limits in games

This afternoon in class when our class was talking about the advantages of video games it seemed as though video games were these magical things that allowed someone to place themselves in a limit-free environment and save the world/ solve problems/ do whatever you could dream up. Not all video games are fantastic adventures that are different from real life. Many video games actually have consequences for the actions you choose to perform in games that do give the player more of a free reign over their virtual world. In the game Fable, you are a character that can do much of anything that they want in a fantasy environment. The game has a set moral system included in it along with a renown system. For each action you do you are rewarded with good points or evil points and everyone hears about your actions. A quest early on in the game is when you are a child and you catch a man cheating on his wife, the man offers to give you some money to keep quiet, or you can finish the quest by talking to the man's wife and telling her about what you see. This is the first time that the game presents you with a moral dilemma and it is obvious which is good and which is evil. later, depending on the choices you make, townsfolk will respond to the choices you have made. if you have chosen a good path, people will stop to cheer for you and thank you for helping the world, but if you have chosen an evil path, people will boo you and guards will automatically attack you on sight. Sure it is easier to be evil, but if you take the evil path it will put you in conflict more often and make normally easy situations much harder because of the hatred geared at you. an older example of limits in games is in the game The Legend of Zelda. In this series you are able to attack chickens with your sword, which would be animal abuse in real life, but in the game if you strike a chicken several times thousands of chickens will fly onto the screen to attack the player as a consequence for doing a morally bad thing. Not every video game involves the player saving a princess or a world, sometimes it can allow the opposite, but just because a path is offered does not mean the game won't have its way of telling you that the option is not right.

Class discussions about war

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After our class discussions last Tuesday and Thursday, I believe that people, including myself, are influenced by the “media spectacle” more than we realize. Since we are a culture that promotes violence and views war as entertainment, we have to realize that it is hard to escape certain myths that are embedded in our culture.

In a capitalistic society, most people within the culture are playing a game of King of the Hill. When people have been exposed to games such as Call of Duty and others, compounded with cultural egotism, I truly believe that people think that they could handle war-like situations. Granted, nobody would admit to it, since rationally, it is quite absurd. However, subconsciously, a lot of people in Western societies have been raised to believe that they are special and unique, causing them to believe they could easily do anything.

I am sure some people play violent video games or watch CSI and subconsciously do not believe that they could fulfill those roles, but as doctors have seen with the development of Web MD and other medical websites, in the technology age, people sometimes believe they are more informed than licensed professionals.

Also, treating war as entertainment is horribly wrong and truly exposes the flaw in nationalism. Could you imagine if the media used the same coverage techniques in school shootings? Why do we believe that American lives are better than Iraqi lives? That is the most alarming thing about this chapter. Everybody deserves the chance to live a happy and prosperous life, however that may be, regardless of race, citizenship, or anything else.

-Derek Miller, Blog entry #3