Week 8 Readings – Shabnam
Cinema does not provide the experience of pride or guilt – which games claim to do.
Q – How can possibly emotions of pride and guild produce empathy and social connection? Can these emotions provide catharsis or simply damages the gamer’s ‘affectability’?
Social context and role play: Goffman talks about the appropriateness of social behaviour: for instance even if you don’t want to smile at your neighbour, you nod politely. This doesn’t need to be with a game. You can adopt an alternate personality – which actually may be more representative of your true self.
Q – Can gaming therefore prompt you or encourage you to remove your ‘masks’ and ‘filters’ which are assumed as a result of ‘socialization’ – can this help lower these filters and result in more truthful relationships? Alternatively does it run the risk of mayhem?
Comment – I would like to argue against the notion that ‘only games that can evoke a sense of choice and responsibility resulting in guilt’. Films with a strong social context, which provoke you enough to get you out of your comfort zone can also produce feelings of guilt through their ‘message’: “Me too” OR: “Save the Planet” social responsibility – shots of asphyxiated animals etc. evoke a feeling of guilt in the viewer: I am part of the problem kind of feeling – that such ‘message’ films evoke in the viewer. (in reference to the points made on Page 9)
AI questions:
Q – If technology designs our behaviour as human beings, how can it alter previously known patterns of behaviour for better (or worse)?
Q – How is AI going to offer information to the world in which we learn more about ourselves? – Is AI going to be a mirror to the world?