For my final project, I wanted to relate Marshall McLuhan's idea of the "global village" to the world of online gaming. In a way, online games could be considered a visual manifestation of the global village, as games can connect you to thousands of people across the globe at once while emulating and replacing real life interaction using a digital medium. When composing my photos, I particularly focused on the limited tools given to gamers with which they may communicate with other gamers while online. I was interested in how human interaction is defined by game creators and how it is categorized and enacted in different online gaming contexts.

This was the first project where I created everything entirely on the computer using found images and manipulating them in photoshop. It was extremely difficult arranging everything at first because I didn't compose the original images and I lack experience with photoshop. After a while however, I was able to pretty successfully achieve the effects I wanted with most of my final images.

This was one of my favorite pieces to come out of this project. 

Link to images:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/136946698@N08/sets/72157660872948979/with/22857854637/

Some of the images reference interaction within games while others, such as "Message Not Received" and "Appear Offline" refer to online interactions outside of the games themselves. For those unfamiliar with the symbols and concepts I used, here is a breakdown of what some of them mean:

Emotes: Commands that make the player's avatar express specified actions or emotions (e.g. /dance will make the player's avatar dance)

Symbols
*symbols are from the game FFXIV: ARR and are not universal

Player Not Found

Player is Busy

Player is AFK(away from keyboard) 

Blacklisted Players

Friends