Another Life--not to be confused with Second Life
okay, tonight i'm doing the "pretend-to-be-reading-while-actually-watching-television" game. I'm not sure what i'm watching, but this crime show just used this girl's Another Life experiences and avatar in order to track her whereabouts in a kidnapping.
in the show, her avatar is a 14 year old girl who runs an underage strip club--she apparently had a ton of "fans," and one of them took "another life" into "real life" and went to kidnap her. the show raises any number of ethical questions, but i thought it was interesting to see the way the show dealt with and manipulated the online spaces. they try to track the game back to the computer controller--and then the controller locates her avatar's friends and locates her kidnap in real life.
hmmm...i wonder what happens when play becomes real...
Comments
Law and Order SVU and I
Law and Order SVU and I missed it. Now I have to wait for it to come back on on Saturday or hope that someone youtubes it!
TiVo rocks!
I TiVo-ed it. I'll hook ya up.
sounds familiar
"In October of 2004, a 41-year-old Chinese man named Qiu Chengwei stabbed 26-year-old Zhu Caoyuan to death over a dispute regarding the sale of a virtual weapon the two had jointly won in the game Legend of Mir 3."
-Source: Wikipedia
The really ironic thing was the resemblance between the weapon in the game and the real weapon.
Of course, that's about a very specific and personal dispute, rather than one motivated by someone's in-game reputation. It'd be interesting to see a real case where someone's in-game prominence made them a target IRL. Even with the extreme investment that some players have in MMOs, I've never encountered anyone who genuinely translated in-game status to RL.
Trashy t.v.--my guilty pleasure
Okay, I admit it: I watched the series premiere of Gossip Girl. I had every intention of not admitting it, but it's relevant to this discussion, I think. Here's the premise: there is some random teenage girl who has a blog. Every day, sometimes multiple times a day, she (or maybe he--who knows?) posts about the stuff s/he sees around her, like who is "hooking up," who is "macking on who," etc. No one knows who gossip girl is, but s/he's obviously someone in the inner circle--or at least associated with it--because s/he is aware of the intimate details everyone else's personal lives.
As ridiculous as this sounds, this show's premise brought up a lot of questions for me about the power of anonymity in new media. Maybe it's hard to see the gossip girl's blogs as a major invasion of privacy because we're talking about a bunch of teenagers. Oh, and it's a t.v. show. Imagine, though, if an anonymous blog were created and posted to the web about students in a graduate program, or even faculty in a department. While we'd hope that graduate students and faculty would be mature and professional enough to not blog about each other's personal lives, I wonder if the fact that this blog could exist at all has affected how we interact with one another, both personally and professionally. Of course, this also relates to last week's discussion of Myspace, Facebook, and the risks involved with having either of them.
**As I was writing this blog, three other people who were also working in the computer lab have admitted to also watching Gossip Girl. I promised to not name names, but at least I know I'm not alone.
Dude, Gossip Girl is now a
Dude, Gossip Girl is now a welcome part of my weekly viewing pleasure. I see no shame in admitting this.
what is this gossip girl and
what is this gossip girl and why have I not seen it?
C.W.
It's on C.W. and let me tell you, it's pretty gripping. Not quite as good as Friday Night Lights, but it's up there.
Thumbs up: virtual worlds
Thumbs up: virtual worlds and gaming getting "mainstream" press and coverage.
Thumbs down: this coverage being the most predictable, let's raise the red flags of fear about technology and gaming and completely ignore anything cool or beneficial.
I'll stick with Gossip Girl and Bionic Woman.
It must be all the rage. Now
It must be all the rage. Now there is going to be a CSI: NY Second Life episode.
From cbs.com:
The lead detective on the hit CBS series “CSI: NY,” Mac Taylor, is a pretty conventional television hero: like his colleagues on the two other “CSI” franchises, he uses science to follow the evidence and catch the bad guys.
But in the episode for Oct. 24, Taylor, played by Gary Sinise, finds himself entering the computer-based virtual world known as Second Life, walking (and sometimes flying) around three-dimensional, animated Manhattan landmarks, recreated by a technique called machinima, and pursuing not a suspect but an avatar.