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Upcoming Assignments and Insights on Avatars in Digital Media

Reminder for upcoming assignments: Quiz #5 on April 9 covering UVG Chapters 6-7 and VGTR Chapters 4, 5, and 8. The 4th paper is due next Wednesday (April 11) and a rough draft of the final project is due in two weeks (April 16). The final project, titled “Hyperidentities,” will be due on the last day of class (April 30). This week, we explore how digital media and avatars reflect and shape identity, considering concepts from postmodernity and the evolution of avatars through various games.

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Upcoming Assignments and Insights on Avatars in Digital Media

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Presentation Transcript

  1. Reminders, 4-4-12 • Quiz #5 Monday (4/9) on UVG Ch. 6-7 and VGTR Ch. 4, 5, and 8 (Gamers, The Avatar, and Race and Gender) • 4th Paper due next Wednesday (4/11) • Rough Draft of Final Project due in two weeks (4/16) • Final Project due on the last day of class (4/30)

  2. “Hyperidentities” • “Digital media, video games included, enable us—for the first time in history on such a scale—to manipulate our “selves” and to multiply them indefinitely.” (88) • “It follows then, that the presentation of one’s own person on the Internet resembles to some extent the user’s real-life identity.” (91) • Postmodernity—lack of cohesion, single self • “avatars are not an escape from our ‘self,’ they are rather a longed-for chance of expressing ourselves beyond physical limitations, they are a postmodern dream being materialized.” (100)

  3. “Playing at Being” • “the avatar does double duty as self and other, symbol and index.” (106) • Evolution of avatars: spaceship of Spacewar!, implied self of Adventure, Pac-Man, FPS (Doom, Quake, etc.) • “If our unity is itself a misrecognition, then the video game, for all its chaotic cartoonishness, may constitute a small square of contemplative space: a laboratory, quiet and orderly by comparison with the complexity of the real world, in which we toy with subjectivity, play with being.” (123)

  4. “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances” • The “rescue the princess” standard plot • “compulsory heterosexuality” (174) • “normative aspects of identity may be played with—altered or rejected—because the experience is ‘only a game’” (180) • “while heterosexuality is often the dominant sexuality portrayed in games, this ‘representation’ or ‘performance’ can be subverted—both through actions of the player and the structure of the game itself.” (190)

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