MACM03 Consuming Cyberspace Dec '10

I'm a little confused as to whether or not we have a dedicated VLE space for our MA students on the Consumption module.  As a fail safe I thought I'd post some of the material I was going to use later today in the session on here, as well as a few other bits and bobs.

The theme of my session is Consuming Cyberspace.  I'll talk a bit about the origins of cyberspace and some of the early pioneers before coming up to data and talk about the ways in which cyberspace has been commodified. In the mean time, this article is very useful. These are some intro slides I use with the Level 1 students on the history of the study of cyberculture:

Mac129 med102 cyberculture week 4 2010 11

View more presentations from Rob Jewitt.

These are the slides I prepped for last year's session:

Macm03 Consuming Cyberspace

View more presentations from Rob Jewitt.

I also like to draw on short film from the BBC's Wonderland series on Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love, in which a marriage breaks down and a relationship blossoms within the digital world of Second Life.  You should be able to find the full episode below (it's about 39 minutes long):

The session will also consider the sale of vitual goods within digital worlds, as well as some of the unique and creative play experiences enabled by virtual worlds.  I think this conference paper was listed as background reading material:

• Mike Molesworth and Janice Denigri-Knott (2005), ‘The Pleasures and Practices of Virtualised Consumption in Digital Spaces’, Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play, available at http://www.digra.org/dl/db/06276.33335.pdf

I also put this journal article on Warcraft up there too:

• Adam Ruch (2009), ‘World of Warcraft: Service or Space?’ in Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, Vol. 9 No. 2, http://gamestudies.org/0902/articles/ruch 

And here's a trailer for a documentary that I might use:

I've embedded episode 3 (of 4) of the excellent BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution below.  It's well worth watching before the session if possible (I know I haven't given you much notice - sorry!).  This hour long episode was entitled 'The Cost of Free' and is presented by Dr Alex Krotoski:

I'll update this post later.  Maybe.

MACM03 Consumption

A week or so ago I was teaching on the Masters programme in Film/Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland.  The module is entitled Consumption and my session was on consumption and cyberspace. The students had already had 9 weeks of material spanning Bourdieu, de Certeau and Fiske before my session. I threw together some slides for the students which you can find below in which I charted a brief definition and history of the term before switching the focus around engagement with digital worlds.

Macm03 Consuming Cyberspace

View more presentations from Rob Jewitt.

I screened a short extract from a BBC short film from the Wonderland series entitled Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love (video is embedded below), in which an unhappily married woman seeks love in the virtual world Second Life.



We also watched an extract from the recent documentary entitled Second Skin which looks at the lives of a number of World of Warcraft gamers.  The trailer is below:



The rest of the session revolved around getting the students to play a series of scenarios from a few different games on the Playstation 3 (yes, I lugged my own bulky unit into the University just for the session).

The idea was to get students to consider the success of games in recent years by asking them to play through a series of scenarios from a number of popular or critically acclaimed games.  The scenarios were:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - The controversial 'No Russian' level
Heavy Rain - 'Hassan's Shop' and 'The Lizard'
Flower - opening stage

The aim behind the gameplay was to get students to think through their own moral motivations behind their gameplay choice and to reflect on their agency within structured systems