Skip to main content

Gaming adapted Web 2.0 elements EARLY

Hi all, I concluded last week's post with a diatribe about MySpace. I'd like to discuss how I interacted with and simultaneously built online communities around games in the mid to late 2000's. Specifically, I'm talking about games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft, as well as online services like Xbox Live. These services were all released earlier than I was able to play them: Runescape in 2001, Xbox Live in 2002, and World of Warcraft in 2004. These services were perhaps my experience with Web 2.0. I was interacting with them before MySpace and Facebook emerged, which were later than these game services. I'll mainly speak on World of Warcraft, but all of these services really offered the same thing: virtual communities that you could interact with and collaborate with in-game. Typed chat was always available, as was voice chat (more prevalent in Xbox Live). World of Warcraft was so exciting to me at the time because it was the first time I'd seen a game with these online capabilities. I could play autonomously, collaborate with others, or use the game to talk to others while I was doing my own thing. 



This was a stark contrast to my experience with gaming up to this point, where if I wanted multiplayer components, I'd be sitting next to someone and looking at the same screen.  I was introduced to these gaming and Web 2.0 elements early enough in my lifetime, where I was right on the precipice of being a digital native- "parallel processing and multitasking" (Prensky, 2001). Because I was acclimated to those massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) elements early on, I feel like I'm still a native rather than an immigrant when I have students discuss their experiences online with Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. I feel like, it's the same thing, just a different generation. It is on a massive scale in a more intimate digital environment, though. I'll paraphrase because I can't recall the exact quote, but I saw a TikTok earlier this week where an interviewed development psychologist mentioned the dangers of Roblox, saying it was like dropping your child off in a virtual world that was '5 times the size of Tokyo'. 

I'll attach the reel here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYh1_XDuXtb/


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Does the digital native/immigrant dichotomy work?

     I felt, as I was reading the Prenska article, that my knee-jerk reaction was that I was fortunate to have grown up at the right time (mid-late 2000s), when Web 2.0 features were coming into mainstream culture. I was learning them like everyone else, and I had an advantage. My reaction to the digital immigrants was that these were relatively older users I saw on Facebook, either using ChatGPT for the first time and sharing a tacky image (see Figure 1), or exclusively using their online interactions in my local ‘rants, raves, and reviews’ to initiate arguments. My brain's intuition couldn't have been right. Is there a right  way to interact with online communities? That's what constitutes me as a digital native? Are these users who use Facebook and AI in those other ways digital immigrants? Although it's a niche of folks who argue on Facebook, they still use that social media website as it was intended: to connect and interact with others online. So, what is ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bistro is Open (5/14)

Hi all, this my first post for EME6414. Blake's Bistro is the restaurant-themed name of my middle school classroom that I teach so it felt like I should bring the same vibe to this sphere. I feel like it's appropriate to just dive into my experience with what is Web 2.0. I'm 31, so I've predominantly grown up in a world where social networking was always an option and available to my age cohort. A very formal way of saying that I've always been exposed to technology. The first big social network, and a lot of my peers in this course can probably empathize, was MySpace. Tom. The whole phenomenon around the 2006-2008 time frame. I think the biggest draw for me, personally, was the ability to personalize and tailor your own web page to the most specific of features. In my case, it was blaring hardcore music immediately into a MySpace page visitor's ears, probably causing them to implode and quickly exit my page. Also, there was this feature that was integr...
Post a Comment
Read more