This week I experimented with rigging my scanned avatar, skeletal meshes and physical assets. I had to redo my texture from last week because my file had gotten corrupted (I realized I had accidentally wrote .png instead of choosing .png to save the texture).
1. Simulating rag-doll physics with a hundred mini me's and breakdancing:
I don't play a lot of games and personally preferred not having to look at the back of my avatar all the time. It felt like someone was always weirdly in my way (even though that "person" was supposed to be me).
I didn't like the uneven texture from the scan so I chose to use other materials. I would like to learn how to play around and manipulate textures in the future.
2. Seeing how many I can pile up...
It was weird looking at a bunch of virtual me's falling down. Because of the weird bounce, it looked almost rubber like and didn't feel painful to me.
3. Making multiple avatars of myself dance to thriller:
Creating a badly edited video of it...
Outtakes of my texture gone wrong - my "skin" is my clothing:
Questions in response to the readings on avatars & violence:
“Games aren’t developed in a vacuum, and they reflect the cultural milieu that produces them. So of course we have violent games.”
Correlation is not causation, which can make measuring the exact impacts of violent video games difficult.
1. Do you think violent kids are simply drawn to violent forms of entertainment, or if the entertainment somehow makes them violent?
“The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.”
Death In the Sim's it is less about violence than it is about control and scenarios. Do we have a fascination and curiosity with death? As something we can't experience and live to tell, do we explore this "unknown" through digital avatars? Or do we use death (in the case of the Sims) as a way to start over? A reset button when things aren't right or we're bored - something we can't do in real life? Or is it about playing God or going against the design and intent of a system?
2. How would playing Sims (and players intent) change if you took death away?
When watching an act of violence that is not "real" and you know the person being brutalized cannot feel hurt, how does this change things? How does this change the person watching? Why do people watch gory movies? Does this play on the bystander effect?
3. Do we feel hurt looking at someone else being hurt, even if we know they can't feel pain? (biological mirror neurons).