Week 6 Readings

The part of the readings from this time that I really responded to was the first section on computer games. My aspect of the group project involves a game from a genre of computer gaming that might be considered the height of computer gaming. Millions of people play MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). The servers of Everquest and World of Warcraft have higher populations and better virtual economies than some small countries. The game I am featuring in my portion of the group project might not be on this large of scale, but it is still an extremely popular game.

I think this post will probably be combining the homework for this week just because the reading was so related. City of Villains/Heroes is a game that remediates comic books in an intensely interactive way. The interesting thing that I discovered when I was working on our project is that the game saves all screenshots without the interface, making the pictures very transparent. The GUI definitely goes away for that aspect. Actual gameplay, however, is very hypermediated because the gui has a lot of small windows with a lot going on in them. I chose to keep the screenshots without the gui because the purpose of our movie is to portray each avatar as a "real" person. (This also deals with the photorealistic graphics kinda).

The other part of the reading that really relates to our project is the "Social Spaces" section in the computer games chapter. Jennifer is doing her portion from Second Life, which focuses on the social more so than on action or the idea of accomplishing a task. The online games also have the potential of being really social because sometimes you need to get a group to accomplish a certain task or to level up faster than you can by yourself, but you don't have to be social to play. I think Second Life is pretty much entirely social. If you don't hang out with "people" on there, it seems like it would be pretty boring.