This term has been really interesting. I have played video games for most of my life, but never really taken the time to view them through a social justice lense. Writing a paper on Skyrim, a game I have played since I was 12, gave me the opportunity to think about what the writers of the game were trying to accomplish with their quests and the way players interact with the narrative. I definitely got a new perspective on my favorite quest, which was not what I expected to happen. I figured that because I knew it so well, I would be able to analyze it easily from what I already knew. What actually happened was that I learned a lot of new things about the way one of the characters was designed and written. She was far more complex than I had ever imagined, and I wasn’t even able to include a whole other side of her because it wasn’t relevant to the paper. She is absolutely a three-dimensional character, with enough content and depth to further my interest in examining her story line. There was a lot I wasn’t able to see before, and I’m excited to keep analyzing her as I play the game on my own time.
It is also interesting to me that we discussed the concept of simulacra in class. Just the week before we talked about it in lecture, I had played a game called Simulacra. It’s an app and while it costs money, it was well worth the five dollars. The game starts with you “opening a phone” and you look through it and find out that the person the phone belonged to is missing. You use all the content she kept on her phone to find clues as to where she might be and in the process, you learn a lot about her. After a certain point it feels like you know her, and the friends of hers you have talked to feel almost like your own. I won’t describe the rest of the plot in case you are interested in playing, but long story short, you get to know the missing girl through the persona she has created on the internet and through technology. You have access to all of her private information and get to know her more intimately than even her closest friends do. So it was really cool to fully understand the concept of simulacra through this game, and I definitely recommend it if you were to want to use a hands on example to describe the concept. Thanks for such an interesting class!
Week 11: Ambivalence, Conflict, Violence
I am not an aggressive person. I avoid confrontation to the point of fault. And it made sense to me that I found, during the past two weeks, that the only reason my aggression level was higher was when I was playing the game and my concentration was interrupted by someone talking to me. This only seemed to be the case when I was actively paying the game in that moment. If I paused it, I would immediately calm down. This may be the case because I play video games recreationally, so I’m used to switching in and out of an aggressive mindset fairly quickly. I was able to learn at a young age how to manage aggression and frustration when playing video games. I can easily recognize when I am feeling outwardly aggressive towards the people around me as a result of the adrenaline from playing the game. Emotion recognition and management is not a difficult skill to learn, especially if you want to be sure you don’t hurt the feelings of the people around you. While when in this state of aggression, I will occasionally lose patience and snap at someone, I never physically lash out.
That is one major difference I have noticed; that I am completely at peace with killing things and acting violently in video games, but would never kill or act violently outside of self defense in real life. Even if it was self defense, I seriously doubt I could ever kill a person or an animal. I feel that this is the case with a lot of people, as video games are not real and generally have no real life consequences. The things in the game are not alive and cannot feel pain. The only times one might hesitate to kill in a game is if the thing is useful to you, if you have an emotional attachment to it, or if there would be in-game consequences that you don’t want to deal with. This is definitely not the case in real life. People are conscious, and have their own lives. They feel pain and when they die, they don’t really re-spawn. I would not be cool with killing people or acting violently in real life.
Week 9: Toxicity, Trolls, and Tricksters: Beyond Gamergate to Discord
I didn’t interact much with other players in general. I found it difficult to engage with other players, and as a result I kind of gave up. The method of speaking made it difficult to do things and talk at the same time, which I wasn’t a huge fan of. However, I did convince my little brother to download the game so we could play it together. After a significant struggle to get both our avatars in the same place, it ended up being pretty entertaining, although the game didn’t really feel designed for two players. We both kept going off and doing different things because the tasks we were doing were not team based. We used the app Discord to talk to each other. It is an app used by gamers to interact when playing games that don’t have easy ways to chat with other players. My brother described it to me as “a bunch of big group chats”. You can do audio or just text and my brother and I decided to use the audio function so we wouldn’t have to stop the gameplay every time one of us wanted to say something. It did enhance the experience, I felt more excited and willing to explore all aspects of the game.
It interested me to see the various groups and leagues because I preferred to play the game on my own. I think it must be a very different experience to play it while belonging to an in game group. I also noticed a fair bit of in-group out-group mentality based around these guilds. They like to have a feeling of exclusivity and as a result, anyone in the out-group was inferior. No surprises there, but it was interesting to see some based on real world nationality. The only way to determine if they were or weren’t of that nationality was by just taking the word of the player. The restriction had absolutely nothing to do with the game and was just a way to create a faux sense of community. Overall, I didn’t explore the multiplayer side of things enough to find any real benefit, and stuck with playing on my own.
Week 7: Storytelling
While I engaged with the narrative, I found that a lot of the stories told in Guild Wars 2 were a bit predictable. I found myself more drawn to the fighting based tasks because while it didn’t have a ton of variation, I was more attentive to what was happening. It was difficult for me to become emotionally invested in most of the characters and stories. I am fairly familiar with a few games, and I felt that a lot of the narrative was repeated across games. While usually that doesn’t make much of a difference for me, there was another aspect to why this game in particular didn’t hold my imaginative processes. I believe it was the fact that it was a multiplayer online game that I had a hard time becoming invested in it. I thought a bit about why I felt the experience was cheapened by playing online with others and I came to realize that one of my favorite parts of games is the individualistic quality gained from being “the chosen one”. When you see a bunch of other people you don’t know going through the game also thinking they are the only savior of this fictional world it doesn’t give you the same sense of being special. I looked at a few of the other games I enjoy playing, and determined that it might not be this game in particular that lacks that feeling for me, but perhaps MMORPG’s in general. I tried a few of them, and none really captured my attention the same way a lot of single first person narrative games have. I particularly enjoy those which have an open world aspect as well.
Skyrim V, Fallout 4, and Portal have been my favorite games so far, and each of them tell the story of the chosen one (The Dragonborn, The Sole Survivor, and the last test participant). In each there is a different backstory and a different reason as to why they are the only one to save the day. I believe this need I have to feel like not just an individual, but a special individual stems from the capitalist romanticization of the individual. This significantly affects my drive to play through these storylines because I am not able to be invested if I don’t feel special. As a medium for narrative, games can be extremely effective, but other societal and individual factors must be considered and it wouldn’t be easy to make a generalization. I need a narrative that appears to be tailored for even if that is not actually the case.
Week 5: Wandering the Constructed World
There are lots of areas in the game that appear infested with dangerous animals that you are tasked to kill. It is posed as a sort of pest extermination, and once the creatures start fighting back, there appears to be no other option than to kill them. Upon consideration, this is a tad problematic as far as ideologies go, but overall it’s not surprising. Can you think of any other time in real life a group of people with guns encroached on another’s land (and killed them to get it)? This colonial mindset is thoroughly placed throughout a majority of games. A kind of expectation that whatever you come across is fair game to claim for your own, as long as you kill some things first. It’s not just specific to land, often times there are treasures or special items you can gain as well. In this image, my character is in a cave that has been taken over by scorpionesque creatures and the goal is to steal their eggs. Of course they fight back, and you need to kill them to make sure your character doesn’t die and you can complete the quest. It seems as is if most of the tasks and quests outside of longer quest lines have this same kind of set up. You travel to a new area, some things try to kill you because you are invading, and then you kill them, feeling entirely justified because it is done under the guise of self defense. This kind of manifest destiny type of mindset is still very apparent in contemporary settings. One other thing I found interesting was that most of the places you went to, that had dangers you were meant to kill were areas that hadn’t been developed yet. Most were in nature, like caves, forests, lakes, or mountains. The places that didn’t pose any threats were the areas that had buildings, merchants, and other things that seemed to imply a developed society. So upon further analysis, I was able to recognize the colonial ideologies that are present in the game and take notice of how my character isn’t necessarily as righteous as I might want her to be.
Creating my character
It took me a very long time to decide with every choice that arose, and for some I asked my girlfriend to choose for me. I took the most time in two categories, picking a race and picking a class (and by that, I mean the assigned outfit). I eventually landed on the Charr and the Warrior. I found that I wanted a female avatar that looked cool, and had a fairly androgynous style, like me. The Charr seemed to fit that requirement better than most other races, especially when it came to the outfits assigned to the classes. Because I chose a female character, I found myself very conflicted with the overall styles associated to the races.I switched back and fourth about 20 times between different races and their different classes. The Charr were the least sexualized out of the characters I looked at and I believe this was a major influence on my decision. Most of the other races had the female avatars wearing armor that revealed legs and midriffs, as well as the bodies appearing hyper-sexualized in comparison to most of the male avatars. This didn’t really come as a surprise as that it upholds the reputation of MMORPGs that I am familiar with. Male avatars look bulky, with functional clothes, hyper-masculine, and generally edgy, while female avatars are much daintier, with what could be considered swimsuits. Often, you need to resort to the least human-looking option if you want a female character that has more variation. I identify with my character in that I present my own self as relatively androgynous and often it is difficult to uphold that style without feeling like I am no longer a woman.
I have a bit of experience when it comes to video games, and I usually play a warrior type character as my preferred fighting style is close range melee combat. I felt that it was very important for me to keep to this trend so that I might have an easier time adjusting to the game. I believe that this is a part of my identity when it comes to gaming. It’s where I feel most comfortable and at home.
I felt that the name was one of the least important choices for me to make. I am also terrible with names, so I asked my girlfriend what she thought I should name it. She said “Bruce Willis, from Die Hard” but when I put that in it was too many characters. So I suggested that we change it so it is shorter and also sounds more like a name. I think the name isn’t as important to me as the appearance because I generally play on my own. I view myself as the avatar and therefore I never really use the name, I just refer to it as me. This is interesting to me and I look forward to exploring this idea of self concept in the future.