ENGL 680V: Writing in Virtual Worlds

Just posting, since I neglected to, my powerpoint for my final showcase presentation.

The link, so I don't forget it :)

http://www.wix.com/emilymarie82/gaming-composition

Just want to work through some thoughts on my final project. Throw it out there—see what kind of feedback I get (if any). Here are some of the basic premises I’m working under (you may see a lot of this rehashed/more nuanced in my presentation/final project):

http://simself.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/reading-list-for-final-project/

Can you post your recipe for that dressing? It's absurdly delicious.

This might be useful for us; it's an article claiming that virtual worlds don't exist. She claims that the dichotomous real world v. virtual world can be traced back to Huizinga's magic circle concept. But she says making this dichotomy is false and detrimental to the potentiality of our scholarship: http://gamestudies.org/1001/articles/lehdonvirta

There’s so much I could comment on in the articles this week. Not that it isn’t normally true, but I’m going to limit my comments to how Shaw in “Putting the Gay in Games” and Higgin in “Blackless Fantasy” deal with questions of representation.

While I’m not sure that this response is particularly “happy,” I wanted to borrow the pun from Malaby and Burke’s title as I knew this response would indeed be “short” after my week-long battle with the creeping crud.

At any rate, I thought Malaby and Burke’s “The Short and Happy Life of Interdisciplinarity in Game Studies” was an interesting introduction in that they have a clear goal of keeping game studies interdisciplinary in nature yet seemed resigned to the fact that that just can’t be (for long):

Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games
Shaw, Adrienne

For my final project, I'm trying to figure out what the characteristics of successful virtual worlds are. To help myself do that, I'm trying to think of all the different types of virtual worlds that I can so that I can test my characteristics against them. Can you help me think of ones I've missed (or contest ones I've put on the list)? Here are ones I've thought of so far:

• chatrooms
• MOOS
• MUDS
• wikis
• social networks
  • facebook
  • linkedin
• Twitter
• discussion boards
• listserves