[-empyre-] Mods I like, games that move me and indy games as hopeful futures

[Jerome McDonough]

On Dec 16, 2010, at 3:07 AM, micha cárdenas wrote:

> At a recent event at UCSD/Calit2 called CRCA Exchange, Jeremy Douglass
> talked about his research into interactive fiction and the film Get
> Lamp. In that discussion I was reminded of how early text adventures
> also paralleled early online communities like MOO's, which of course
> prefigure today's virtual worlds like WoW and SL. In my discussions
> with philosopher Sandy Stone during Becoming Dragon, she criticized
> graphical MMO-worlds of today for their limited offerings of
> embodiment. While it's feasible to spend time and money to be a dragon
> in Second Life or a night elf in Wow, in a MOO it's only a matter of
> creativity of language to embody a cloud of smoke or a body of fire or
> have a character that is a beam of light.
>

I studied one of the early online, 3D graphical worlds, Alphaworld,  
for my dissertation.  The designers were actually philosophically  
opposed to the idea of allowing people to assume any form they wanted  
as an avatar.  They thought people should be represented as people in  
the system.  Of course the first thing the users did was figure out  
how to subvert the system so that they could start walking around as  
trees, giant chess pieces, etc.  There was a bit of a battle for  
awhile between the users and the implementors over that.

Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-5916
jmcdonou at uiuc.edu





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