I have been digging through all the thoughts in my brain in order to come up with a thesis for the final paper. Yesterday Dr. Jerz and I spoke briefly about one idea when I expressed an interest in continuing my study of video games and relating it to digital culture. He mentioned avatars and suggested that in some classes writing a biography and story about an avatar would in turn help students to write about themselves. Apparently this is a legitimate practice in some academic forums.
I came up with a few notions about avatar creation and the creation of characters in literature. I tried to think about the literary/author personality in all of us and how it can be brought out through the creation of an avatar. I have found that avatars are not always direct reflections of the gamer, though they can be like on the Nintendo Wii. Last night I came up with a few more ideas that centered on interactive fiction, hypertext literature, and cybertexts. I know that I want to do something with digital and now I am off to the library to try and figure out what that “something” is going to be.
Ideas:
1. Avatar idea as mentioned above.
2. I thought about maybe writing a research paper about the relationship between interactive fiction and the popular fiction genres. There are definite similarities and differences between the two forms of literature, but we can see where they have grown off one another. Specifically we see the influence that popular fiction has had on the interactive medium.
3. Video games have turned into teaching tools of the future the same way that books were once innovative.