Online Gaming

1.       How does the tool relate to the topic of the week?

The topic of the week is online gaming.  The tool we used to experience online gaming was Dungeon Blitz. It allowed the gamer to chat with other players while playing alone or you could invite people to join your group to play with you. It relates to the topic of the week as it involves interaction between players.

2.       What function does the tool serve?

This tool serves its users by allowing them to interact with each other to solve the games challenges together and fight off the different monsters. While doing all this they can join forces and fight together, and be able to chat with them about the game.

3.       What did you find most interesting about the tool?

The thing I found most interesting about Dungeon Blitz was that I am normally not into fighting games, but it made it more interesting when they actually told you what to do unlike other games these days like Halo or COD where it’s just walking around and shooting people. Time went by really fast when I was playing which can be a bad thing, but it means that I liked it.

4.       What did you find most challenging?

The most challenging thing for me was that I kept getting lost. I would go to the “home” and then when I tried to leave I couldn’t figure out how to get back so I would just close the game and restart it. Also when Kelly and I were trying to find each other on the game to invite each other to be a part of our group we could never see each other online so that was kind of confusing as we would both be in the same spot and never see each other.

5.       How does the tool improve or complicate communication?

I think the tool would improve communication within the game as gamers could talk to each other instantly and let them know about different enemies ahead or just different secrets of the game a new user would not know about. I wish it would notify you better though when you had users talking directly to you as it would only be seen in the bottom right corner in a small box. It also could complicate communication as anyone could chat in there and sometimes I would not know what they were talking about.

6.       What is your critique of your experience?

Overall I enjoyed playing the game, but I think I liked playing it more alone than with a group as I invited someone to be a part of mine and I feel like he doesn’t even do anything but follow me around. Also I think players should be notified more clearly if someone is instant messaging you because the box for chat is so small I wasn’t really paying attention to it when I was battling.

Second Life

1.       How does the tool relate to the topic of the week?

The tool we used this week was Second Life. It relates to our topic of the week (cyber culture/virtual communities) as a cyber culture is a culture that has emerged or is emerging from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment, and business, and a virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific social media in order to pursue mutual interests. Second Life allows anyone to sign up and interact with individuals who have common interests.

2.       What function does the tool serve?

This tool serves as a virtual community as it is a social network that allows people to interact with each other whether they have mutual interests or not. There are many different world destinations people can enter to find people with mutual interests or just people to talk to.

3.       What did you find most interesting about the tool?

I thought the most interesting part of the tool was changing the avatar into whatever you wanted to be. There were so many different options between humans, animals, vampires, or robots then you could actually go into the different destinations and retrieve free clothes to change your avatars appearance to how ever you want it to be.

4.       What did you find most challenging?

The thing I found most challenging about Second Life was how to fit in with all the older users. Everyone in each destination seemed to know what they were doing and it was hard to follow along if there were set rules for each destination as sometimes they would kick you out if you didn’t belong. Some destinations required certain clothing as others seemed to just be people that have already met on Second Life that did not want you to be a part of their group.

5.       How does the tool improve or complicate communication?

I think this tool complicates and improves communication depending on who you are talking to in Second Life as some people want to help new users and others completely ignore them. It helps improve communication in that universities are looking into using Second Life to teach and in the future I think it could also become a great marketing tool as they have lots of space to put advertisements. I think it complicates communication in that people do have their own lingo on Second Life with words like rezzing and slurl. It also can be all anonymous as people can make their avatar actually look like themselves (which is never exactly alike) or they can choose to be a vampire, animal or robot.

6.       What is your critique of your experience?

I thought using Second Life was fun, but it just seems like you need to be really into it to know what you’re doing and who to talk to, to make the experience worthwhile as not many of us had people come forward and talk to us instead we had to go talk to them. I am more into Sims where you are able to control mostly everyone in the game. It was fun, but I would not use it daily.