Human? God? Private? Public?

Seriously speaking, this week's reading is totally abstract and not understandable no matter how many times I tried to read it. It just leave this empty feeling after completing the readings. And I keep asking myself as I read each sentence "What has all these gotta do with the gaming world?" Sheesh, I shall try to write whatever I can understand which I can relate to Second Life then.

Firstly, I'll bring in the three classification which Hannah Arendt uses: Labour, Work and Action. I find it very interesting that he does it this way and I'll use them to relate to my SL character.

Labour
According to the author, it is actually life itself. The spontaneous growth, metabolism and eventual decay of the human body. No then, "Labour" doesn't apply to SL. My character in SL will never grow old, he will never decay and he doesn't even have an age. I can stop playing it for one year and log in after that only to find that my character is still the same as before, and he's on the same spot the last time I logged out one year ago.



Work
If I'm not wrong, "Work" refers to something which is artificially created that doesn't belong to life. In SL, work will probably be the different ways the players play the game. Selling digital houses?? Finding nice outfits to dress up their avatars? In short, without work, players in SL will just be wondering around and doing nothing. This being a Sandbox game is normal, in a sense that players can choose not to "Work" since there is no leveling and no disadvantages.



Action
Referring to activities that goes on directly between men without any extra matters or so. This perhaps can relate to SL's interaction between players?? The chat function is there and players can just log into the game and find friends which they can purely hang out in the virtual world. I've seen NUS students just log into the NUS island in SL, basically do nothing and just "park" there and wait for fellow students to log in and chat with them. Whatever the reason they do that I have no idea. Perhaps they are treating it as a 3-dimensional MSN?



Immortality is also another thing mentioned. Like I've discussed in my previous blogpost about Mimicry, I find that players in SL are sort of seeking a form of immortality which they can't achieve in real life. They can feel powerful and high desired in SL, but then it may not be the same in reality. It is much easier to attain immortality within the game than reality.


With this, I'll like to come up with a discussion question. And that is what has all these philosophical stuffs got to do with the gaming world? Why must we go in so deeply on something that is so simple and supposedly enjoyable?



No idea, toughest reading ever.

Agon . Alea . Mimicry . Ilinx . Paidia . Ludus

Looking at the age of the reading, I'm glad that I'm able to at least relate to a new age game like Second Life. So Callois basically categorized games into four different groups, and each game by itself has some portions of Ludus n Paidia.

After playing SL, I can see that it falls into more than one category stated above. I shall now zoom into each category and further analyze how does SL falls under it.

Agon(Competition)
Eventhough SL is sort of like an open-ended game with no specific target/goal to achieve, there is still intense competitions among players themselves. What kind of competition will depend on what the player intends to achieve in the game. To be the most beautiful? To possess the most amount of land? To be the richest? To have the most amount of high value possessions(house)? All these can be classified under Agon since every player is trying to outdo and outplay each other in the same aspect.




Mimicry(Simulation)
I think SL falls under mimicry the most. It's almost like the definition of Second Life that maybe SL can rename itself as Mimicry. Usually players in SL will try to be a person which they can never be in reality, which is why it's called Second Life. A fat man can portray himself in SL as a hunky and well dressed character. He can have a car, a nice house and many admirers in the game, which in actual fact is a dream for him in reality. He wants to be that, but is not able to achieve his dream in reality, thus making use of SL to "fill in the gaps". It is the fastest, easiest and surest way to get what he wants, and he can even customize everything according to his choice. He has total control over everything, an aspect in reality which is not totally possible.




Alea(Chance)
I don't really know if this is considered as chance, but a player needs some form of luck too. For example a property seller in the game who sells beautiful in-game houses. He's gonna need some luck to find willing buyers and also characters who will chance upon his houses and take a look at them. This is especially tough when SL is a very big game with many places to teleport to.



Paidia vs Ludus
Of course, being a Sandbox game, Paidia will be the dominating aspect of the game with lesser influence of Ludus in it. There is absolutely no restriction on what you wanna do in SL. You can choose to play the game anyway you like, some examples were already stated above. You explore an open virtual world which mimics the real world. You can play the game alone, or collaborate with other players to achieve your goals within the game. However, it is not exactly 100% open. What the character can do is limited by what the game developer allows the character to do. There are only a set of programmed functions which one can do in the game. Example, one can't kill another character because this function is not coded into the game. This is the Ludus part, when things are more controlled and rigid.

What keeps the player in the game is the Paidia part. I can't stop myself from exploring more places and see what's nice in them. SL is so big that I haven't seen any houses that is of the same deisgn architecture. I get to meet different players from different parts of the world too. I guess this is wha keeps SL going strong even though there isn't any concrete agenda in the game.



So, is Paidia or Ludus based games more addictive?