blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for gaming and narrative
July 22, 2007 at 11:07 am · Filed under Gender, gaming and narrative, second life
My starting point is the term Self only because right now it’s the word that comes to mind when I think about my avatars, Me-the person that’s writing this blog, and my experience of Me being in SL embodying my avatars. Using the concept of a Self helps me operationalize my thinking. It helps me analyze my experiences by constructing an artificial separation between mind and body. In practice, I don’t however experience or believe there’s a separation.
In “Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds” (The Social Life of Avatars, edited by Ralph Schroeder), the authors point out the importance of seeing embodiment as relevant to both virtual (digital) and physical (biological) experiences, in that we interact with both worlds through our bodies.
No matter what, I and others experience some embodied representation of Me and my Self. But what does that mean? What does it look like and how does it feel? How do my thinking and actions change as a result?
Layered onto of the idea of embodiment, are ideas about identity, role, gender, race, and physical appearance.
The verbs to practice and perform are useful for talking about embodiment. For example, gender is an abstraction until we practice or perform it. This is true in both worlds, however in SL it takes on much more complexity because we can change our avatar’s gender instantly. Both of my avatars have androgynous names so that gender is not inscribed on them via their names. I can then experiment with performing gender. It’s very interesting how gender has been designed into SL standard avatars. You see it when you play with your avatar’s appearance. In SL yesterday I met a female resident who commented that her breasts were way too big; she quickly qualified that by adding that her [avatar] shape must have been designed by a man. I met another resident whose human-looking avatar looked entirely different from other residents. Her hair was short, her body proportions and clothing were subtle yet distinct. She had a kind of aesthetic sophistication you rarely see in SL. It reminded me of a Parisian. I complimented her on her look and she told me that she had designed the entire avatar. She called them “Me’s.” “Me’s” she said are all unique. She was very proud of her designs and being able to craft individuals. She’s a graphic designer in first life.
How do these experiences map onto to first life and vice versa? How are first life gendered practices performed in SL? What can we say about embodiment in first life given the bodies of celebrities and those of our friends, family and neighbors? When I look at bodies in first life, I see poverty written onto the bodies laborers. I see the bodies of single working mothers as distinct from childless women. Wealthy retired executive bodies are distinct from those of retired middle managers. At the SDSU gym, I see masculinity performed in the weights room; on campus I see femininity practiced with long hair. There’s no escaping the fact lived experiences in the digital and biological worlds are always embodied experiences.
July 6, 2007 at 1:48 pm · Filed under coolstuff, gaming and narrative
Modders are people who go into video games and do their own fiddling, with the characters, textures etc. Like Machinima, where people create their own comic or movies that have in-game graphics, the learning the happens here is remarkable. First teachers can mod games to match learning outcomes, then students too can mod games and make predictions of what’s going to happen in new scenarios. Both of these get at narrative structures and the ability for a learner to manipulate and participate in complex narratives.
Read more
August 21, 2006 at 6:27 pm · Filed under Gender, gaming and narrative
BBC’s story quotes David Gardner of EA, the producer of Sims and many other games, which he says are played by 90% of boys and 40% of girls.
Something’s felt a little off with those generalized statistics about what young people are doing. What it signals to my mind is a real disconnect and cleft, not just in the gaming industry but in software and hardware industries too. There’s ample evidence suggesting that girls are “not welcome” in engineering and computer science cultures from the beginning–in school. Technology is gendered, historically and systemically.
July 22, 2006 at 6:30 pm · Filed under Research methods, gaming and narrative
I spent today with 30 other people and Lourdes Arquelles finding out about narrative inquiry. I like the inquiry as compared with research, and the idea of a statement of intent as compared with the statement of a problem. The organization of a narrative dissertation feels more holistic, more readable, more organic and natural.
Narratives, discourses, stories, micro and meta, I can’t decide that I want to do a narrative inquiry without knowing first, what I’m going to write about. I think I can decide though that I want to tell a story, that my dissertation tells a story, or multiple and multilayered stories.
So I’ll have to look at the stories, the published and unpublished, the formal and informal about something.
Why a narrative? If I shouldn’t begin with the method, why am I doing just that?
What is my orientation, the ideology and philosophy driving this decision?
What words convey what stories do?
They portray, they explicate, they provoke, they question, they summarise, synthesize, they add to discourses, they intersect and disrupt discourses. They
come together to form meta-stories, they bastion notions, beliefs and understandings about something. Why not a narrative?
Area of inquiry: Learning, adults learning, faculty learning, faculty learning informally, formally.
Initial intentions
To portray adults/faculty members’ understanding of how they as individuals learn.
To juxtapose with or complement “research” on how adults learn.
To expand the body of knowledge on learning.
To document the language and the ways of knowing adult/faculty use to understand their own learning.
Area of inquiry–digital narratives used by educators, distributed conversations of educators.
Area of inquiry
Knowledge and understanding about the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Intent of inquiryTo expand the body of knowledge about the scholarship of teaching and learning.
A start. or something like that.
July 9, 2006 at 3:25 pm · Filed under News, Teaching with Technology, gaming and narrative
The corporate gaming industry is justifiably criticized for producing primarily “shoot ‘em up” games. It’s nice to see that there are conversations and resources for social-change games.
In Tim Lauer’s post I came upon this article: Can Social-Change Video Games Tackle Divorce, Poverty, Genocide? and I thought yes, ok, let’s hear what game developers are saying and doing.
I always appreciate the “yes, but …” voice. S/he is usually experienced and sophisticated in wisdomed way. S/he brings up those ugly things, the practical things, the idealist can’t or won’t seem to hear.
I just started a class at Claremont University. The other students are primarily k-12 teachers, in and around the LA area. Claremont is about equity education and social justice themes. It’s telling perhaps, that in a class of about 15, me being one of “oldest” by far, from the looks of their faces, I was one of 2 people taking notes on my laptop. Notebooks? Pens? But you’re 25, you’re supposed to be a net -gener?
“Other People’s Children” by Lisa Delpit and “The Schools we need and why we don’t have them” by E.D. Hirsh, introductory readings to a class on learning theories and pedagogies gave more words to my typical “yes, but…” voice. Or should I change that to “yes, and …”?
“In the end, Koster proved to be knocking the legs out from the Games for Change movement in order to champion what he cherishes most about games: their levity. It wasn’t a happy kind of levity he was praising as much as it was the fact that games are good at making no situation seem altogether dire — nor outright intractable. The problem with the world’s real-life issues, he said, is that the crisis of Darfur and the squalor of Haiti seem insurmountable. People throw up their hands in a way they don’t with problems posed in a video game.”
I’ve got big gaps, isolated dots looking for connections because I see these issues from several angles. Teaching and learning social change, being social change, being a victim, being completely isolated from poverty, or completely consumed by it. “The biggest thing social change is mostly lacking is worldwide will.” That’s probably the biggest gap. We’ve got the money, the ideals, the knowhow.
