Isbister Questions (Derval)
1. Isbister writes: “This capacity to evoke actual feelings of guilt from a fictional experience is unique to games. A reader or filmgoer may feel emotions when presented with horrific fictional acts on the page or screen, but responsibility and guilt are not generally among them… Because they depend on active player choice, games have an additional palette of social emotions at their disposal.” (8-9)
–> In what ways are the visual and narrative techniques used in games to create identification with characters (allowing feelings like guilt to arise from the choices one makes) derived from cinematic language? Rather than seeing these kinds of emotional responses as unique to game environments, can we think of them as an evolution of cinema?
2. Do self created avatars and self-designed environments in gaming offer the opportunity for radical reclamation of hetero patriarchal, white-supremacist media? Do these reclamations, like the Indigenous Machinima in Second Life that Aaron and Lia showed for their show and tell, offer viable alternatives to exclusionary mainstream media, or simply demonstrate the necessity of creating new networks of production and distribution?
3.What are some unconventional social experiences that people have had through networked gaming? Has anyone in the class fostered valuable connections this way? What unique things can we gain from these social experiences?