Group Performance: Unit 4: Digital Worlds

This performing group brought in an extra projector and had one projection at the rear of the room and one at the front of the room.  On both screens, they projected World of Warcraft, with one performer as one character in WoW and another as a different character.  The students watched the two characters interact, dance with each other, get challenged (and killed) by other characters, and the two characters wandered around WoW.

The performers showed videos that they'd made.  One showed a video of a recent experience she'd had in Second Life, where her avatar wandered around Second Life and asked about how their online or virtual lives differ from their real life.  She found that some people wouldn't talk to her, other people talked to her avatar quite a bit about this topic.  At least one person told her that s/he was more comfortable in Second Life and another person warned her against being in Second Life too much b/c you start losing value irl when you're on Second Life too much.  

They then showed the NY Times slideshow of people irl and their online avatars, some of which were idealized versions of their real-life appearances and some of which had no relationship to their real-life appearances. 

And they played a game of "Uncanny Valley" (which they invented), where they projected various images of animated figures and robots, and the class had to move to different parts of the room to indicate where, on the spectrum of emotional affection (positive to negative), they felt about the image projected.

Evan: I thought it was really awesome.

Wafa: I thought it was really cool that they had two videos.  It was distracting at the same time.  They told people to sit on the floors but some people sat in chairs.

Naomi: I don't feel like a lot of people in our class would be doing that stuff - WoW and Second Life - so there was this underlying question, Why do people do this?  

Evan: Well it gives you freedom to be whatever you want.

Wafa: It gets you thinking about why do people do this.  I asked, What's the point of all this?

Evan: I enjoyed meeting friends online.  When I would play a game like that, I would ask someone to play with me.  I would start out with someone I knew irl.  I would talk on my mic on your headset to other people playing WoW without seeing their face.  I really enjoyed campaigns, missions, I got sucked into it.

Gail: This was a very bravura performance in terms of the technology, b/c there was immersion, we felt totally inside a big big world b/c of the dual projection.  And also there were live portions (with two different perspectives and people we didn't know interacting with "our" avatars) and recorded video, too.  And questioning the ties between people's real lives and online/virtual lives was terrific.  Most of the discussion was about whether there was a danger of addiction to the online experience and whether we could get too deeply involved in digital worlds.  If anyone remembers, someone in the Q&A section said it's not about the online world vs. the offline world division, but the notion of  "third world" that will define our future "reality."  Does anyone remember what was meant by this term "third world"?  If you do, please post about that here.