Monday, November 30, 2009

Video Games

Recently, we watched the documentary "Second Skin" in class. It was a documentary about people who play video games (focusing on role playing games). Role Playing games include World of Warcraft (which i think almost everyone has heard of), and Everquest. Before we began watching the movie, I was kind of interested in seeing what type of documentary that we were going to be watching about video games. I mean, how interesting can you really make a documentary about people who play video games?

The overall message that the documentary sends is that Role Playing games can really ruin your life and that the average gamer looks like your stereotypical extreme video game player. It mostly focused on romantic relationships formed from role playing games and followed these people around who played video games almost all hours of the day. What really aggravated me about this documentary was that it portrayed people who play video games as people who have no life, and just care about their role playing game. In fact, someone in class had made the comment that it just reinforced the stereotypical gamer to them. I can see how this documentary can do that to people who don't personally know someone who likes video games.

I wasn't a big fan of this unit so much because I didn't really learn more than what I already knew about video games. It's not the most interesting topic to me, and i was really annoyed that the documentary that we watched wasn't anything positive about video games and gamers. I wish that we would have watched a documentary showing a different side to video games. Maybe how they're developed and why they're popular.

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