Playing vs. being played

My reaction to Caroline and Jemma doesn’t stand out from the rest of the class who has blogged on them: they weren’t my favorite. I’ll admit, it was fun to hear British accents and relive some of the British abbreviations from my study abroad days, but the content of the both of the sites was less than interesting. The intense sexual and/or alcohol themes of both simulations annoyed me and made me believe that these are designed for teenagers who want a peek at either uni life (however realistic it may be) or the life of a young working woman. Emails from Jemma’s coffee date reading “Fancy something stronger tonight?” and Caroline’s drunkenness with Simon in her first video turned me off.

However, I will say that I appreciated silversprung’s honesty of admitting to liking the sites. I, too, was sometimes flattered by the use of details from my life in their emails. For instance, one line of Caroline’s email caught my attention because it filled in the name of my best friend. Soon after that, though, she says, “What about you? You're a woman, I see.” That made me laugh. I have to think there is a less awkward way of pointing out that I’m a woman. I mean, if we’re friends, Caroline doesn’t need to point out my gender to me. As Jill Walker says, different responses to the questions don’t vary the emails from Caroline much at all, and often that was all too clear.

Nevertheless, I did feel an odd sense of “fun” at reading their emails and exploring their sites as homework and at looking at them with a critical eye. My favorite part of both was watching the videos, and I wonder where web videos fall in terms of our class understanding of electronic literature. Videos are not interactive; we can’t record our own videos and send them to Jemma or Caroline. I think this is a large part of how, as Walker says, the simulations “play” us instead of us “playing” them. And what’s the fun in “playing” a game that plays you?

Like others, I see that Jemma at least appears to have a purpose of attracting women to science in university. And I did enjoy her commentary on what it’s like to be a woman in science (though, as Oz pointed out in a comment, I hardly think her squeelish ways attract me to science…her lab partner definitely does yell “take off your trousers” at the end of the experiment when she makes a mistake.) The quiz on whether or not Adrian’s pictures of half-naked women on his office walls caught my attention, especially because of the results of what other people chose. I was surprised to see that 17 percent of respondents thought the pictures were “very sexy”, more than the number of people who were offended by such pictures, wherever they are. Where do they get these numbers and who is voting? Like we must do at the start of novels, I had to question the authenticity and truthfulness of Caroline and Jemma. The same comment Caroline made to me in an email—“Whatever you tell me about kids or anything else, I have to accept that you might be lying to me about who you really are”—I had to do the same for her and Jemma. It’s very strange, though, to question someone I can see on my screen, so I’m curious to study the difference of authorship between writing and filmmaking.