Is this real?

The wonderful world of video games allows you to basically do anything you want to do in another man made universe. Many games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty are meant for its players to actually feel what it feels like to be in a war or battle like situations. Counterstrike is a first person shooter where you can either be a terrorist or counter- terrorist. The point of the game is to eliminate the other side by killing them, either with guns, grenades, or knives. The terrorists have an opportunity to plant a bomb, while the counter-terrorists have an opportunity to defuse the bomb.


Call of Duty is also a first person shooter where the goal is to eliminate the other side.

These video games in essence offer the player a sense of power. Players are allowed to do anything they want without the consequences of their actions. Many of these types of games try to mimic what a battle situation is like. However, there is one key thing it does not mimic; the tragedy and pain that is felt when someone takes a human life. These games in a sense give a false power to the player, because they are able to “kill” the other player before they are killed. It is an illusionary power in which many players want to feel control over another player. Video games are rather popular among men in practically all age groups. This can be a bad thing for many younger players because it basically dulls them into thinking that killing someone else can be reduced to a mere game.

This brings about cultural issues over power because people begin to play these video games to feel this sense of power over others and sometimes this gets violent. People will do crazy things in real life because they have been influenced so greatly by playing these video games. If you get shot at or attacked in a video game, you can most likely get “healed” or your life will slowly regenerate over time. In real life however this is usually not the case.

Stumbling or Procastinating

The Dictionary.com definition of Procrastinating is "to put off till another day or time; defer; delay." Many people procrastinate things like school work and other tasks that they do not want to do. I can see already that many people in this class myself included waited until the last minute to do their blog posts because until yesterday their were very few posts and today there have been sixty or seventy and the day is not over.

If you need some more help procrastinating then I am going to help you out:

WWW.Stumbleupon.COM

Just click the link and then in the top left corner click Stumble! and you will find yourself procrastinating like never before.

This website lets you click the Stumble! button and takes you to a random webpage. It can be anything from a computer game, to a puzzle, a video a funny quote, a picture or actually come to think of it anything. It is completely random unless you select what your interests are. In which case it will be limited to only the selections you make.

In the Sean Redmond reading about visual regime and how celebrities are always being followed around by paparazzi and having pictures taken of them. I think it is pretty sad that many people make celebrities lives the mainstay of their days and are always up to date of who is dating who and who went to the club last night. The biggest story in the news right now is the earthquake in Haiti but the biggest story before that was the Tiger Woods scandal. People use Tabloids and the internet to procrastinate their work and try to figure out what is going on in the lives of celebrities today.

The Tiger Woods scandal is a big deal in the sports world right now and many people look up to him, but I feel like enough is enough and let the guy have some privacy because he knows he messed up he does not need everyone reminding him of what he did wrong every second of the day.

I think we find the lives of celebrities so interesting because we look up to them and they are always around on the covers of magazines, on T.V. and on billboards. Celebrities are everywhere and they are people to and sometimes I am sure that they could use some space away from all of their fans.

This website is a way for me to procrastinate in other ways and keeps me away from all of the celebrities in music and movies. I encourage you to try it out and Stumble upon something other than famous people.

Call of Duty Pushes the Limits

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is the best selling XBOX 360 First person shooter game of all time. With the war today and the gun violence on the streets some would say that video games like Call of Duty are a little over the top and to realistic. The graphics of these new games on HDTV's are almost life like. The game has rating of 17+ on the box but who says a little kids brother or sister will not buy the game for them. When I was younger my parents would not let us have shooting games like Ghost Recon and especially not Grand Theft Auto because they new that the game had a lot of drugs and gangs related to it. What my parents did not know was the my best friend down the street had the games and we would go play them there. I know when I play online with people all over the world that many of the people I play with are probably not even in high school yet or at least they do not sound like it. I am a 21 year old college student. So I can differ from what is real and what is fake.

In the beginning of the game before you even start playing the game asks you if you would like to skip a few levels that you may take offense to. When you have to ask some one if they want to play a level or not because it might be offensive, I believe they should have realized they pushed it to far when they had to put a warning on it. The level they ask if you want to skip is, you playing a Russian guy and you are with a couple other Russian men with large machine guns. You walk in to an airport and the objective is to kill everyone. There are police shooting at you that you need to kill and people crawling on the ground that you have shot. The Game itself was actually banned in Russia. When an entire country bans a game you probably offended them. Say for instance a person buys the game that lost a family member in the Columbine shooting or the 9/11 attacks, and has never heard about what the level is and decides to play the level. The warning just asks whether you want to play. It does not tell you what the level is. This person may take a serious offense to this.

There needed to be some sort of explanation of what the level deals with and what the objectives are in the on the warning message.

Yes, it is a video game and the label says 17+ and Mature but the game and the XBOX do not know who is playing the game. Younger children play this game possibly thinking war is cool and when you get shot you come back to life with full health and ammo. If parents are going to let their kids play these games I believe they need to have a talk about what is real and what is fake and how war is not a fun thing.

We as people often look to deep in to things even as young adults and even older adults we look to far and try and find a different meaning for things like movies and video games. I can not speak for the programmers of this game but I think they were just trying to make a good video game and I believe they succeeded but pushed it a little far. I try and enjoy movies and not look for a bigger meaning in it. Little kids look at this video game and see shooting people and being shot as fun and they can be influenced by this very easily. They need to be taught to not misinterpret Video games for real life.

VIDEO GAMES: Goodbye to the Damsel in Distress

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the female characters in video games and cartoons were damsels in distress, waiting for the all powerful male to come and rescue them. Donkey Kong decided to capture Princess Peach and Mario had to go through the obstacles in his way, such as rolling barrels and broken ladders, to try and save the helpless princess. Then, again he had to rescue her as she was captured by Bowser and held captive in the castle in the original Super Mario Bros game.

Whether it’s Olive Oyl needing Popeye to come to her rescue from Bluto, Princess Peach sitting helplessly waiting for Mario to save her from whoever has captured her, or Rapunzel sitting trapped in the tower until the prince came to save her, the idea was always the same. The female was in need of a male savior.
This brings to mind Freccero’s thoughts on power and how it relates to group identities and marginalization. Freccero believes that within popular culture, we can see hierarchies among identities, where certain groups are considered to be more powerful and others are more marginalized. The examples above show power in relation to gender identity within video game texts and cartoons. In the past, we would see more and more texts revealing how the male gender was considered to be the more powerful identity. Females were portrayed in ways that represented them in a marginalized light. Throughout the years, in video games as well as cartoons, we have seen a lessening of this power dynamic that used to be so much more evident before. In today’s culture, you will see a lot more strong, independent female characters, some being the main hero of their own game. Some examples include Lara Croft of Tomb Raider, Jill Valentine of Resident Evil, Princess Zelda of the Legend of Zelda, and even Princess Peach is no longer considered a damsel in distress, as we see her fighting off her opponents in games like Super Smash Bros.

In this case, the marginalized group has been gaining more and more power throughout the years. Even if the hero of a particular game is still a male, the goal to achieve at the end of the game has shifted towards other things rather than the need to save the female character, the damsel in distress. By comparing video games of today’s time to those of the past, we see the ways in which power has moved through the different texts and even though it hasn’t entirely changed the hierarchies of the gender identity represented in these texts, it has shifted them towards a more balanced level.