Lametti vs World of Warcraft

Lametti points out that "Apple has built its highly successful business model around incompatibility" (216). Hinting towards an era where the Cloud replaces the Internet - or perhaps more accurately, towards an era where Clouds replaced the Internet - as the primary site of public discourse and private data storage, the future according to Lametti will most likely be one full of gatekeepers, paywalls and segregation, propping up a system of neoliberal privatisation that will be as ubiquitous as the media that facilitate its effects.

Lametti also notes that the deregulated Internet allowed for "file sharing and mash-ups" (203) to emerge as dominant, definitive and most importantly collaborative forms of self-expression online - Lametti predicts that this will all disappear with the dominance of the Cloud.

However, taking the example of "machinima" content created by World of Warcraft players, we can see contemporary parallels that seem somewhat less bleak. Celebrated by the community and actively encouraged by Activision Blizzard, "machinimation" involves using a program to extract models from WoW as files and then manipulate them, along with other video editing techniques, to create an original piece of art.

Generally humorous and inherently subversive, machinimation seems to actively undermine Activision Blizzard's monopoly over its own content, politically, economically and legally. And yet, Activision Blizzard encourages this practice, as it provides a source of free advertising, strengthens bonds within the community, and makes them look like benevolent overlords.

It is also a source of free labour, much like the numerous and popular "let's play" YouTube channels. Even Jane McGonigal, champion of gamification, insists that people not be paid for their efforts, because then people would only ever do things for money (232). 

While the example of WoW's paratextual environment provides an alternative version of the future to Lametti's privatised nightmare, perhaps the prospect of glorified unpaid labour is not that much better.

Rationally paranoid

According to Harper, certain paranoid behaviours can be rationalised in certain contexts. For example: people who belong to minority groups may express "paranoid" beliefs about society, but given the systematic persecution that minority groups face on a daily basis, these beliefs are perhaps less paranoid and more reasonable conclusions drawn from personal experience. Even websites that use surveillance methods for their users' supposed benefit, such as dating sites, do not necessarily store their users' personal information responsibly, as with this case in Texas.

Modern media such as facebook and instagram ensure that it is not only minorities and disgruntled online dating folk who have reason to believe they are being monitored and watched in ways that make them uncomfortable; Andrejevic's example of "Room Raiders" suggests that anybody could be targeted by surveilling forces at work in society - and that we are the ones targeting ourselves. It seems that we not only enjoy watching other people being exposed (often with humiliating results and an end-goal of public shaming for humorous effect), but we actually enjoy being exposed as well.



It may be tempting to conclude that the modern media-savvy netizen is not so much paranoid as exhibitionist, one who bares their soul openly with no thought to the consequences. But this ignores the fact that our online personas are carefully constructed. This is something that Andrejevic suggests we are very savvy about, the constructedness of virtual self, and that we are constantly aware of this norm of image-control when online. Rather than a case of paranoia or exhibitionism, I would say it is having a sense of control: we enjoy it when we feel able to mediate ourselves online, and feel upset when the information we want control over is in somebody else's hands.

Toys Are Us

After reading Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal, in which a broad plan for “saving the world” is outlined through the deployment and cultural up-taking of ubiquitous gaming (my phrasing), the readings for this week took on an interesting slant, because Tamagotchis and Furbies are not simply robots; they are specifically toys. If we identify a toy as “a tool that is used for playing games with, both Tamagotchis and Furbies make a lot more sense than if they are simply "sociable robots", which could conceivably be autonomous in their actions and responses, geared towards a very broad, general concept of what is “sociable”; a toy robot's actions responses will always be designed to both respond to and constitute the rules of the game that is to be played. And the game one plays with these toys is a game of caring for a living being, or a being that is “alive enough”.

What makes it a game, according to Jane McGonigal’s line of thinking, is the arbitrary and voluntary basis of this undertaking on behalf of the “player”: we do not need to care for a Furby, but we do so anyway because caring is what Furbies exist to have done to them by us. By this logic, it seems as though all toys and games are systems that use "players" to perform themselves, rather than the players performing the game.

But factoring into this Clark’s suggestion that, rather than the human brain preceding the technology it invented, the two are and have always been caught up in a reciprocal, ongoing developmental cycle without which neither could exist, it is not so much a question of whether we are playing the game or the game is playing us; rather, it is the question of whether there has ever been any other state of affairs, and if this is not precisely how we human beings have become what we currently are.