Practicum 8 Mike

For my last post I was going to wrap up all that I had found over my research, but because I just finished writing that in my paper, I thought I would discuss how people create identity through their gamer profile. Not only does the username itself say a lot about the user, but the user also gets to post two profile badges that are awarded for certain achievements within the game. The most striking feature I found about these profile badges, however is the fact that there are many drug related ones. These badges say more about the user than that game character as there are really no drug references in the game. Badges like "joint ops" and "blunt trauma" feature pictures of marijuana leaves on them and were visible on many player's profiles. I found it interesting how public these references were, as well as how prominent. I would think that people would feature things more about the game, but I supposed when trying to create identity on the online space, people choose to draw references to other aspects of their life.