Part One: Mario, The Sims and World of Warcraft
In this section, Meadows talks about the Sims, which up until this class, I have had no experience with. The game itself is pretty fascinating, especially considering all the things you can make your characters do. Meadows breaks down Sim’s users into four categories: The conformers, The Death Dealers, The Reality Television Viewers, and The Doll Housers. Immediately after playing Sims for the first time, I was able to categorize myself as a “Reality Television Viewer.” I was fascinated by the natural interaction between the two characters I had created and can see how people get wrapped up in this life. I was also able to tell that other people in class were falling in to other categories. One thing that Meadow’s said that stood out in my mind was that “The characters are not controlled by the player, but a player can determine the emotional recipes of the character as he or she is building it.” Before playing Sims I just assumed that the characters did exactly as they were told, but I quickly learned otherwise. My group and I found it absolutely impossible to get our characters to behave the way we wanted, and they really did seem to take on a life of their own.
Part Two: The Three White Girls From YouTube
I found this section to be really amusing. For me, social interaction through an avatar is not real and a lot gets lost in translation. There is no way for you to tell who is behind an avatar- I used to play word games on gsn.net and sometimes I would forget to change the default avatar that was a little punk guy, and there was no way for anyone else to know that wasn’t me. I thought this section was really neat, especially after finding out that all three girls were actually acting under an identity other than their own. I think people do communicate online because it is so easy to be someone else. You can push your real life aside and take on a new persona that embodies everything you wish your real life was. In a society that is so focused around online communication, it is easy for people to build an online following and literally live a second life entirely different from their own.
Part Three: A Point of View
I found this section really interesting because I had no idea that there was more than one point of view that you could use when creating characters. On page 20, Meadows discusses the way that point of view can change the perspective of narration. I had no idea that avatars were so complex before- the fact that people use different features to alter the depth of narration of a character was fascinating to me. This section in meadows pointed out a lot of neat things regarding the actual physical appearance of avatars and ways to adjust how people see your characters.
Part Four: A Simple Character
In this section, Meadows describes creating an avatar as classic character development. This struck me as being weird at first, because I think of classic character development as being a result of writing, but this is starting to replace that. When I started to think about it though, I do think that just as much character development goes in to an avatar as it does to a character in a book. I actually think that it requires more because of the fact that you physically have to create a character that looks the way you want them to and that embodies the quality of character that you want. He also says that internet consists mostly of small avatar villages, which is also not something i’ve thought of before. Every website that we are on uses an avatar to represent ourselves.
I guess overall I’ve just never thought of how prominent avatars are in the digital world or the effect they have on our communication. Although I can never see myself becoming really involved in an avatar-driven world, I am fascinated with the idea that people live through characters in a digital environment and am looking forward to experimenting more with digital characters.
