Lost for Emotion- Week 7 post 2
I am pretty addicted to Super Smash Bros. It’s a fighting game series from Nintendo, filled with all their popular characters from their various franchises and mashed together into a chaotic battle royale with tons of easter eggs and homages to video game culture. For a long time Nintendo fanatic,it’s incredibly fun. I’ve been playing the different installments of the series for the past 20 years. (!)
Nintendo has sort of gotten a reputation for being behind Sony and Microsoft when it comes to their online gaming offerings. The first few installments didnt have online connectivity. The 2014 Wii U installment did, but no way to really communicate with the online players you were competing a match with. Yet, players found a way to communicate. This installment had a way to name your profile, and it allowed it to be changed before and after a match. Quickly, you had players using this function to write out little messages to communciate their feelings. The messages were often crude, the word restricted to barely enough characters for a long-ish name, but resorting to accronyms or clever use of punctuation, the message got across. Sadly but inevitably, most of these communications took the form of boasting or insults. I still marvelled at how players strive against and felt the need to communicate somehow.
The newest iteration on the Nintendo Switch, released just this past December, tried to rectify this. Instead of being able to change your name, you are stuck with it when you sign on. Nintendo still decided to throw players an outlet, and preprogrammed a set of messages you could send after a match to communicate your feelings. The messages are innocuous (Well Played!- Lucky!- You almost Had Me!- Let’s Go Again!) I wonder how they are being received by the fanbase. You can already see some players being somewhat subversive in their usage of them- sending the messages after matches where you can’t help but conclude they are being sarcastic in their message choice.
A similar thing happened in the game itself. In previous iterations of the game, you could have your character perform a “taunt”, usually a little dance. I guess some players were using this feature in a derisive manner, because it’s been removed from the current game as well. But of course, players want to express something, so I’ve noticed that instead of the disabled “taunts, players will just being a repititive standing/ducking dance with their character to basically achieve the same meaning as a “taunt”
Where am I going with this? I don’t know.
I guess I”m just seeing a need for human beings to interact, and how they strive for it whenever they can, despite the limitations. I’m reminded of beepers, that long ago technology were the only thing you could send to someone with a beeper was a phone number. But of course, people figured out and developed a secret language with the numbers, usually by holding the beeper upside down, to write messages. 01134 uspide became “hello”- stuff like that. This translated into the first text messaging and chat software. They are everywhere , but remember that emojis started off as simple combinations of puncuations and letters to create little faces.
It seems to me that despite all the ways social media enables us to communicate and contact each other, there is stil an element to it that doesn’t quite capture the full extent of human interaction, such that we need to figure out ways to supplement it, to embue it somehow with emotion. I think the widespread usage of gifs is part of this category. Yes, they can just be meant to be funny, but the visual image sometimes captures a mood or sentiment so much more efficiently and preciesly than any amount of words could ever do.
We’re getting to the point where videochatting and conferencing is replacing so much of the way we communicate even electronically. Wasn’t technology like skype so popular because finally you could not only talk to someone remotely, but see their face? Because you were missing out on something vital without that visual input, again I would suggest an emotional context.
Right now a lot of social media is very text based, and the visual gifs/images/videos are supplemental. A service like Instagram is trying to emphasize the visual component, and of course a service like Youtube is all about the visual.
Let me pause (I’m sort of thinking as I write this rambling piece), because I was about to make a case for text communicaitons being replaced or phased out eventually for forms which gave more emotional context, but the reverse kind of happened with text messaging, didn’t it? We had cellphones, but texting has become the more popular way among lots of users to user their phones to communicate. I’ve seen the joke often enough about how people prefer texting to calling someone. So this is an interaction where the additional input/information was seen as detrimental. The efficiency of the text makes it preferred to talking on the phone, where you might have to deal with an emotional context (certainly the traditional pleasantiries/greetings)
So there is a tension here in our social media communication, between efficiency and emotional delivery. That tension is being served by gifs, memes, emojis. So what other ways will be developed that will continue to enable the delivery of emotional content to a social media message?
Nintendo has sort of gotten a reputation for being behind Sony and Microsoft when it comes to their online gaming offerings. The first few installments didnt have online connectivity. The 2014 Wii U installment did, but no way to really communicate with the online players you were competing a match with. Yet, players found a way to communicate. This installment had a way to name your profile, and it allowed it to be changed before and after a match. Quickly, you had players using this function to write out little messages to communciate their feelings. The messages were often crude, the word restricted to barely enough characters for a long-ish name, but resorting to accronyms or clever use of punctuation, the message got across. Sadly but inevitably, most of these communications took the form of boasting or insults. I still marvelled at how players strive against and felt the need to communicate somehow.
The newest iteration on the Nintendo Switch, released just this past December, tried to rectify this. Instead of being able to change your name, you are stuck with it when you sign on. Nintendo still decided to throw players an outlet, and preprogrammed a set of messages you could send after a match to communicate your feelings. The messages are innocuous (Well Played!- Lucky!- You almost Had Me!- Let’s Go Again!) I wonder how they are being received by the fanbase. You can already see some players being somewhat subversive in their usage of them- sending the messages after matches where you can’t help but conclude they are being sarcastic in their message choice.
A similar thing happened in the game itself. In previous iterations of the game, you could have your character perform a “taunt”, usually a little dance. I guess some players were using this feature in a derisive manner, because it’s been removed from the current game as well. But of course, players want to express something, so I’ve noticed that instead of the disabled “taunts, players will just being a repititive standing/ducking dance with their character to basically achieve the same meaning as a “taunt”
Where am I going with this? I don’t know.
I guess I”m just seeing a need for human beings to interact, and how they strive for it whenever they can, despite the limitations. I’m reminded of beepers, that long ago technology were the only thing you could send to someone with a beeper was a phone number. But of course, people figured out and developed a secret language with the numbers, usually by holding the beeper upside down, to write messages. 01134 uspide became “hello”- stuff like that. This translated into the first text messaging and chat software. They are everywhere , but remember that emojis started off as simple combinations of puncuations and letters to create little faces.
It seems to me that despite all the ways social media enables us to communicate and contact each other, there is stil an element to it that doesn’t quite capture the full extent of human interaction, such that we need to figure out ways to supplement it, to embue it somehow with emotion. I think the widespread usage of gifs is part of this category. Yes, they can just be meant to be funny, but the visual image sometimes captures a mood or sentiment so much more efficiently and preciesly than any amount of words could ever do.
We’re getting to the point where videochatting and conferencing is replacing so much of the way we communicate even electronically. Wasn’t technology like skype so popular because finally you could not only talk to someone remotely, but see their face? Because you were missing out on something vital without that visual input, again I would suggest an emotional context.
Right now a lot of social media is very text based, and the visual gifs/images/videos are supplemental. A service like Instagram is trying to emphasize the visual component, and of course a service like Youtube is all about the visual.
Let me pause (I’m sort of thinking as I write this rambling piece), because I was about to make a case for text communicaitons being replaced or phased out eventually for forms which gave more emotional context, but the reverse kind of happened with text messaging, didn’t it? We had cellphones, but texting has become the more popular way among lots of users to user their phones to communicate. I’ve seen the joke often enough about how people prefer texting to calling someone. So this is an interaction where the additional input/information was seen as detrimental. The efficiency of the text makes it preferred to talking on the phone, where you might have to deal with an emotional context (certainly the traditional pleasantiries/greetings)
So there is a tension here in our social media communication, between efficiency and emotional delivery. That tension is being served by gifs, memes, emojis. So what other ways will be developed that will continue to enable the delivery of emotional content to a social media message?
You bring up a really interesting line of thought- text being replaced with visuals. I know that some of the most popular books for 9 year old boys (like my son) are comic-book style. They are very visual. His teacher told me that they are not good for developing vocabulary and reading comprehension despite their popularity. As a child, I read comic books, but I also read books without any pictures or illustrations. And I loved reading. Getting my son to fall in love with reading is a struggle.
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