blogosphere

The website Technorati has released its annual report on the "blogosphere". I haven't read much of it yet, but I found the statistics on who is blogging interesting. I think there must be a certain amount of selection bias, as only bloggers registered with Technorati were surveyed. But it still shows how privileged an activity blogging is, despite the fact that we tend to think of it as a democratic practice. Two-thirds of the bloggers surveyed were male, and 70% had a college degree. Both education level and household income were higher than those of the average Internet user.

Woman jailed for 'killing' virtual hubby

Note: I've copy-pasted this article from ninemsn.com. Available at http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=652750

Woman jailed for 'killing' virtual hubby
11:03 AEST Fri Oct 24 2008
By Mari Yamaguchi

A 43-year-old player in a virtual game world became so angry about her sudden divorce from her online husband that she logged on with his password and killed his digital persona, police say.
The woman, who has been jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his ID and password to log onto the popular interactive game Maple Story to carry out the virtual murder in May, a police official in the northern city of Sapporo said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of department policy.

"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry," the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

The woman, a piano teacher, had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said.
She has not yet been formally charged. If convicted, she could face up to five years in prison or a fine up to $US5,000 ($A7,427).

Players in Maple Story create and manipulate digital images called "avatars" that represent themselves, while engaging in relationships, social activities and fighting monsters and other obstacles.

In virtual worlds, players often abandon their inhibitions, engaging in activity online that they would never do in the real world. For instance, sex with strangers is a common activity.
The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married to kill the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his online avatar was dead.

The woman was arrested on Wednesday and taken 1,000km from her home in southern Miyazaki to be detained in Sapporo, where the man lives, the official said.

The police official said he did not know if she was married in the real world.

Bad online behaviour is usually handled within the rules set up by online worlds, which can ban miscreants or take away their virtual possessions.

In recent years, virtual lives have had consequences in the real world.

When bad deeds lead to criminal charges, prosecutors have found a real-world activity to cite - as in this case, in which the woman was charged with inappropriate computer access.

In August, a woman was charged in the US state of Delaware with plotting the real-life abduction of a boyfriend she met through the virtual reality website Second Life.

In Tokyo, a 16-year-old boy was charged with stealing the ID and password from a fellow player of an online game in order to swindle virtual currency worth $US360,000 ($A534,760)

Virtual games are popular in Japan, and Second Life has drawn a fair number of Japanese participants. They rank third by nationality among users, after Americans and Brazilians.

Flash mobbing

Some examples from youtube:

From Japan

From America (mentioned in the lecture)

23rd

So... do we have a workshop this week? in outline it says "reflection: blog"... ?

due to popular demand...my tute discussion notes

For those of you who couldn't make it to the tute last Friday :)

Mia Consalvo’s article, ‘Hot Dates and Fairy-tale Romances’ takes a look at two popular games, Final Fantasy and The Sims, and discusses the construction of sexuality and gender within them. Discussion about Final Fantasy was mostly tied up around the idea that the game player automatically inhabits the male character Zidane, who engages in a romantic discourse with the princess Garnet, and who is ultimately responsible for ‘saving her’. Consalvo also discusses the interesting notion of the ‘erotic triangle’- which exists within FF and how it is weakened when the game player is female.
In discussion of The Sims, Consalvo focuses on the wording of the user manual which states things like ‘a same-sex relationship does not have the option of marriage’, but at other times goes to great lengths to use vague language in discussions about the characters- which is supposed to reduce pigeon holing.

Overall, I found the most interesting part of the article was when she spoke about how within the game ‘The Sims’, sexuality is considered an activity, rather than an unchangeable aspect of personality chosen when the character is created. Consalvo outlines that some gay activists have a problem with this- saying that by making sexuality ‘merely’ a choice, it gives weight to the argument that homosexuality is optional. On the other hand, some support the way the Sims game is structured in this aspect, because they believe that saying the body is ‘innately’ sexual is too essentialist.

The second article in this weeks reading ‘From Quake Grrls to Desperate Housewives: A Decade of Gender and Computer Games’ opened with (in my opinion) a very bold statement; “today, few worry about women’s access to cyberspace- the gap between the sexses in online participaton has largely closed… we scarcely think about [the web] as a male-dominated space”. As this is central to my research essay, I have done quite a bit of reading around this issue and the general consensus seems to be that the web still is considered a male-dominated space. Does anyone else find the above extract a bit unstable?
I won’t write any more on this article because my copy in the course reader is missing what looks like every second page and thus is very hard to get any sense out of!

Third article: ‘as we become machines’: talks about body as cyborg. Old Haraway argument.
Thinking like a computer
2D to first person perspective- making the body ‘grunt’ in pain etc... screen shudder, fade to red etc...
Occupy role of camera operator as well- shifiting postion.
Arcade games- actually sit on a replica motorbike.
Wii- extention of this idea. Using body as the apparatus, not a joystick.
While you can change skin colour in a game, your character and the world around still behaves in the same way.