Re: [-empyre-] hi
On 5 Jul 2004, at 10:20 AM, soft_skinned_space wrote:
We speak Gender (I do) but we should also speak class,
struggles, confrontation, conficts. Games are poweful tools, I want use
them for fun and for learning. To try to support another agenda than
the
most games show today. I am tired of shot ups, cover agents recovering
hostages and being blasted by guys at towers, I am tired to decide if I
want to be a Green Beret today or a Freedom fighter.
I think its the paradox, we are always reproducing the hegemonic models
but not creating new models of behaviour and relations.
I was involved in creating the old VNet system
which allowed the participants to "put on" any avatar
which they could make (in VRML) or find pre-made on the net...
the setting was established by the game-host
but the avatars and storyline were established by
whoever entered and participated in the game-space...
in some senses the opposite approach
to most of the online gaming spaces
there have of course been other game-spaces
which took an approach similar to this
[like Cybertown from Blaxxun, which I also worked on]
and older similarly-situated text-only spaces as well
[see the book "Flame Wars"
for some interesting discussions of these]
the two questions which come up for me
in reading this current thread
are 1) why the spaces with pre-structured storylines
seem to have been so very much more popular
than the participant-structured one
and 2) whether there are differences between
who tends to like/participate in
one type (pre-structured) versus the other (user-structured)
I do have some ideas on this
but I thought I'd interject some questions into this discussion
and "listen" a bit to what folks on this list think...
does a space need to provide a narrative stucture
to attract people in general to participate...
or to attract specific types of people?
what is it which is so attractive about
spaces with pre-structured narratives?
jeffs
--
Jeff Sonstein, Assistant Professor
Department of Information Technology
Rochester Institute of Technology
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- Dr. Science -
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