Initial Reflection | DR/CC 2021

Initial Digital Identities Reflection

1. What identity issue(s) did you select as the focus of your project? Why?

I chose to focus on performance of identity at play in the new Critical Role campaign that began about two months ago. Specifically, I wanted to take a look at how the cast worked to establish their characters’ identities at the table in the first episode they aired for the new campaign. I think an interest in identity at play throughout rhetoric and composition, how our languaging and communicating and technologicking (thanks, Word, for telling me the word I made up is in fact made up) works together when we get together to try and play creatively, is what is driving me here. I am interested in how we play with identity and how we evoke identity in performance that is purposeful and self-aware, in situations where we are consciously trying to act out fantastic situations far removed from our realities, while creating and embodying characters that are often very different from us.

2. How did you identify or develop the focus/angle for this project? What other possibilities did you consider?

I developed the focus/angle of the project by watching and trying to analyze through the first few introductory scenes for each of the two characters I initially focused in on. I tried to focus on what they said, how they said it, and what they were doing as they said it in order to see how they were performing to introduce their characters and establish their identities to the rest of the table and the audience at large. I also took a look at the official character art and displayed stats that are integrated into the screen as the campaign airs and the cast plays at the table in real time. Other possibilities I considered were taking a look at the prior campaign, or looking at a couple of characters in this campaign who had appeared in a prior mini-campaign to potentially see how the identities they portrayed changed, stayed consistent, or deepened across different stories told.

3. What argument/position are you taking on this issue? How difficult or easy was it to find your own perspective to include?

The position that I am trying to take, though not in a very argumentative or directive way, on this issue is to show how a performance of identity can be a pleasurable activity in play that can perhaps aid us in becoming more flexible with our own identity performances outside of play. I guess I see this project as kind of a foray into thinking about how playing games can not only affect our identity, but how we are conscientious of shaping identity and the processes that it involves at the game table. This also connotes, implicitly, how we might carry those understandings forward into our own lives when we leave the table; how do we know what our physicality is communicating, our dress, our tone of voice, mannerisms, facial expressions? Can play potentially free us from feeling less agentive in the control of these particular, personal factors in creating identity? Moreover, what kinds of limits are there still even in this kind of play, to how much we can manipulate and change identity?

4. What media did you select for the project? Why?

I chose to focus on the official character art, relevant character statistics, and the onscreen portrayals of two new characters to the campaign in the first episode of the new season. I thought this would be more straightforward to try and start grappling with than bringing too much more outside information and knowledge about other portrayals of characters from different campaigns, or comparing / contrasting identity play across time in campaigns (which I’m not quite sure what the value would have been for what I was initially curious about anyways, and would have to think more on if I wanted to include it).

5. If you had unlimited time, skills, and financial resources, what would you have done differently with this project?

I think I would have liked to create individual GIFs of moments of gestures and speech that I found visually interesting, if I had the time and the ability to create those high-quality GIFs. I would have also liked to create GIFs / small clips that I would be able to add my own annotations to, something that I still need to figure out how to do but would also have aided in the description and analysis of the identity markers at play I was trying to do. I would also have liked to make a slightly more complex interface to break the sections down in to see if it had any sort of effect on the composing I was trying to engage in.