Sunday, December 7, 2008

Journal IV

Journal #4

The concept of a virtual world is nothing new. We have merely found another way to create a partial reality that desperately tries to capture what can only be found in the ideal plane. That being said, I chose Furcadia as the virtual world to talk about, and it was one of the weirdest virtual experiences.
I primarily started going to Furcadia with some other friends of mine told me about it. We would just go around to the various portals in the site and talk to people. The main draw for us was the conversational aspect, since most of the conversations and interactions made no sense at all. It became very apparent that most of the people using and visiting Furcadia had other things in mind. From what I understand the site, although it has a very whimsical-cartoonish feel, is a hub for people in search of a particular type of kink. Furries, as they are called, are sexually aroused by anthropomorphic characters mainly of a cartoonish nature. This fact, again, just added to hilariousness of it all to me. The program and the character design of Furcadia have a very pixelated, analog look them. You are given several different choices in what kind of animal you want, which is called a furre, to be, the sex, the coloration, but that's about it. Unless you pay for specialty items your character will basically be some sort of mildly happy looking anthropomorphic creature in neo-medieval garb. You have a more detailed looking profile avatar, while the representation of it in the game is much more basic. The world is a 2-D design with relatively simplistic action commands. There is no zooming in or angle changing since the game was designed back when Windows 95 was the big thing.
The fact that the creatures have kept this now almost retro design going defiantly adds another element that many newer virtual world games do not have any more.
As with all the games that are created in this format many of the commands that run the game are in DOS format such as: / To whisper to another member, or: (ex. :smiles) To communicate an emotion. It gives it a, dare I say, an old-tyme, quaint feeling. A feature like that would as probably attract an even slimmer cross section of people from the Internet populous.
Along with there being a large variety of rooms, or dimensions, you can go into, there are also user created specialty rooms called dreams. While the large dimensions are created by the game programmer, dreams are completely created by the users. The game and profile avatars can change in the dreams, depending on how they've been programmed. For instance, what was once a biped rabbit person is now a, to scale at least, twisted, 8 foot, quadruped. Now, some of the other dreams have bar and, um, special rooms of a certain private nature. I'm not sure what exactly happening in them, but I would have to guess that it's something along the lines of virtual foreplay. I suppose the use of this virtual world could range to any number of uses on a personal level. Talking to people with similar interests, experiencing a different view though a chatting medium, or just trying out a new virtual experience.




Sources:
1. Furcadia
2. Furries
3. Interview with Dragon's Eye Productions, Inc.
4. MUDs
5. Virtual Worlds News

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