The evil within the gamer

In class on Tuesday we discussed how gamers could end up doing things to save the future of a real earth. I blogged about the morality systems in games yesterday, and while I was writing it made me think of something. Through my experience of gaming I havent met too many people interested in saving the world at all, in fact most people i've met in games have a dark side to them that they let out when they are within a game. The best example to use for this would be an mmorpg, or Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. In these types of games millions of players play together and accomplish tasks to become stronger. In many of these games there are players that take on the role of a PK, or Player Killer. As the name states, these players find enjoyment in the game by killing other player's characters and stealing the items that the killed player has in their inventory. Being player killed can really halt progress for some people because it can make the player lose money, weapons, and expensive items needed for a certain event. Pretty much every player in an MMORPG would become a PK if they could, but many of the characters are weak and can't face high level opponents, so they would not be able to kill many players. PK's are cruel and have ways of killing players sneakily. When a PK stumbles upon a lower level character they may offer to help them train their character or trade them a rare item at a certain point, the low level character will consider it an act of kindness and follow the PK. The PK will then lead the lower leveled character out of a safe zone to where it is legal to kill players and take down their prey. This does not give me hope that gamers will be able to help out the world much. If we were all placed inside of a game world where levels were non-existent and players relied only on skill, there would be a majority of PKs. Nobody would take the time to do quests to help the world or further their character with no level system unless there was something in it for them to help their individual character to beat other players. So maybe we shouldn't place any trust in gamers to solve real world problems, because they come from a world where murder and theft is a completely normal thing with no consequences.

Food And Social Media

Through our articles last week we talked about how social media is changing the way we eat, diet, and potentially try new things.  Today instagram, twitter, facebook, and pinterest are blowing up with pictures of meals.  Whether it be a new recipe they just tried, something like looks too delicious not to share, something they spent hours slaving over after they found out a new recipe via social networks, or just showing off their super healthy meal that goes along with their super healthy lifestyle.  In the article “How the Web is changing the way we eat” it discusses how social media sharing our experience and how we react to food.

            Is this a good or bad thing?  Personally, I would like to say I have not jumped on this bandwagon.  I find people who are constantly intragramming their meals, for whatever reason, to be extremely annoying and it becoming unnecessary posting.  Maybe social media hasn’t changed the way I view my food because I am not going to post, tweet, or instagram my microwaveable meals. 

            Has instagram and twitter just become another way to show people a certain “persona.”  Is this just another way of “acting” through social media, to portray a certain image of yourself.  Do people want to show others that they know how to cook delicious looking food, or to show people that they are on a strict diet regimen and therefore only instagram their daily morning green all natural smoothie?  I think that the web is changing the way we eat, but I think we are not changing the way we eat for ourselves, but rather for whoever is willing to look at our instagram photos. 

Food - Derek Miller 4th Post

During class on Tuesday, a popular opinion among my colleagues was that the food industry should not have more regulations. While more regulations could lead to a shortage of food, I think it is imperative for the government to have more control over big agricultural businesses, ensuring a more sustainable future.

 Allowing capitalism to play its course in the food industry demonstrates a major flaw in a capitalistic government: classism. People with less wages cannot afford or have time to purchase or make higher quality of foods. As mentioned briefly in class, cheap quality food has allowed corporations to pay their workers less, since they can obviously buy the cheaper quality food. With that in mind, I am not saying everything is the corporations’ fault; their number one goal is to make a profit. However, since we have established this in our government, we need to include more regulations, ensuring safer environments for animals, pesticide-free food, and a lack of antibiotics in our meat.

At the same time, to believe that the switch to environmentally sound foods will be easy is completely wrong. With the input of all kinds of chemicals in our food and plants, farmers are able to feed more people. Our population number is on a J-curve at the moment, which to put that in perspective, no animal species has every fully recovered from a j-curve population explosion. If we switched everyone’s diets to all natural, the cost of meat would be astronomical and other foods wouldn’t be too far behind, due to the high demand for food.

So in other words, there is no easy way to fix the food crisis. Sure, you could follow the text’s example, allowing the middle-class and wealthy to eat healthy diets, while the poor are still stuck with cheap, processed food, but I think the government can start taking steps to change certain aspects about the treatment of animals and food processing.