This document discusses postmodern perspectives on virtual identities and worlds. It explores how in virtual spaces like Second Life, people can take on fluid identities through avatars, blurring boundaries between real and virtual. This challenges traditional concepts of identity and experience. The document also discusses how some view virtual spaces not as an escape from reality but as an extension of ways to express oneself. Businesses are increasingly using virtual worlds for activities normally done in real life, showing how virtual templates can enable serious uses.

1. Lesson 7: Violence
Leading onto the avatar

2. In what ways do audiences operate
differently in a post-modern world?
Salen and Zimmerman article
Homework: research Salen and
Zimmerman

3. Second Life:
“We create avatars to leave our bodies behind,
yet take the body with us in the form of codes
and assumptions about what does and does not
constitute a legitimate interface with reality
– virtual or otherwise.” (Rehak, in Wolf and Pearson 2003:123)
Create avatar, move around island, talking to
other avatars connected to real people, who
are doing the same as you.
Business, entertainment and education are
clamouring to develop more and more virtual
land & spaces to do more virtual activities.
Benefits are in cost, efficiency and time.

4. You can trade real money in Linden Dollars & then buy
and sell in Second Life.
At The Serious Games Institute in Coventry businesses
are supported in running elements of their work in this
virtual world.
This is an example of a video game template being the
starting point for serious commerce.
In post-modern media terms we want to
know what is going on when someone
takes on this virtual identity, in relation
to the previous quotation from Rehak.

5. Duality and boundary-blurring = definitely PM
Is it a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-
playing game)? It is not actually a game.
BUT it is a large group, online, sharing virtual
experiences = it challenges traditional concepts and
traditional gamers.
“With all video games there is a defined ‘objective’ and for video games as
opposed to multi-user online games a narrative as well. A user must ‘do’
within this environment and has specific goals to achieve at all stages…and
receives feedback and rewards when each goal is achieved. These users often
feel initially disenfranchised when they enter the Second Life world because
they are not immediately greeted with a narrative and set a goal or task. They
find the concept that they can simply ‘be’ in this environment rather ‘do’ alien
and sometimes intimidating.” (Bennett: 2006: 6)

6. Consider games that also offer ‘be’ rather than ‘do’.
Post-modern games – always involve interplay of
tasks/goals
Non-strategic ‘hanging around’ could be seen as a move
away from this.
Second Life being influential – moving games designers
away from narratives.
(We will study future movements in gaming at the end of
the unit)

7. Link to Baudrillard –
In a post-modern culture we are able to design
ourselves – fluid/temporary
Change our identity in ways previous generations
could not
Argument: this is not a substitute or escape from
reality, but an extension of it – extending
expression of ourselves beyond physical
limitations

8. Protagonist – the hero of a play or a novel, and often
the focal point of the narrative.
In many digital games, there is one central character
which can be regarded as the game’s protagonist.
Often called the avatar (from Sanskrit avatara –
incarnation of deity).

9. Sex, Lies and Avatars :
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.04/turkle.html
Snow's famous phrase delineating "the two cultures" - science and
the humanities - got it wrong from the outset. In the house of the
human mind, there are many mansions, many cultures. The British
physicist and novelist presented his two-cultures idea to great
acclaim in a 1959 book. Who then could have foreseen that Snow
got it wrong because he was a modernist?
A generation later, it takes a postmodernist to guide us through the
many mansions Snow failed to imagine. That postmodernist may well
be Sherry Turkle, the cyberspace explorer and professor of the
sociology of science at MIT. No matter that Turkle calls herself not a
postmodernist but "a modern woman telling a postmodern tale."

10. Her postmodern tale is about computing - the technology, she says, that
brings postmodernism down to earth.
Turkle is author of three seminal books - Psychoanalytic Politics, The
Second Self, and her most recent, Life on the Screen - each a
measured, meticulous, and ultimately mind-reordering exploration of the
ways people think about themselves and their worlds in these
postmodern times. What is real? What is virtual? What is living? What is
nonliving? Of the many selves I am, who is the real me?
For postmodernists like Turkle, no unitary truth resides anywhere.
Postmodernism celebrates this time, this place; and it celebrates
adaptability, contingency, diversity, flexibility, sophistication, and
relationships - with the self and with the community. Modernism coexists
with postmodernism, which makes sense if you think of modernism as
the spirit of the Tofflerian Second Wave (all those railroads and
smokestacks that we still use and need) and postmodernism as the spirit
of the Third Wave.

11. So Newtonian physics is modern, but quantum
mechanics is postmodern. Biology is mainly
postmodern, and so, maybe, are the national and
global economies. Modernist birthday parties had
cakes, candles, presents, and games; the main
game at postmodern birthday parties is watching
and commenting on the videos just shot. A
modernist always wore a tie with a jacket; a
postmodernist throws a well-tailored jacket over
a T-shirt. Modernist Walter Cronkite could end
his newscast with "That's the way it is." Dan
Rather must end more tentatively with "That's
part of our world tonight."

12. Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into
postmodernism when people got personal computers. Computing
continues its postmodern odyssey through the Internet to the most
dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing
online personae.
With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the
rules first, its hypertext (no one pathway through the text is the correct
way or the best way), computing now is as postmodernist as it gets.
It's characterized, as Turkle puts it, by "the precedence of surface
over depth, of simulation over the real, of play over seriousness.”
For philosophers who have lamented the lack of objects to represent
the postmodern condition, computing now offers the information of the
Internet and the connections of the World Wide Web; the windows,
icons, and layers of personal computing; the creatures in a SimLife
game; the simulations of the quantum world routinely used in
introductory physics courses.
Handout on simscity

13. Computing also offers pluralism, different things for different
people. In Life on the Screen, Turkle returns to one of the people
she interviewed for The Second Self. "Computers have changed,
times have changed, Rafe has changed," she writes. "But I could
also write: Times have changed; Rafe has changed; computers
have changed. In fact, there are six possible sequences. All are
simultaneously true. There is no simple, causal chain.”
Postmodernism. Right in front of you. Your laptop embodies new
ways of thinking, carries you to them (or them to you), and opens
you to them.
Alongside Turkle's claim that computing is what brings
postmodernism down to earth, we can put what Jay David Bolter,
author of Turing's Man and Writing Space, once mischievously
remarked: that the computer has transformed the knotty difficulties
of postmodern theory into the trivially obvious.

14. Hyperidentities
• Transformation of culture
• MMORPGs revolutionary in game medium
• Argues against games alienating people
• Experimental arena to watch mechanisms
increasingly found in everyday life
• Combines entertainment with communication
(first mass medium to do)
• Culture of simulation