GAMES ASSIGNMENT
To Students who did NOT attend
SPEAKER NIGHT on Wed, 1 November: Mary
Whitton and Daniel Ward: Serious games,
and game addiction: |
You have two
choices for the Games Assignment. You can do the same assignment
as usual based on the PowerPoint slides and readings or you can do the
following assignment instead. Use the
assigned readings as your primary sources. |
Literary scholar Janice Radaway argues that when people read romance or
adventure novels, they are not necessarily escaping from real life, but
resisting its limited appeal: that is, they
are building realities that are less limited and more
interesting than their own. Reading
the novel becomes a form of resistance to the humdrum of
everyday life, rather than an escape from it. Indeed,
people are still very much a part of both lives: one is simply enriched
by the other. |
Media Researcher Henry Jenkins agrees with the notion of
resistance. He believes that television and movies enrich fans
whose real lives are limited whether because of economic realities,
medical, or emotional ones. |
Couldn't these ideas
extend to spending time in an on-line multi-user game or in a virtual
community? |
Questions to consider for your writeup: |
For many serious gamers,
time spent in the virtual environment is much more enjoyable than in
real space (face to face). And if someone
is enjoying his/her interactions with game friends, what's the harm? Some of Sherry Turkle's patients have reported
being happier when they are online than when they meet with people face
to face, for reasons ranging from simple shyness to phobias. |
Many people who create their "game characters" put a lot of their own personalities into them (such as in the much discussed " |
Is the real self (in real
space) always the "naturally occurring" one?
Some sociologists argue that real life
itself is also a social construct where one may act or
behave very differently with friends than with strangers, or in the
presence of co-workers when having a beer after hours.
So which is the real person, then? Isn't this the same? |
If one cannot change the real environment, is there anything wrong with spending more time in virtual environments? Why or why not? Where should the line be drawn, if at all? |