Wk 2 — Activity — Virtual: Worlds
4 min readSep 4, 2020
- Show photos or a video of your Virtual World visit
- PLACE: My high school went online for a couple of weeks during the growth of COVID-19 in Taiwan, but then remained open for the rest of the year. It’s interesting to begin a whole new school experience, especially college, while being fully online in another country. The strange part about this is that I haven’t actually attended the university in-person at all yet, nor have I ever lived in California, so I still don’t know the feeling of being at CSULB physically. It’s an interesting experience to begin your first year of university online, as you don’t get the “college experience” the way you expected to a few months ago. I’m quite satisfied with the way everything is going with online college so far, but I often find myself wondering how different my life would be if I was attending CSULB in person. In terms of similarities, I would imagine that the classes are mostly similar to how they would be in person. It’s mostly the same content but taught digitally, including any changes due to the switch to being online.
- PLACE: I visited Animal Crossing for this project. Compared to a non-place online environment like Instagram or Facebook, I believe that Animal Crossing allows you to actually interact with people more physically than through social media. Being able to exist in a world while taking the form of an avatar can be much easier to express yourself physically. For example, walking away from someone while they are talking to you in Animal Crossing isn’t something you’re able to do on Instagram or Facebook. Rather, you’d simply ignore somebody or not respond to their message/comment on social media if you wanted to get away from them. In terms of communication, Facebook or Instagram is a much better tool, as it allows you to say what you want to say in a way where you’ve had time to write down your thoughts clearly and eloquently.
- PLACE: Through Animal Crossing, I was able to spend some time with friends that now live overseas. This allowed me to interact and “hang out” with them in the form of an avatar, which is very special to me as I am unable to walk down the block to see them in person anymore. In my opinion, I would say that the activities in the game, such as diving, fishing, gardening, catching bugs, etc. are less fun in-game than they are in real life. However, they offer this variety of experiences with the click of a button, which is very impressive. This was a very fun experience, as I was able to spend time with and catch up with my overseas friends in a “virtual world”, which was almost like chatting and doing things with them in person.
- CONCLUSIONS: Although I still prefer the real world and real-life experiences over virtual worlds, I thought that it was incredible how one can turn a virtual place into anything from a home to a place of adventure. Especially during this time of the novel coronavirus, interacting with others online in a virtual place allows us to enjoy each other’s presence, meet new people, and go on adventures while remaining safe and at home. It’s crazy to see how far we’ve come in the world, and imagining people using virtual worlds to remain social during times where they can’t physically interact as easily shows just how revolutionary virtual worlds are. Virtual worlds give us the experience of having a “sense of place” while remaining fully digital, allowing us to feel as if we were actually somewhere we are not. You could travel the world with the click of a button, and that alone is incredible.
- IDENTITY: In a sense, social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are totally examples of MMORPGs. Although they don’t take on the traditional meaning of the term, they are MMORPGs in the sense that they allow us to be anyone we want to be through a digital presence. “Role-playing” is exactly what Facebook and Instagram are. We show people only what we want them to see, and we are able to be anybody we want to be, simply by what we choose to post and how we sound in writing.
- IDENTITY: Real life can also be seen as an MMORPG, considering the fact that we are all “players” in this game of life, and we all take on the traits of a character. The only difference is, these characteristics that we possess are usually true aspects of our personalities. Typically, people don’t pretend to be somebody the same way they do in online worlds. However, it is extremely easy to pretend to be somebody we are not while continuing to live in and interact with our world. In that sense, I believe that real life could easily be an MMORPG if one chooses to see it that way.
