Changing Faces: An Experiment in Friendship, Ego and ID was a weeklong netprov duet by Claire Donato and Mark Marino (or Claire Marino and Mark Donato), two electronic artists who grew up in Pittsburgh, studied at Brown, and whose names end in O. Taking the ultimate leap of trust, they jumped into each other’s social media accounts from August 5-12, 2015. What they learned has something to teach us all about who we are online and how others make it so.
Online social networks and video games are prevalent in today’s society, and using both video game characters and social networking profiles cam potentially be used to help people better understand others’ experiences, delivering meaningful experiences which enable critical reflection upon one’s identity, and on others’ experiences related to identity. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text fields are insufficient to convey the richness of our real world identities. As a step towards conveying richer identity experiences, we introduce our interactive narrative game called Mimesis, which aims to allow players to explore identity phenomena associated with discrimination. The story of Mimesis takes place in an underwater setting with subtly anthropomorphized sea creatures as characters. The player character is a mimic octopus, which is a species of octopus adept at emulating other creatures. The octopus is on a journey that takes it from the dark depths of the ocean to its home in the tropical shallows. Along her way, the octopus will encounter several sea creatures who inhabit the waters and whose actions serve as examples of particular kinds of covert discrimination. These sea creatures provoke the octopus, leaving the player to must choose between different emotional responses to the creatures in order to guide the octopus through a series of short conversations. In this way, the project maps the experience of discrimination onto gameworld based on an underwater metaphor. (Source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/mimesis)
During the past 10 years, the success of Internet literature has become the most attractive phenomenon in contemporary Chinese literature. Internet literature has not only attracted millions of readers, it has also gained commercial success. How can we understand the combination of computer and Internet as a kind of global technology, and the literature, as the local and the national representation, in China? In order to answer this important question, my paper will begin with a discussion of the rising young and famous Internet literature writers. The Internet not only provides a new world of cyberspace to young people to express their feelings and lives in a new age, it has also created new possibilities for the refashioning of literature in contemporary China. By following the successful stories of Internet literature writers, we will find that Internet literature, as a kind of new folk disourse, creates a new discursive space and constructs a kind of virtual identity. Such an attempt, generally called "the spirit of new folk literature" in the cyberspace, counters the elite discourse of Chinese traditional literature. Meanwhile, with the acquiescence of official ideology and the promotion of commercial power, Internet literature moves towards the mainstream from margin to the centre and bring forth a literary revolution in post-socialist China.