Social Presence in Final Fantasy X

This last summer me and my buddy decided that we were going to beat Final Fantasy X not know that it was going to be one of the biggest investment of time as we have put in over 100 hours of game play in this one game. You start out as this character whose name is Tidus throughout the game you gain many allies Auron, Kimahari, Wakka, Lulu, Rikku, and Yuna. You also come into contact with many foes to defeat the biggest one being Sin. So after putting in so many hours playing the game you start to feel like you personally know these characters and build a relationship. For me these relationships were good and bad one depending on the characters.

My favorite character which I'm sure many other people have was Tidus as he is the main protagonist in this video game and the story line kind of revolves around him. He has a nice fiery grit about him and he never gives up on things not to mention one of the best blitzballers in the game. So that is part of the reason why I liked him so much I think. Anyways throughout the game there are certain times when you are not able to use him and during these times I wasn’t happy because I wasn’t able to use my favorite character. He was also the character that I liked to score all the goals when playing blitzball and it was my ultimate goal to always have him be the best. So as we were coming to the end of the game when everything gets crazy (SPOILER ALERT) and he end up having to fight Sin who is actually his father Jecht I was very emotionally invested in this battle. And after the game ends I was somewhat relieved because we put so much time into it but at the same time it was kind of sad that it had come to an end and we wouldn’t be using him to fight all the bad guys and save the world anymore.

Through playing so many hours with this character I believe it lead me to have a social presence with him, which is the ability to form relationships with a Para-authentic actor or avatar. So is time invested the number one factor in being able to create this social presence?

Reference

Downs , Edward . "Presence (Chapter 16) Notes ." COMM 3560: Video Game Entertainment. University of Minnesota Duluth. Power Point , Duluth . 26 Apr. 2013. Class lecture.

Are Cars Considered Avatars

Avatars & Identity

I think that when talking about Avatars and Identity a thing (car in this case) has to be. When talking about this topic we discussed reasons why gamers become so invested in their avatars and listed four reasons. The reasons are as follows…

1. Time commitment during creation

2. Time spent playing as the avatar

3. Skill acquisition in game

4. Similarity to the self

I believe that in racing game such a Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition I became very invested into the cars that I would make and use for my races. So out of those reasons for investment correlating to the car I have all four of these. For the first one I think I’ve spent more time customizing and creating a car how I want it than any other avatar or character even when creating myself. The second one I've played many hours driving around in the cars that I created and have completed many races. Moving on to skill acquisition during the game you have to gain money to be able to make your car better and customize it exactly how you want it. Lastly it correlates to similarity to the self because each car that I have customized I have personalized to be similar to something that I would like not necessarily look like me obviously because it’s a car but created to look how I like it to look. This also goes into another point that you live vicariously through you virtual representation (Downs, Avatars & Identity). I connect to this point because though this game I am able to purchase cars, rims, paint jobs etc. that I cannot afford in real life.

So this poses that question can things be considered avatars such as cars in a video game or would the “driver” in the car technically be the avatar?

Referene

Downs , Edward . "Avatars and Identity ." COMM 3560: Video Game Entertainment. University of Minnesota Duluth. Power Point , Duluth . 2 May 2013. Class lecture.

Multi-Tasking

So I started playing this new game on my iPad called “Hardest Game Ever 2.” In this game you have to do all kinds of weird games that are simple to do but hard to do fast and accurate.  Anyways I have been stuck on this level where you have to use three fingers to press three different ice cream cones to make the ice cream scoops fall down on to them but each cone requires different amounts of scoops, also if you go over the amount of scoops on any cones you automatically fail the level.

So again I have been stuck on this level getting more and more frustrated because I can seem to get the “superior” rating on this level. Then I thought about human processing and the different types of multitasking and assessed it to this game. This made it make a little more sense to why this game was so difficult. This was because it almost requires you to completely concurrently multitask and it uses all three groups of our resources perceptual, motor, and cognition at the same time to complete the level at a “superior” grade.

The game starts with requiring you to gather information perceptually through your vision to look at the ice cream cones and see how many scoops each of them need. This then leads into cognition, which in this game is requiring you to count and decided which ice cream cones to press and how many time to press them. This then moves into using your motor resource and that is physically using your three fingers to press each of the cones. You have to make all of these decision in such a quick fashion that I believe it requires you to use concurrent multitasking. You could make the argument though that it just requires very very fast sequential multitasking but where is that line drawn between when a fast sequential multitasking turns into concurrent multitasking?

Here is a video of a guy killing it at the ice cream game!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg6KcFfaLcQ

Reference

Downs , Edward . "Multitasking Types ." COMM 3560: Video Game Entertainment. University of Minnesota Duluth. Power Point , Duluth. 2 May 2013. Class lecture.