Gaming: Present & Future

I'm posting this a little late...I am generally behind because I have been sick quite a bit. No matter, I wanted to post this regardless because gaming is certainly the topic in this course most pertinent to me. I have been a gamer ever since I was very young, and I have been an aspiring game developer since early high school. I read a few of the gaming articles, so I'll address a couple of different points raised:

Games are for kids: The actual argument in the article was that games are not, in fact, just for kids anymore, and I am inclined to agree. As the gaming generation grows up, they are not willing to grow out of a major source of entertainment. The same people that grew up playing Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog are now developing games so that they can keep on playing. There is an entire genre of games clearly aimed at more mature audiences (there are more and more titles that recieve the dreaded "M" rating by the ESRB every year). In addition, games are getting deeper than the basic premise of "get the high score" or "beat the final level."

Violence in games: I have had this argument with a dozen people and I still hold that violence in games doesn't make kids violent. Playing Doom and Halo never made me want to pick up a gun and shoot someone with it. Playing Grand Theft Auto never made me want to steal cars and run over people. I don't necessarily believe that this means that everything goes in video games; there should still be a certain standard of ethics and morality that the development community adheres to. However it's not because I think the content of the games radically damages our society; it's simply because I believe that there are things we don't need in video games.

Kuma War: This game kind of disturbed me when I first saw it earlier this year, and while I still don't particularly like the premise, my impressions have changed. At first it felt like the game was making light of war and the fact that people are dying every day, but in retrospect, this is really just as true of any war simulation game. The problem, however, is that it DOES make people take the current situation less seriously than they should, which is a problem because in life, there is no reset button. The game is also too eager to propogate current American stereotypes of the "face of the enemy," and can only really serve to heighten the already paranoid sense of anxiety about Arab-Americans.

It's a Small World After All

Well, I was definitely laughing out loud while watching the Small World clip, which is probably a first for a homework assignment at Stanford. The general gist of the clip is that with social networks like Freindster, the entire concept of relationship is becoming thouroughly distorted. I found the analysis interesting and found myself agreeing on almost every count. As a matter of fact, I have been having the discussion with several people about theFacebook.com and how (in my mind) who your friends on the facebook are means absolutely nothing. I find it interesting that there are actually people who pride themselves in being able to say, "I have 300+ friends on the facebook!" I have been asked more than once by RL friends if they should accept a friend request; why does it matter? Who cares? The facebook and similar systems are nothing more than databases on some server somewhere with a bunch of rows and columns that happen to have real people's names associated with them. I've also found it interesting that the facebook keeps expanding what it can be used for, now having support for small, exclusive groups that are only open by invitation. Awesome...now we have cliques somehow embedded in the aforementioned database. The coolest two features of the facebook in my opinion are a) that it functions as a more easily navigated phone book, allowing you to reunite with long-lost friends, and b) that it shows the degrees of separation with people that you find on the facebook, actually proving that it is indeed a small, small world.