Posts Tagged ‘Second Life’
Coming in September I will be publishing an interview in Transformative Works & Culture with Dr. Angela Thomas about her work on the Virtual Macbeth project in Second Life. I am really happy about getting to work with Dr. Thomas. It has been a goal of mine for the past few years to work with her and I am very pleased to finally be able to in a great journal like TW&C.
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From Fibreculture, Caroline McCaw on the art of Second Life and Axel Bruns looks at used based “produsage.”
Due to some monetary constraints I was unable to attend ELO 08, but Scott Rettberg posted his presentation over at Grand Text Auto. More on that soon.
Barrett Hathcock’s essay on the Internet from The Quarterly Conversation.
Catching up on fiction from The New Yorker: Bolano, Diaz, Eugenides, and a previously untranslated story by Nabokov.
Seamus Heaney’s 1985 review of Mr. Palomar from the New York Times.
Daniel Green’s review of the intriguing Lost Books Of The Odyssey.
The New Yorker had a big piece last week on Keith Olbermann.
Meanwhile, on Twitter…
The New Republic pays tribute to de Beauvoir.
Terra Nova covers a promising MMO called Lila Dreams.
Greg Palast on the preemptive theft of the 2008 election. Speaking of, maybe I should just sleep in anyway.
My new desktop background (Kind of big and exciting casting spoilers for the finale of Doctor Who)
Kristin Hersh has a new website.
And…
Margaret Atwood won a big literary award in Spain.
A member of the old New York hardcore band Ultra Violence gets a mention in The New Yorker too.
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Via Terra Nova comes word that King Of The World, a Chinese MMOG, is suspending the accounts of male identified gamers who play using female avatars. This is done, according to Terra Nova, by requiring webcams to “verify†gender. This is problematic for a variety of reasons.
A lot of female identified gamers I know play as male avatars so they won’t get hit on constantly. This can become very annoying and quite frankly disgusting after awhile. I’ve played in Second Life using a female avatar and the amount of creepy flirting and sexual innuendo makes me wonder why anyone plays as a female avatar at all.
If someone is exploring where they fit in the gender spectrum, restricting their movement between genders is pretty asinine. What gives the managers of any game the right to tell people what gender they can choose?
Playing as another gender might only be a simple case of escapism. I don’t see a problem with that.
I am really curious as to how the managers of King Of The World define “male†and “female.†What happens if a gamer doesn’t meet the requisites for what they deem “male?†Requiring a webcam is just another way to shame non-gender normative gamers.
For the most part, I would argue that almost all avatars are a performance that isn’t quite replicated by the Real Life gamer’s appearance or build. Do you really think that hulking, muscle bound, six foot male avatar is the same in Real Life? Do all females have gigantic, gravity defying, breasts like a lot of female avatars have? How is fibbing your avatar like that any different than changing genders?
Voice Chat in MMORPG’s is a great idea, but using it to pinpoint gender is so problematic. This addition to the gaming experience, which is supposed to upgrade and enhance that experience, ends up making games more restrictive and gender normative.
I don’t play many MMORPG’s, and news like this doesn’t make me want to run out to buy any. No American games seem to require anything this restrictive, as far as I can tell, which is good news. There is so much that can be learned via a gamer’s use of avatars; restricting them to normative gender binaries is just plain wrong. If that is the direction MMORPG’s are heading, I’ll stick to 8-Bit games.
I haven’t had a lot of time to do anything with Second Life recently, but I took some time out the other night to check out the recreation of Midgar (yep, the one from Final Fantasy Seven) someone created. I don’t like Second Life that much; the idea of it is much more interesting than the practical application of it. I walked around for a little while in Midgar and enjoyed the level of detail and obvious love these people have for Final Fantasy. Hopefully when this game is ported to a new system it will look this good.
My friend Sean Duncan has restarted his blog and it looks great. So far he has a post up about The Politics Of Griefing (in relation to the recent vandalism of John Edwards’ Second Life headquarters) and there is more to come I am sure.
Zotero Library
