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Taking Gaming Into Adulthood (Dr Jill MacKay)

Course video 5 of 36

In week 1 we provide information on how to engage with the course as well as our Twitter account, using #DFMOOC. This week, we will introduce you to the topic of Digital Footprint. There are a range of activities, videos and resources for you to work through. By the end of week 1, you will have the opportunity to critically reflect on your own online presence and consider how you can make better informed choices as well as setting appropriate personal goals around your digital footprint.

If I Googled you, what would I find? As we move around the online world we leave tracks and traces of our activity all the time: social media accounts, tagged images, professional presences, scraps of text, but also many artefacts we don't always realise we are leaving behind, or that others leave about us. In this course you will hear from a range of experts and you will have an opportunity to explore and reflect on your own online tracks and traces, to understand why your digital footprint is important. We will introduce you to some of the tools and approaches to effectively manage your online presence (or digital footprint). The course will focus on the different dimensions of a digital footprint, including developing an effective online presence, managing your privacy, creating opportunities for networking, balancing and managing professional and personal presences (eprofessionalism). By the end of this course (MOOC) you should be equipped to ensure that your digital footprint works for you, whether you want to be more private online, or are looking to create a more effective and impactful presence. You can also join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #DFMOOC and follow us @DFMOOC We hope you enjoy the course!

Skills You'll Learn

Digital Footprint, E-Professional, Social Media, Privacy

Taught By

Louise Connelly
E-Learning Developer
Nicola Osborne
Digital Education Manager

Transcript

[MUSIC]

My name Jill MacKay and I'm a researcher at the University of Edinburgh.

I'm also an avid video gamer.

When I'm thinking about my digital footprint, I need to include

not just things like social media but also who I am in the world of gaming.

Like many people my age, I grew up with video games.

My first games were Hudson Hawk on the Atari 1024 and

Prince of Persia on the Macintosh Classic.

I have pretty wide and varied tastes.

I've played shooters like GoldenEye, 007, and

Shadows of the Empire but also point and click adventure games like Broken Sword.

I absolutely love gaming.

And I've met some amazing people through this whole beat who I would consider to be

some of my best friends.

I've flown to America to meet people and to play games with them and

hang out at gaming conventions.

And I wouldn't change any of it.

But all of this fun does come with a caveat.

There's a part of my digital footprint that still remembers what I was like

when I was a 16 year old geek, hanging out with a bunch of other geeks.

And that part of my digital footprint is extremely hard to manage.

My identity is all over gaming forums and gaming websites.

Sites that are privately owned and controlled.

Sites that I can't delete my data from.

That part of my digital footprint is massive, and it's very exposed.

A lot of my growing up happened online.

Think about the kind of person that you were when you were 16,

and think about that person trying to impress new friends,

possibly by saying things that they might not really mean.

At that time I thought I was going to be an author or possibly a superhero.

So, I wasn't particularly thinking about how anything I said

might reflect on me when I was 30.

Or even in another 20 years when I'm 50.

And my new career career goal is to be a fancy professor or possibly a superhero.

I have some gaming friends who use multiple Facebook accounts to try and

keep their friends from one world from crossing over into the next world.

And I have some friends who have said that they later realized

what an idiot they were when they were a teenage boy hanging out on the internet,

thinking that they would never have to answer for what they were saying.

The thing is, is that there's still good people.

There are people that I trust, but an out of context snapshot of that

can really give somebody the wrong impression of who they are.

For awhile, I was very cautious about my gaming persona and

I tried to limit the connections between my gaming identity and

what I thought might be a more presentable online persona.

But that felt fake to me.

When I finished my PhD, I found myself writing lots of CVs, as you do,

and I was talking about gaming as a hobby and even mentioning some of the skills

that this hobby has given me, my gaming identity is part of me.

My friends are a part of me and my teenage years are a part of me,

I don't think that I did anything wrong when I was a teenager.

Maybe just a little bit embarrassing.

And so you might say that for me anyway being a gamer and

being open about being a gamer is part of my authentic self.

I will always be the kind of person who gets excited about video games and

books or week of annual leave to play Mass Effect 3 through it at its launch date.

Strangely enough I think the best parallel to my gaming identity is

my political identity.

I've got strong political beliefs and I don't that think it's right for

me to pretend that those beliefs don't exist.

They may have changed and mellowed as I have gotten older but

they're still a part of me.

While I wouldn't necessarily open an interview with my political beliefs or

my gaming history, I would be happy to own up to both of them.

Regardless of how you decide you're going to integrate your online identities,

whether you're like my friend who has these two different personas to keep

those sides of their life separate, or

you're like my other friends who comment on forums with their real names.

And some of them have been doing this for over 20 years.

I think that the thing to do is to identify how far

your digital footprint goes.

And to make sure that it doesn't get away from you.

You don't want to be surprised by something that's lurking out there.

I've grown up as a gamer, and I think I'm maybe in the first generation who's going

to be taking an online identity like mine into a professional world,

that thinks that it has the right to Google you.

Therefore, my personal belief is that we all just need to be a little bit more open

about it.

Just so long as you understand what your digital footprint really looks like.

[MUSIC]

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