Unweaving the Web: Beginning to think theologically about the Internet

This is the author's version of the book.This book discusses features of the Internet that are new and theologically challenging and how these features affect the way we think about place, time, and identity

The pleasurable lightness of being: Interface, mediation and meta-narrative in Lucasfilm's Loom

This critique of the overlooked Lucasfilm adventure game focuses on the techniques, by which the distance between the avatar and the player is bridged, and the way the game deals with its gameness in its fiction.The critique is broken into three sections: the analysis of the fiction, investigation of the interface and, finally, the whole narrative structure.Conclusion is made that the uniqueness and "magic" often mentioned by the game's fans comes about thanks to a series of parallels between the player's and the avatar's situation

Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game

This paper discusses two main claims made about virtual worlds: first, that people become “immersed” in virtual worlds because of their sensorial realism, and second, because virtual worlds appear to be “places” they can be studied without reference to the lives that their inhabitants live in the actual world. This paper argues against both of these claims by using data from an ethnographic study of knowledge production in World of Warcraft. First, these data demonstrate that highly-committed (“immersed”) players of World of Warcraft make their interfaces less sensorially realistic (rather than more so) in order to obtain useable knowledge about the game world. In this case, immersion and sensorial realism may be inversely correlated. Second, their commitment to the game leads them to engage in knowledge-making activities outside of it. Drawing loosely on phenomenology and contemporary theorizations of Oceania, I argue that what makes games truly “real” for players is the extent to which they create collective projects of action that people care about, not their imitation of sensorial qualia. Additionally, I argue that while purely in- game research is methodologically legitimate, a full account of member’s lives must study the articulation of in-game and out-of-game worlds and trace people’s engagement with virtual worlds across multiple domains, some virtual and some actual

Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium

In this article, we examine the imaginative geographies of the new millennium through a critical reading of cyberfiction. This fiction, we argue, through its use of estrangement and defamiliarization, and its destabilization of the foundational assumptions of modernism, provides a cognitive space in which to contemplate future spatialities given the present postmodern condition – a cognitive space which is already providing an imaginal sphere in which present-day individual and institutional thought and practice are partially shaped. Using a detailed reading of 34 novels and four collections of short stories, we illustrate the utility of this cognitive space, and its appropriation, through an exploration of fictional visions of postmodern urbanism in the early twenty-first century. We assess the viability and utility of these visions by comparing them to academic analyses of the sociospatial processes shaping present-day urban form and spatiality

A Vision for the 21st Century

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/79549/1/1995_A_Vision_for_the_21st_Century.pd

Chapter Verso una storia dell’Abitare Virtuale. Dal Cyberspace a Second Life fino al Metaverso di Facebook e oltre

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences

Virtual travel and the pleasure peripheries -- case study of Second Life

No abstract availabl