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 " A Rape in Cyberspace" case, particularly with the character named Legba),  and many often inhabit that character for years.    Others create their characters with traits they believe they truly possess but are afraid to show IRL (in real life) for fear of embarrassment, or other issues.  Many report that they feel more like their real selves when they are on-line than when they associate with people IRL. 

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?