Hi folks – here’s two extra credit opportunities:
First Extra Credit Opportunity:
The Level Up event (hosted by library-being held in JC Cinema) on Wednesday, April 22nd between 3-5 p.m (free food to follow). After you attend the event, you can just post a short response to any of the lectures/discussions here.
The featured topics for this event are:
Small group dynamics in an on-line gaming perspective, from a perspective of participant, by Chris Magee – Library Assistant, GMU Libraries
Mii, Myself, and I(dentities), by Kristin Scott – GMU Graduate Student, Cultural Studies
“Gameplay experience may change during online play” by Chris Wren – Assistant Professor, GMU College of Visual and Performing Arts
____________________________________________
Second Extra Credit Opportunity:
Write about the film, Lawnmower Man, that we just finished watching in class. You can take any approach, as long as you provide an analysis of the film (using whatever framework or theories we’ve discussed in class).
“Lawnmower Man” was definitely a movie that you could tell was older and not as recent as movies that have been coming out the past few years. I felt that the movie was interesting but also kind of weird. I felt it was somewhat interesting how they the main character Joel was originally living and working for the church (dealing with a religious theme). The theme of cyberculture and the idea to explore human individual with the games were very low tech for the graphics of today but seemed very high tech for that time period of when the movie came out. I also wanted to comment on the factor of the security level where Joel was taken with the doctor for the experiments and equipment. I assumed that there would be harsher security because there were times when Joel would just show up to the building by himself or with that woman he was dating. I would have assumed that any guest entering the building would need proper identification or clearance. i felt bad that Joel was always being made fun of but than when he was becoming smarter and powerful he definitely took advantage of those powers and what exactly he wanted to do with them. i know this was just a movie meaning not everything in it is possible or could really happen but i felt like the cyberculture that took place was totally different from the cyberculture/world that we are learning. We are not put into machines that alter our entire body to get a view/feel of cyberworld/game that was taking place. instead we have online virtual communities that have avatars which do not take over over physical body.
“Mii, Myself and I” discussed the experience of identities through bodies online. The presentation questions who individuals are in cyberspace, how they present themselves, and compares organic body vs. the virtual body. Because I experienced Second Life in this course, I was able to experience some of these questions as well.
It is apparent that the organic body is vulnerable both emotionally and physically. People experience hardships face to face such as confrontations with friends and family. As an avatar in a virtual body, I experience confrontations but I feel less emotional or affected by it because I am not attached to other avatars I meet. We do not form personal relationships; their true identities are anonymous as well as my own.
Being overly masculine and feminine was also something I discovered on Second Life as well. Most of all the avatars I have seen and met were either very muscular. Women were portrayed as promiscuous and never overweight. This kind of illustrates the fantasies and desires of people as they are able to change their true identities and creating their own “ideal” bodies.
Lawnmower man was a movie that caught me a little by surprise. At first I had no idea how the movie could possibly relate to our cyber culture class, though it would be come obvious that it was very relevant as the movie went on. It was a story about a man that was born slightly mentally handicapped who was taken advantage of by others including a priest that would whip whip him on the back (weirdo) if the main character acted in a fashion that the preacher thought was out of line. As the movie went on, the other main character who was a researcher of human brain waves activity in correspondence to stimulation via virtual reality images, decided to do an experiment. He believed he was capable of actually making the mentally handicapped character smarter by exposing him to virtual reality and having him play these specific games specially suited for the purpose of stimulating the mind and making the man smart. As the movie went on, you could see the progress his mind made eventually to the point where he had super physic abilities.
At one point in the movie, there was a woman who was trying to get at the character going through the brain improvement process and eventually he took her to show her the virtual reality he was experiencing that was responsible for making him smarter. They seemed to be making out and doing all this stuff that they were also doing in real life which sort of reminded me second life and how people tend to make their avatars behave in a way that the user might in real life. The simulation ended up causing her trauma or messing up her mind, I wasn’t exactly sure which. This sort of demonstrated the point though that virtual reality and the cyberworld in general seems to be able to have an effect on people’s real lives even though it is just a simulation. Sort of how we blogged on that one simulation similar to second life about how the behavior of some weirdo killing avatars effected people in a way you might not expect.
The movie started out a little slow and was a little weird throughout the whole thing with it’s old style and strange story line, but I actually enjoyed watching it and was even a little disappointed when we couldn’t see the very end of it! =)