Place: For this week assignment’s virtual world theme, I dragged my friend into playing Call of Duty Mobile with me. This assignment was to see how different we act and feel about because of the whole Zoom ordeal and online schooling happening in the new school year of 2020. The charm about Zoom University is its convenience of simply being able to show up for the class hours anywhere the student can be and eliminates the need to drive to the University, losing valuable time on finding parking spaces and avoiding possible accidents along the way. However, physically attending the University gives their students more sense of belonging and helps them keep in shape. Personally for an explorer as myself, I really love checking the campus out by myself in my free time and find less-known areas or figure the map out like it’s the back of my hand; something I’ve done at my graduated high school. Despite the space difference, both universities succeed in the goal of bringing the students together and helps organize a learning space.
Place: As someone who rarely ventures on social media, I have favouritism towards my virtual worlds as it is where I go most of the time when I’m online, besides YouTube if that counts as a super non-place online environment. There’s a lot more things to do in virtual worlds because it’s not comprised of only the single player, especially in MMO or MMORPG. Humans have their own minds so the swing of things can drastically be different from one day playing online to the next and you’ll never know who you’ll meet. In my opinion, I find it more fun and significant when socializing through a game with an online friend than to simply message back and forth; it gives more ranges of emotions since it requires more cooperation and team effort as well as space for creativity.
Place: Compared to a physical place like the mall or a cafe shop… my virtual choice of gaming is a lot more violent and simple; we’re shooting the opposing team to get to 50 points. If I have to go anywhere outside these days, I’ll have to spend some money but the good news is I’ll get something physical in my hands (unless I’m getting a Steam card). But online-wise, I get a global connection to almost anyone anywhere on the planet and honestly, I learnt a lot from socializing with them.
Conclusions: If I had been able to go through with my best choice, The Sims 4, then I would admit to maybe finding a few new thoughts about the Idea of Place. But since it’s Call of Duty, a shooting MMO with friends, I don’t think I’ve thought a new thought. If to find a comfort zone or somewhere to feel like isolated and stranded during this quarantining time, then yes virtual worlds have become a more significant place to bond between users across the globe. Whether I’ll find the most perfect game to make it through the year is still a question to be answered.
Identity: I would deem social medias like Instagram and Facebook simply as MMO unless Facebook brings back its fun games then maybe a MMORPG, but otherwise that’s a no from me. Role-playing games are meant to have games and its users to play a role; to be yourself online is not a role (unless you’re catfishing or got something else going on then that’s a different story).
Identity: However, to think of real life as a MMORPG is a very interesting take on life. It’s almost as if we’re just Sims interacting a life in the game. To a simple-minded degree will I say we’re living in a MMORPG because none of us were born with android chips in our brain and we all have free will so no one can really be born into a single-player game.
