Essay Proposal!

I would like to ask people (facebookers) about the transition they made from myspace to Facebook and the reasoning behind it. I want to go into the term, ghettoization of Myspace and if anyone had noticed that before or even had thought about it before. Analyze the article associated with it.  I was thinking about doing some kind of survey again on Facebook and see how that works out.

Gamer?

The movie Gamer was not what I expected whatsoever. In my mind I thought it was going to be about teens who are OCD on playing video games or somewhere along the lines of that. With that being said, it did do this in a subtle way or as worded in the question: its the "social commentary. Simon portrayed a typical teenager gamer. Obsessed with his toys, he may have had more advanced systems, but the general image is there. Another thing, it showed was that Simon seemed to enjoy was the girls. Especially when the girls flashed, I would think that’s point on portrayal of teenage boys. 

A social commentary that we talked about in class was the man in the wheelchair.  Clearly he was obese. Everyone knows about America being an obese country. We see it, hear it, and there are statistics that prove it. The man was handicapped because of his weight, so the only way to function in society was to be literally in "Society".  It goes to show how impersonal we have gotten especially with the advancements in technology. Everything is so much easier, unlike back in the when a letter would have probably taken about a month give or take to arrive in the hands of the recipient. Now all you have to do is “shoot an email”. Or better yet Skype, iChat, Facetime, etc. Believe me all these are much appreciated.

In “Society” the people got paid for their time. In the real world people will do what ever it takes to support a family or even to sustain themselves. I feel like we have come a place where no job is shameful anymore, yes- even prostitution. I am not saying I am condoning it only that some people’s responses have changed when they hear such things.  The players very much used the game as a fantasy land where everything and anything can be true, take the man in the wheelchair. For most people fantasy is better than reality, which is understandable, except when they let it consume them. Players should not cross the thin line between sanity and insanity.

Gamers Anonymous

I had never heard about Role Playing Games before reading this article. No one I know plays this kind of game. Mostly they play Modern Warfare, my brother being one of them. I still don’t get the hoopla on video games, and now Role Playing Games.

I do believe that the extreme gamers tend to blur the lines between fantasy and reality.  In my previous English classes, we were presented with articles similar to this topic.  One of the articles talked about a young boy around the age 10, while playing a wrestling game on a playing system, beat a 6 year old girl to death while mimicking the wrestling moves. Yes it is not RPG’s, but it involves the same or similar concept how those games affect some people.  As the theorist Arthur Asa Berger said,  “Playing video games may lead to alienation; this alienation can often lead to a sense of estrangement from oneself…what is difficult to know is how being immersed will affect players. Will new video games become a kind of opiate for people who can find an outlet in simulations that seem better than those offered by their reap-life experiences?” (107-108) I get the need to find an outlet for the stress’s in life; however there should be a limit to how much some gamers dive into the fantasy lands.

One of the reasons I think people are obsessed with these systems is because they get a chance to be involved in things that are not possible in real life, do not have the means to, or is illegal.  It gives them a chance to go outside the “box” which is normal. To me it does not become okay when gamers apply fantasy to real life negatively.  For example if they drive around in a car trying to run over things for points or a similar example like that. I believe Role Playing Games or any type of those games/systems should be used in a healthy dose. Not to the point where the person can not sleep because they are thinking about their game or even dreaming about it. They should especially be careful not to mix reality with fantasy.