Blog: Creativity and New Media
Creating online avatars is one of the many ways new media enables its users to be creative. It gives people a chance to use their imagination and create a character that they can then live through and do things they may not actually be able to do in real life. These avatars are usually characters in a virtual reality world (including children's games) or just in particular stimulations. It gives users the power to control their actions, their appearances, and their language.
I created an avatar in my old childhood game "Club Penguin." When I was younger I would constantly play this game because of how fun it was and how much power I had to control my Penguin. Creating this penguin avatar allows me to control its appearance, name, and movements. This platform allows its users to build igloos as homes, decorate them, buy pets, and actually play games throughout the town. This game can also be very educational considering there actually is a library where you can read books and other games where knowledge and pattern analysis are needed. This form of new media strongly enables its users to use creativity and imagination to enjoy and innovate the game itself.
In addition, to the club penguin account, I created a separate individual avatar in the perception that I would want to look like. Many times others who are not happy with the way they look or just want to see something new but are too scared to do it, often create these avatars and again live through them like it is them themselves. The biggest difference with my avatar is basically the color of my eyes, seeing as I wish I had blue eyes.
Creativity using new media started when we were just kids using the computer, whether we knew it or not. Now that we look back, creativity was fostered and expressed through social game sites such as Club Penguin. Although at the time, we were just playing that game because it was fun. Having the option to customize your penguin through various colors, clothing and pets opens up limitless combinations to suit each person's creative desires.
ReplyDeleteIt seems as if we all played some sort of game as a child that sparked our creative juices. I remember playing the Sims (and I'm sure most of us remember that game), and spending countless hours customizing my characters, my home and my neighborhood. All games, to a certain extent, cause us to use our creativity to some degree, whether it's customizing a character or a combination of clothes. Or maybe we're just trying to justify playing games more often.
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