Monday, September 9, 2013

Cybernetic space



I came across this documentary about the allures of virtual community. I wanted to explore further the concept behind how games can impact real life and how the visual aspects can play a role for people.
 Digital Ego explained that, “Every person who communicates in virtual and social environments owns a virtual identity, which sometimes may be identical to real identity. As mentioned before, our lives are a stage on which we are playing out roles that we have learnt from birth onwards. This virtual identity finds a way to express itself by existing on the internet. Transferring feelings, thoughts and links to online communities is important.” The attraction of becoming a completely different person visually is a large part of what drives the popularity of games in general. An documentary on this issue with online identity and cybernetic social space is: Wonderland: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love. BBC. Where a wife and a mother of 3 had an affair online with another player in a online game chat room called “2nd Life”. “It's about people who've cheated on their life partners and risked losing everything, for the promise of a life that's so far only been experienced in the pixels of a computer screen and the dream world of their own fantasies.” 

This is where ingame clothing and costuming plays a huge role in self expression. Clothing becomes a projection of your personality, or the personality you want others to believe in. You are free to choose the most unrealistic outfits that the game has to offer. As I found through researching game design concepts, each game would have a distinctive feel for their title and would have a particular style of costumes. This shows that game fashion feeds off the ideal fantasy of a what is believed a consequence free mentality of the cyberspace. Therefore inorder to attract players, I need to incorporate that unreal expectations or ingame clothing.

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