Month: April 2019

This term has been really interesting. I have played video games for most of my life, but never really taken the time to view them through a social justice lense. Writing a paper on Skyrim, a game I have played since I was 12, gave me the opportunity to think about what the writers of the game were trying to accomplish with their quests and the way players interact with the narrative. I definitely got a new perspective on my favorite quest, which was not what I expected to happen. I figured that because I knew it so well, I would be able to analyze it easily from what I already knew. What actually happened was that I learned a lot of new things about the way one of the characters was designed and written. She was far more complex than I had ever imagined, and I wasn’t even able to include a whole other side of her because it wasn’t relevant to the paper. She is absolutely a three-dimensional character, with enough content and depth to further my interest in examining her story line. There was a lot I wasn’t able to see before, and I’m excited to keep analyzing her as I play the game on my own time.
It is also interesting to me that we discussed the concept of simulacra in class. Just the week before we talked about it in lecture, I had played a game called Simulacra. It’s an app and while it costs money, it was well worth the five dollars. The game starts with you “opening a phone” and you look through it and find out that the person the phone belonged to is missing. You use all the content she kept on her phone to find clues as to where she might be and in the process, you learn a lot about her. After a certain point it feels like you know her, and the friends of hers you have talked to feel almost like your own. I won’t describe the rest of the plot in case you are interested in playing, but long story short, you get to know the missing girl through the persona she has created on the internet and through technology. You have access to all of her private information and get to know her more intimately than even her closest friends do. So it was really cool to fully understand the concept of simulacra through this game, and I definitely recommend it if you were to want to use a hands on example to describe the concept. Thanks for such an interesting class!

I am not an aggressive person. I avoid confrontation to the point of fault. And it made sense to me that I found, during the past two weeks, that the only reason my aggression level was higher was when I was playing the game and my concentration was interrupted by someone talking to me. This only seemed to be the case when I was actively paying the game in that moment. If I paused it, I would immediately calm down. This may be the case because I play video games recreationally, so I’m used to switching in and out of an aggressive mindset fairly quickly. I was able to learn at a young age how to manage aggression and frustration when playing video games. I can easily recognize when I am feeling outwardly aggressive towards the people around me as a result of the adrenaline from playing the game. Emotion recognition and management is not a difficult skill to learn, especially if you want to be sure you don’t hurt the feelings of the people around you. While when in this state of aggression, I will occasionally lose patience and snap at someone, I never physically lash out.

That is one major difference I have noticed; that I am completely at peace with killing things and acting violently in video games, but would never kill or act violently outside of self defense in real life. Even if it was self defense, I seriously doubt I could ever kill a person or an animal. I feel that this is the case with a lot of people, as video games are not real and generally have no real life consequences. The things in the game are not alive and cannot feel pain. The only times one might hesitate to kill in a game is if the thing is useful to you, if you have an emotional attachment to it, or if there would be in-game consequences that you don’t want to deal with. This is definitely not the case in real life. People are conscious, and have their own lives. They feel pain and when they die, they don’t really re-spawn. I would not be cool with killing people or acting violently in real life.