#chid250c

[chid250c]

CRITICAL REVIEW: Minecraft by Caroline C.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIhs8_m5qPc

Minecraft is a wide-open sandbox PC/Xbox game developed by Markus Persson, or “Notch”, and developed and distributed by Mojang.  The world is block-based, with cubes made of different materials that spawn to simulate the “natural environment” in terms of aesthetics and gameplay.  There are three gameplay modes: survival, creative, and hardcore.  In survival mode, your character, Steve?, wakes up at sunrise on a random spot in a randomly generated map and has 10 minutes of daylight to figure out how to protect himself from the mobs that spawn after the sun sets.  To do this, you have to collect wood blocks from trees and use them to craft tools and weapons, so that you can kill passive mobs for food and hostile mobs in combat.  Getting killed will respawn you back at where you started, and you have to find your items again.  In creative mode, you have access to unlimited amounts of items and blocks, cannot die (except in the Void under the map), and have the ability to fly and destroy any block instantly.  In hardcore mode, you play as you would in survival, except with the condition that you cannot respawn after dying.  Instead, you have to delete the map. To “finish” the game, you need to defeat the difficult to find Ender Dragon boss mob, and slaying the Ender Dragon will take you to a poem of sorts that suggests that both the game and the “real world” are a long dream.  The dream analogy enforces the idea of a narrative in this otherwise wide-open game.  

One of the interesting things about this game is your avatar, Steve?.  His default form has somewhat brown skin, brown hair, and blue eyes, and is apparently male if his nickname is enough of a signifier.  In terms of gender, Notch has declared all Minecraft characters to be without sex, but the game itself indicates otherwise with the animals, such as the cows, that have a clear gender.  Animals reproduce by “kissing” for about four seconds, which indicates that two animals are necessary for the game’s version of sex, so it’s left somewhat ambiguous how gender works for them.  As for Steve?, he is referred to as male because his default form has no indicator of gender except for his male-sounding name.  His racial identity is even more problematic, as he looks vaguely black, but by changing your “skin”, which is the design of your avatar’s surface, you can make a different-colored, or even a different-gendered, character based off of style signifiers used in the “real” world.  This avatar customization does not allow your character to wear a dress, which makes female identification difficult while indicating the male as the default and skirts as stereotypically “girly”.

Another interesting aspect is the difference between Survival and Creative mode.  In survival mode, the game is designed to be realistic, with the blocks mimicking forests, deserts, oceans and caves, and there are rigid boundaries in your abilities, such as your hunger bar and health bar, as well as added danger during the night phase.  Creative mode, on the other hand, gives you far more flexibility.  While neither mode explicitly states a goal, both modes have specific formations of identity: in survival mode, your experience points accumulate as you go for long periods of time without dying, and in creative mode, you have the time and resources to build massive, elaborate structures that you can invite your friends to see and explore.  There is overlap between the two, however, as you can still build in survival mode.  In fact, building elaborate structures is more satisfying when you have to collect the blocks for them deep in an underground cave while minding lava and exploding creepers. 

In short, these strange formations of identity would make Minecraft a very interesting game to play with “mediating identities” in mind.  The avatar customization and the culture of building and survival would be interesting to explore, as well as the freedom allowed in the gameplay.  The YouTube video is one of a vast number of short songs written about Minecraft, describing the many structures one player has discovered while exploring various servers.  

[chid250c]

CRITICAL REVIEW: Borderlands 2 - Bo

Borderlands 2 is a mix between an action role-playing and a first-person shooter video game and is a sequel to the first Borderlands that was released in 2009. The game is developed by Gearbox Software and reaches multiple platforms of PC, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, which creates a larger possible population to attain and participate in playing this game, especially that it is also an online-game. 

The focus is to complete quests and missions, an overall campaign, as a "vault hunter", in which the player can choose from four different characters and to kill Handsome Jack. The setting is on a planet called Pandora, which inhabits all types of people, animals, hybrids, robots, and aliens and covers different types of landscape. As the game progresses, the player develops increasing skills, attaining the status of higher levels through experience points and various guns.

The four characters display an interesting array. The first character presented is a Caucasian, blonde-haired, army-like man named Axton that is in the Commando class. His combat style is to "keep to cover and never give the enemy a chance," which is already implying that he is the good guy.Secondly, Zero is the Assassin class, who is visually seen as an androgynous robot, wears a helmet similar to the helmets Daft Punk wear. It's interesting that its action skill is Deception because of the idea that there is a fear towards non-humans because of their intelligence and non-humanistic qualities. Thirdly, the only female, Maya of the Siren class, who looks fairylike with blue-abstract tattoos, blue short hair, and a modern looking Kill Bill yellow jumpsuit. Her combat style is to control the ebb and flow of the battlefield. Lastly, Salvador from the Gunzerker is the only identifiable minority, a Hispanic background. He is a buff, testosterone-filled male that seems to be powerful, but yet is shorten by his height. His action skill is "Gunzerking" and combat style is "Bigger Guns! CHARGE!" He is short in height compared to everyone. 

When selecting characters, there is provided very interesting options to change appearance and the name of the character. The player is able to change the "head" of the character and "skin" which is costume and hairstyle. (can be seen in the video provided)

**Please skip to 2m19s.

What happens when every time your character dies…

The revival of death is very virtual reality-like. The character just warps through some cyberspace tunnel and returns to living. There is nothing human about this. 

Borderlands 2 would definitely be a strong match to the course syllabus because the characters presented plays a lot with gender, posthumanism, heterosexuality, class, and race. Personally, while playing this game, I had noticed many of these elements immediately because of the knowledge I had learned in CHID 250. On the other hand, the concern lies in customers that buy this game because to the individual it is just "awesome" or typically enjoy playing these games, do they notice these elements? Do these elements matter? 

This game provides a world that is post-humanistic and seemingly complicates the idea of that Earth no longer exists and living has become ether. In a world, where the character relies on the direction of a robot and also encouraged by a female hologram called the ECHO communicator. Identities are available to be changed over the course of the game. This video game performs the idea of cyberspace and its freedom; 1) externally, an individual has the ability to play into a world separate from Earth and its normalities and 2) internally, the character lives in a cyberspace itself, freedom to roam the landscape and the act against an enemy instead of laws and systematic government. 

[chid250c]

The word "superhuman" is used instead of "posthuman" in this interview.  Is the decentering of the human the same as the augmentation of the human?

-Caroline

[cutlipn1-blog]

Nick's iLog #8: What Does a Technological Identity Look Like?"

I found this picture under the caption "abstract ecosystem", and think that it represents several aspects of my conceptualization of technological identity pretty well. I think that one very important aspect of the term is the game of give and take that it entails-a "technological identity" (I suppose like any identity) must be in relation to other technological identities in order to be made sense of and given meaning. The massive number of identities in cyberspace, as well as those in the "real world" that are heavily integrated with technology, are all involved in very complex interactions with one another, interactions shaped through the lens of not only "human" interaction but also technological interactions. These interactions are like an ecosystem, different identities rely on one another in order to be maintained just as the different components of an ecosystem must be balanced with one another. At the same time, however, technology has warped our already weak understanding of what identity is and does in the context of other identities. We do not know what the mediation of identity by cyberspace technologies, or even by technologies as simple as language (not that identity can necessarily exist without these identities) entails, and thus, the ecosystem of technological identities is abstract-it cannot be conceptualized in a "normal" manner.

[chid250c]

Jassine's iLog#8: What Does a Technological Identity Look Like?

Now that the course is coming to an end, when I think of technological identity I think of it as an extension of identity through technology. We've discussed how clothes are a technology, and how the way we dress is a form of expression, a performative tool, that demonstrates a part of our identity whether it be personality, status, or any number of other things, which is always up for interpretation. Moreover, when you die and your family has to figure out what to do with all your old belongings, they'll probably see your old clothes and think of you. They're an extension of your identity, they're artifacts of you. I chose this WALL-E shirt in particular because when I asked my brothers what they thought of when they thought of technological identity, they said WALL-E or ROB. This made me think of AIs and personhood, which I thought was another interesting interpretation.