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Bobby Aultman, Alec Lapierre, Robby Bearss, Travis Robinson, Austin Grogan.

Do the cons outweigh the pros in gamers?

In class the other day we discussed the pros of being a gamer and what skills would be developed by becoming a virtuoso in gaming. Things like task orientation and hand-eye-coordination were brought up, but overall it did not really seem like there were too many skills developed through gaming that could not be acquired somewhere else. In my life I have spent enough hours playing games to be considered a virtuoso in video games, but I did not develop any of the skills that we talked about besides a bit of hand-eye-coordination. I think ive gained more of a negative skill set than a positive one. I have become less social due to video games, while playing games i don't talk because the only person I would be talking to would be myself, which would be weird. I also did not really become socially aware of many things, including myself, until my junior year of high school. I also had gained a lot of weight because of my constant playing of video games leading to a sentient life style, which I have lost now but still regret having that happen. All of these things that happened because of video games have led to other negative things happening, as where the positives I got from video games never seemed to cause anything positive to happen. I think that people that are involved in a club that involves something that builds hand-eye-coordination would be better because they get a social experience, have to manage time to attend the meetings, and they also build hand-eye-coordination without doing something that could be harmful to a persons skill set.

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.

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.

Having the media looking over your shoulder

Today there was some huge news because the new Fall Out Boy album was released onto the internet. Why is this big news? Well a few years back, after the release of their 2008 album Fall Out Boy had gone on a permanent hiatus... or so we thought. About a month ago Fall Out Boy performed a brand new song on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and released a music video for the song "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light 'Em Up)" They announced that they had a new album coming out in the next month. This excited fans everywhere, there had been no news or hype on the release up until that point. Fall Out Boy had wanted to keep things under wraps so that they could make music their own way without interference from media and fans, along with the pressure to release the album. They tried very hard to keep it quiet, even with big guest artists like Elton John. Bassist Pete Wentz had gone to dinner with rapper 2 Chainz to discuss a collaboration on one of the songs and 2 Chainz had taken a photo and captioned it "Fall Out Boy Ft. 2 Chainz" which scared the members of Fall Out Boy because they thought the public would find out, but so many people thought that it was a joke that it was dismissed and Fall Out Boy could continue their work in secrecy. It is really cool that they were able to go under the radar to create an album that was made of music that they wanted to play and music that was able to be perfected due to the unlimited amount of time they had to work on it. Sadly Fall Out Boy has made plans for a new album in public so they will once again be in the public eye and won't be able to have the effect that they had with this last album. Fall Out Boy may have started something with this method though, maybe other bands that are supposedly retired will come back to release new albums the way that they want to release them outside of the media's sight.

What doesn't kill us.....we eat!

In the last class some students commented that fast food was too much for them to handle, or that they felt bad after they would eat it because of what went in to making the food. I didn't really understand why they chose to say that, considering the majority of campus food is fast food itself. In class big name fast food chains were discussed like McDonalds and Taco Bell but nobody mentioned anything like Uncrustable PBJ's, fountain drinks, or Bosco Sticks. Those foods are terrible for you, students just don't take notice of it because its not in a bag marked with the golden arches or a bell. I work in food service on campus at Lafollette and every day I make food that is bad for them and they keep coming back every time I work. Other times I will see someone look at a bag of chips containing 180 calories, then they will turn to their friend and say something along the lines of "this is disgusting" then they will get an Uncrustables sandwich which has 30 more calories and much more sugar in it. I just don't quite understand why people judge food by the label. They seem to have never heard the term "don't judge a book by its cover". These people are constantly ingesting crap into their system thinking that it is healthy when really it is worse than the things that they are trying to avoid. A way to fix this would be to promote looking at nutrition labels instead of looking at packaging that shows persuading healthy words to draw in the customer. Salads are one of the big foods that seem healthy but can actually be terrible for you. If you put too many things on the salad or too much sauce the calories can easily become very high. Salads may not always have nutrition facts on them because they're ordered at a restaurant or made at a salad bar, but the restaurants that serve salads should have a list of the calories in all of their menu items, or at least a close approximation. So next time when you're trying to decide between a bag of chips and a salad or Uncrustable remember to check the nutrition facts before throwing the chips back with disgust.