Reminders, 4 -4- 12

1. Reminders, 4-4-12 • Quiz #5 Monday (4/9) on UVG Ch. 6-7 and VGTR Ch. 4, 5, and 8 (Gamers, The Avatar, and Race and Gender) • 4th Paper due next Wednesday (4/11) • Rough Draft of Final Project due in two weeks (4/16) • Final Project due on the last day of class (4/30)

2. “Hyperidentities” • “Digital media, video games included, enable us—for the first time in history on such a scale—to manipulate our “selves” and to multiply them indefinitely.” (88) • “It follows then, that the presentation of one’s own person on the Internet resembles to some extent the user’s real-life identity.” (91) • Postmodernity—lack of cohesion, single self • “avatars are not an escape from our ‘self,’ they are rather a longed-for chance of expressing ourselves beyond physical limitations, they are a postmodern dream being materialized.” (100)

3. “Playing at Being” • “the avatar does double duty as self and other, symbol and index.” (106) • Evolution of avatars: spaceship of Spacewar!, implied self of Adventure, Pac-Man, FPS (Doom, Quake, etc.) • “If our unity is itself a misrecognition, then the video game, for all its chaotic cartoonishness, may constitute a small square of contemplative space: a laboratory, quiet and orderly by comparison with the complexity of the real world, in which we toy with subjectivity, play with being.” (123)

4. “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances” • The “rescue the princess” standard plot • “compulsory heterosexuality” (174) • “normative aspects of identity may be played with—altered or rejected—because the experience is ‘only a game’” (180) • “while heterosexuality is often the dominant sexuality portrayed in games, this ‘representation’ or ‘performance’ can be subverted—both through actions of the player and the structure of the game itself.” (190)