Reality in our society is continuously changing, increasingly individual and becoming increasingly variable by us.
When we break down how we create reality, we see it is a combination of perception and habit.
- Perception – a highly contextualized view and experience of the world before us. This is completely shaped by our individual pasts and our past relations to objects (Whitehead)
- Habit – an individual collective of our actions, thoughts and mannerisms. It is a strong didactic relation between attraction and distraction of humans. It however does not exist as a simple repetition of human actions, but as skilled variations.
This theory has been applied and appropriated by Howard Rheingold, with his concept of ‘infotention’, “a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters” (2011). He uses this to be able to clearly designate his attention to the internet accordingly. His perception of the internet has been melded and manipulated by various internet collations (such as RSS, Dashboards, Twitter, searches, etc) to shape his experience, and therefore his reality of the internet. As he describes, creating a dashboard is “not so much about how you set it up, it’s about changing your own browsing habits” and controlling your attention and distraction. He evolves the internet to become a completely individualistic representation of his interests.
This view of individualisation has been appropriated consistently throughout video gaming. We see designers continuously attempting to create a more personalised experience, and create different in- game realities. For example:
- Bioware’s Mass Effect titles (2007, 2010 and one upcoming late2011) provide players with the ability to make conversational choices, and game altering decisions that shape the reality that exists during a playthrough. This creates a highly individual experience, through ones perception of the characters and the worlds needs.
- Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (2004) online multiplayer RPG also takes choice and creates a highly individual experiences. By allowing character customisation and choice of tasks to complete, players are giving altering realities of the world they inhabit.
by Wayne Blair, z3290795
tutorial time: monday 4pm
References
- Rheingold, H. 2011, ‘A mini-course on infotention’, online, accessed 7 April 2011 <http://howardrheingold.posterous.com/a-mini-course-on-infotention>
- Bioware 2007-2011, Mass Effect 1, 2, 3
- Blizzard 2004, World of Warcraft
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
