Double Postings? Craziness!

So, after a lot of running around, planning, and consideration, I've finally hit upon a good concept for my avatar portion of the Adversarial/Non-Adversarial Gaming project. What follows is pretty well-finalized, but there are some mechanics I'm still dancing with.

In essence, the avatar Jacques Morrisey is a dual-identity individual. His primary appearance is as a gamer all grown up. He's wearing a dark suit, a very metro shirt, and shiny black shoes. His face is impassive, his glasses are slightly tinted grey, and he generally appears as an inoccuous individual. He's a casual gamer. Most likely, he plays Solitaire or Freecell at work, or Tetris on his phone while waiting in line. He's very straight-laced, unaffiliated (hence no visible tags aside from his name), and doesn't really stand out. It has been my experience that gamers with jobs generally tend to blend into the background when they are outside their virtual element.

However, Jacques leads a true "second life" through video games. This is represented by his second set of clothes. Tigerstripe camoflage, body armor, boots, and a severe military haircut and facade set him apart from his more "normal" counterpart. He even openly brandishes an impressive-looking assault rifle. An observer can easily place militant Jacques into most FPS games, such as Call of Duty 4. I'm still working on setting up a quick-change routine in Second Life to allow him to switch between outfits and possessions.

Outside of those technical difficulties, which will be resolved as soon as possible, Jacques represents to great effect the duality most gamers experience in their lives. After all, there are very different social conventions which one must adhere to based on the surrounding environment and present company. When in mixed company, it is usually frowned upon to wear camoflage and openly talk of how you "pwnzored that n00b." However, amongst his gamer peers, Jacques feels much more comfortable with his true adversarial nature.

I found the readings interesting, but had some questions about some of the images that were presented. The two examples of children's books, for instance, both demonstrated very different social conventions of publishing. The second seemed a bit dark, with a fallen leaf laying on the ground and the bird looking straight at it. Is there a level of Eastern European social convention we are overlooking in this example?

Additionally, the image of the matching exercise (Fig. 1-9) has a very clear 800-lb gorrilla. Why is one of the coffee cups scratched out? Is there something that was not investigated properly, or am I just looking too deeply into a children's exercise?

The concept of text being socially constructed is nothing new. The standard font of most webpages is a sans serif font, but the standard for printed documents appears to be at most a variation on Times New Roman. This very visual aspect of writing lends nicely to the concept of a visual social semiotic environment. There is a clear division between technical-looking documents and more stylistic or academic ones. Our textbook uses a small, sans serif font on higher quality, unfinished paper. Why is this? It's visually stressful to see a huge page of grey space. Why would the authors choose this format?

Perhaps applying semiotic considerations to a book on visual design seems a little out there, but these are the things I was thinking during the second read and after my conversation with Dr. Holmevik. Incidentally, the initial idea of creating a dualized avatar was proposed by Dr. Holemvik. Just wanted to give credit where it is due.