I was just going to let this pass silently…but felt guilty in doing so!
I’ve fallen in love with yet another academic, James Grimmelmann – seriously reading his stuff has given me some interesting outlooks on quite a few questions I’ve been carrying around for some time! Therefore his papers on Virtual World Government and Law have now been added to the ‘Papers’ section of this blog (jeeeezzz…you’d think I could come up with a more creative title than that!
I’ve also added a guy called Lars Konzack…initially just to keep him available because I haven’t finished reading his paper yet. But it’s really interesting! He writes that computer games have 7 layers: hardware, program code, functionality, game play, meaning, referentiality and socio-culture. I haven’t really made my mind up if I agree with him or not….but if anything…this is a brilliant try on creating a method for computer game analysis (as usual it can all be torn apart if you’re analysing an MMORPG, but I’m used to that now…sigh)! I haven’t finished it yet because I already got stuck on page two. He writes that the description of a computer games “…should be made from two different perspectives, because a computer game consists of two different levels: a) the virtual space, and b) the playground. From what I can gather…the playground seems to be what is in ‘real’ space, controls and so forth. Now…this is how big a looser I am! I started to wonder if the actual view on the screen was ‘the playground’…I mean…should the description that it is a First Person Shooter game…be in the virtual space description or the playground? It confused me and I just had to move on before I ended up wasting my time and pondering about something meaningless for hours. But I do think that it also demonstrates the difficulty of defining the borders between virtuality and reality. I remember me and the ‘game lads’ (urgh…I have to find them a better name) ended up in endless discussions about what were ‘real’ resources and what were ‘virtual’ resources in computer games! But look at me! I’m rambling again…oh you poor thing…did you really read all the way to the end? I’m sorry!!