A website that enables users to interact is called 'Habbo Hotel'. It is basically a chat-room, but what is different is that you are able to create your own 'character', choose clothes, hairstyles etc for it, and, in short...be whoever you want to be! Of course you can do this with any chat room, and most people do- talking to stranger enables you to create a new persona, someone that you want to be, but feel like you can't. It is much more visual than other chat rooms, as you can go into different 'rooms' and actually guide your 'habbo' around, even letting it walk up to people and strike up a conversation.
This website intrigued me because it seemed to be trying to re-enact real life as much as possible through the Internet. In theories of interactivity, i would say it is consultational interactivity. I think this because you are able to create you 'habbo', and choose what clothes it wears, what name it has etc, and you are in control of guiding it around and choosing who it speaks to. However, you are not fully in control because you can only go into rooms that have been designed by 'Habbo Hotel', and you are limited in what you can do (obviously racism/swearing etc results in your account being deleted). You have a limited set of fixed choices.
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It's a bit like a more basic version of 'Second Life'and other similar online games. I think it's a bit crazy that people can go as far as making real money by having 'jobs' on these kind of things. Then (as far as I know, which isn;t a lot about Second Life, you can go to the 'cinema' and watch films, listen to music, decorate your home, talk to people, have an actual job....it kind of takes interactivity to a new level. Scary! http://www.tesco.com/books/product.aspx?R=9780071508254
ReplyDeleteHi Dani,
ReplyDeleteI see you're ahead of me and you're doing as I hoped, bringing the relevant reading into your thinking. Good work.
As Rodge says, 2ndLife is a difficult thing to get one's head around. Apparently some people do the same things on 2ndL as they do IRL! It's something I'd like to understand better, but so far I've not had the time -apparently there are some scholarly articles about it, but I've not come across them yet.