Audience

within this the main thing I will look at is the new online based interact games such as second life.

This has completely changed the way we can interact on the web; it lets you roam around and meet new people and lets you pretend to be whoever you like. People make money of this game and create a living doing so, and there are even cases of people falling in love over this game. This does bring up the question of what people are not doing to play this game instead, firstly they are not going out to meet new people but playing the game and finding people over the web. This stops the meeting of new people and although you may make friends over this game, you may never meet them in real life. As most people may go out in a n evening you would be confined to the computer to socialise with your friends.

This new technology is passively consumed and takes the full concentration of the user; it has no main target audience and can be used by all age groups.

There are many advantages to this new media, firstly if a person is not able to go out and interact with people due to a disability or just doesn’t want to then they can go online and meet people that way, giving every one a chance to meet new people and make new friends. This new media goes to a new level letting the user do what ever they want to do, there are limits but they can shop or build or even fly, this makes people live out there dream life on the game. although there are major concerns over control, there were reports of a paedophile ring within the game and this is due to the vast expansion of the game and the creators not being able to control what is being build and what is happening in the game.

This then bring up the other side of the argument that this is fine and good for the information rich areas of the world but bad for those who ar information poor. The phrase was once said that we are becoming a global village and every one is connected to each other. This is true but for the people who don’t have this access then the divide between us and them is increasing and making the gap further apart. Also there is a concern over who is watching people in the game and checking up on them; do they have the right to? And who is really in charge in the game. The main question is can the controllers see what you are doing in the game and do they have the right to check up on us. This is true both in online gaming as well as the console gaming. When we are playing online are the able to see who we are playing against and actually what is happening in the actual game play.