#fluidself

MDA:20009 DIGITAL COMMUNITIES

Week 10: Playing the Crowd

In socially populated online gaming worlds, where overlapping rule sets, both strange and familiar are agreed to contractually and negotiated evolutionally, it is no surprise to find the attractions of escapism, accelerated ideal self-expression and intersection of political goals and societal communion (de Zwart & Humphreys 2014).

Out amongst the ethereal interstellar particles of hydrogen and helium that make up deep space, the MMORG (massive online roleplay game) of EVE, is combining all these attractions with the tiers of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs along its historical narrative thread, to see how humans react to contexts of what would seem to be the opposite of first world laws and governments (de Zwart & Humphreys 2014, p.78, Piech 2016).

Current percentage of gamers will be shipshape ready for interstellar war if and when it is declared thanks to the huge platforms of online gaming that involve conflict and military strategies, brutality and hegemony, elitism and bigotry that will shape the ‘Goffman frame’ of their social mores in a galaxy far far away where lack of a moral compass or sense of humanity may be deemed an asset, not a crime (de Zwart & Humphries 2014)

Away from the passivity of watching networked texts in a broadcast form, digitally networked nationstates are forming and storming and deciding who to cast their votes and video modes of affinity with, via their heavily invested online actions, environmental controls and intensive iterations of war and peace, crime and punishment and digitally networked socionomics (Taylor 1997).

THOUSANDS of Eve Online players just got SCREWED OVER by ONE GUY!  (Pretty Good Gaming, Published on Sep 15, 2017)

Sounds like Trump and the Nth/Sth Korea dynamic …

However, we don’t have to prostitute the fear factor of stranger danger and ‘others’ trauma online, to bulldoze policy, codes of practice and create a reactionary result of deeply centralized government controls with unprecedented power and no courts’ supervision back out into our offline communities (The Guardian 2017).

The high adrenalin addictive nature of affordance in some games is not the social norm for all and the crowdsourced networked communities of more listening and learning games can provide meta data for advocative socially inspiring activist and artistic causes (Taylor 1997, p.174).

 Its largely a matter of choice about which platforms of social gaming make your heart sing, whether it be a kickstarter game that calls for strategies that include both cruelty and sympathy or a Biogame, that harvests the networked pattern recognition of players to identify pathology strains!

http://biogames.ee.ucla.edu/

You could explore the great affinity online peeps have for cats and put your allegiance in the way of the HK Project, a truly cosmopolitan platform for aesthetics that do not include hegemony but instead encompass and welcome respect and diversity.

“ Although the team has worked hard so far on HK, it's still pretty early in its development cycle. The developer doesn't expect a release for several more years, especially considering that the team only consists of two humans and two cats (the blog also admits that the cat in charge of communication isn't doing its job very well).”

You could just as easily combine ground breaking codes of practice and aesthetic engagement by immersing yourself in a platform by one of your favourite media stars …

 At the end of 1999, the singer also became involved in video games, when he appeared in Quantic Dream's Omikron.  He played a character named Boz, a hunted revolutionary.  "It was relatively unprecedented to have such a big star embody a character within a game and not just appear as a thinly veiled version of themselves," says Thomas McMullan, a tech journalist at Alphr who played Omikron as a teenager.  "And Bowie engaged to a level that went beyond just lending his face. He worked on it from a musical point-of-view as well.  A bit that really sticks in my memory is a secret concert that you could discover if you uncovered some clues, and it showed you a clip of him playing in a fictional band. It felt like sneaking into an underground concert."

(Entertainment Infinity 2017)

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/01/the-video-game-that-changed-how-i-saw-david-bowie/

One of the most powerful aspects of online gaming is the ability to self-express and experiment the many facets that we may be too ‘gun shy’ to take out in our offline publics for whatever reason.

Many gamers play and are played by expressions of a fluid self that Nathan Jurgenson claims is the norm for social interactions in a world where an ephemeral death can be replaced with a Goffman like reframed silhouette of ideals and aesthetics (de Zwarth & Humphries 2014).

While Omikron: The Nomad Soul is Bowie's most direct interaction with the gaming industry, his influence on creators and players alike is impossible to miss.

The most obvious evidence of Bowie's influence comes from Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series. First came numerous references to "Major Tom" in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, referencing Bowie's "Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes". According to the Metal Gear Wiki, both songs were considered for ending songs for the game, only to be replaced as the game's space themes became less pronounced during development.

Then there's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a game featuring the private military company Diamond Dogs, a name derived partially from the Bowie album of the same name. Indeed the game opens with a cover of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" by Midge Ure.

And let's not forget this image, which made the rounds a couple of years back

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/03/david-bowie-is-every-metal-gear-solid-character-ever/

So, in our digitally networked communities of online games that have remained one of the few platforms (apart from porn, ironically) that have hung on and ridden the roller coaster of internet economics and socionomics, don’t let the hours spent engaged as a digital layer of yourself endanger or harm the offline layers of your person or others (Castronova 2004, p. 173).

Ask yourself, will it harm or will it help this one life I have to live – until the next one? …..

REFERENCES:

AskaScientist 2018, ‘What space is made of”, viewed 26 May 2018, <askascientist.co.uk/space/what-is-space-made-of/>

Castronova E 2004, ‘The Price of Bodies: A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthetic World’, KYKLOS, Vol.57, pp.173196

de Zwart, M & Humphreys, S 2014,' The Lawless Frontier of Deep Space: Code as Law in EVE Online', Cultural Studies Review, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 77-99.

Entertainment Infinity 2017, ‘Omikron: The Nomad Soul – David Bowie Interactions/Music’, [online], viewed 24 May 2018, <https://youtu.be/-eOulnVZv0o>

EVE Online, 2014, Home: EVE online, viewed 3 August 2016, <www.eveonline.com>.

Piech K 2016, ‘Political Economy, An Introduction to the Theory of Economic Policy’, viewed 25.5.18, <https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Diagram-of-Maslows-hierarchy-of-needs_fig15_308530946>

PrettyGoodGamers 2017, ‘

THOUSANDS of Eve Online players just got SCREWED OVER by ONE GUY!

’, [online] viewed 26 May 2018, <

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEO-Gc-VKV4

>

Taylor, J. (1997). The emerging geographies of virtual worlds. Geographical Review, 87(2), 172-192. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/docview/225336600?accountid=14205

 The Guardian 2017, ‘Gillian Triggs Australian Government ideologically opposed to human rights’, [online], viewed 20 May 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/26/gillian-triggs-australian-government-ideologically-opposed-to-human-rights>

Thornhill T, 2014, 'The online videogame battle that cost $300,000: Gamers see hundreds of costly spaceships destroyed after user forgot to pay bill to defend their base', The Daily Mail, 29 January, viewed 3 August 2016, <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2547908/EVE-online-sees-biggest-battle.html>.

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