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!