Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64 as an Offline Socialization Tool
Podcast:
Many people think of gamers as isolated people. Now that games have gone online, we see a new sort of socializing. But there was socializing through video games in the offline era as well, notably Goldeneye 007. Alongside Taylor's insights into identity and socializing, we will discuss how video games have facilitated bonding in the past.
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Meatspace
Awesome. In a complete aside, I am absolutely buying the new Bond-Wii (re)release (very) soon. The idea of a (re)release also complicates some of the notions you put forth in your podcast. Is it the same game? Would we be inhabiting the same characters? In some ways, absolutely not--the technology of the new game allows for a wider variety of movement and possibility, all the while also changing the physical appearance of who (the better) Bond is.
What I found most interesting in your podcast though is the idea that this network-metaphor that we like to employ in understanding technological-relations between users is a metaphor that was already here before. I'd like to call this "networked meat space," for it shows that in our day to day bodily lives networked connections occur. It comes back to a point I made a few weeks ago; namely, that the body is the most mundane technology. And perhaps that's not as axiomatic as it may seem. Maybe the social-body is the most mundane technology. Perhaps our interactions in the realm of meatspace constitutes the first technology that became invisible. Regardless, the technology of social interaction or social scaffolding still persists today, evidence in the shared love for a specific video-game.
and even with a rerelease, and the fact that the same networked meatspace that constituted my group of friends in high school will not be the group of friends I play the new Bond with. Either way, that collective identity, composed as a social event, transcends specifics and instead cultivates communities through and with and in the actual game itself.
Pretty cool stuff. Great job on audio, etc, etc.
What's more persuasive than a dinosaur?
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Michael,
I found your podcast equally fascinating in its connection to Taylor’s chapter “Where the Women Are.” Particularly, I liked your idea of “bonding” (to use your stellar pun) by exploring and competing within the Goldeneye landscape. I guess I would like to add my perspective (or experience) with Goldeneye, as this game featured prominently in my youth. My brother taught me how to play video games, Goldeneye included, and when I entered high school I attended more and more Halo / Goldeneye “parties” my guy friends. Taylor notes in her discussion of avatars that “The role of this active engagement in the game extends to the way one can interact with its ‘worldness.’” As you stated in your podcast, exploring the world of Goldeneye in single player mode was far less important than inhabiting the world of social interaction that was erected around playing Goldeneye with friends. I would add that playing in multiplayer mode as Natalia or Bond was far less significant for identity exploration than playing in a room filled entirely with bodies of a gender other than my own. And in this regard, I explored a social landscape that was deeply formative in my thinking about gender and identity. To this day, I am still far more comfortable navigating the terrain of behavioral cues in stereotypically “male” activities such as playing video games or watching football than I am with stereotypically “female” ones such as shopping or whatever it is my gender supposedly does with their free time. Playing Goldeneye in a markedly male gendered space was in retrospect (because at the time it was just something I did for fun) an act of exploring the fluidity of socially constructed gender paradigms. But furthermore, as Taylor states “Bodies are not simply neutral objects that have no bearing on our experience but act as central artifacts through which our identities and social connections are shaped […] They are not neutral, and indeed their power lies in the very fact that they cannot be.” Referring to gender as socially constructed (and indeed, to a large degree it is) masks the very real and material way that bodies communicate in a meatspace, as Kyle would say.
Anyway, great job and I’ve really enjoyed listening to your podcasts this semester!
Madeline / Rhetorama