Virtual Reality at the Library: VR at MGCCC

Neurodiverse students in college are not only an often marginalized population on campus, but face numerous challenges when pursuing a degree. Innovative teaching and learning practices may help neurodiverse students with such challenges. Second Life (SL), an online virtual world, has been used as an educational platform both inside and outside higher education. Because SL allows for semi-anonymous learning, safe spaces, and the allowance for creative self-expression, it may prove to be an innovative approach in helping neurodiverse students succeed in college.

This paper develops a taxonomy of kinds of actions that can be seen in group agency, human–machine interactions, and virtual realities. These kinds of actions are special in that they are not embodied in the ordinary sense. I begin by analysing the notion of embodiment into three separate assumptions that together comprise what I call the Embodiment View. Although this view may find support in paradigmatic cases of agency, I suggest that each of its assumptions can be relaxed. With each assumption that is given up, a different kind of disembodied action becomes available. The taxonomy gives a systematic overview and suggests that disembodied actions have the same theoretical relevance as the actions of any ordinarily embodied human.

In the article, videogames as the specific phenomenon of modern social reality based on the specific way of human activity are disclosed. Creating virtual world, videogame often copy and or create unique state of virtuality borderline with the material world which includes replication, specific reflection and copies of real places and objects that have their features and rules of functioning. The analysis of the components and symbols of the videogame space is important to understanding the influence of videogames on human consciousness and social relations. City may be one of the objects of videogame or the background for game actions. It is not only simple space inside other space; city and videogame may be considered complicated system of complex phenomena in their relations. The urban topos is the dominant of the city space, space continuum of the city text. The analysis of the urban topoi existing in videogames is important for the systematical researches of videogames as sociocultural phenomenon. Examining of topoi in videogames is also actual for the urbanistic researches, because considering the urban topoi as a part of virtual space may define further researches of the place and meaning of the city in modern society. Analyzing classical concepts of the «topos» and «locus», authors of the article adopt the concept of urban topos as a «cultural and historical organism», which is constantly in the space of dynamics and development, which has its «anatomy», «physiology» and «soul», to the concept of the urban topos in videogames. In conclusion, it is stated that there are at least two kinds of reflection of the urban topos in videogames: 1) reflection of the topos correlating with the real one, 2) topos unusual to the real understanding of it. With the help of the games of the first category we can understand the real city as well; videogames belonging to the second category may be helpful in experiments with different simulations.