AADAC perhaps needs a gamers rehab?!

Yes, I was once a gamer, and yes, I am female. My gaming history looks something like this (note how it was all driven by my brothers influence). First Ninetendo came out, my brother and I (I think I was 6 or something at the time) shared half the cost of it. I never did make it competly to the end, but did watch my brother make it many times.  Super Nintendo, once again we split the cost and played it to no end. N64 my brother bought and I played, I prided myself in being able to beat my friends in Mario Kart and Bond playing with my feet. Then along came something called warcraft,… the first version. I first only watched my brother play. So I played warcraft until the expansion pack when everything changed, and it was more of an individual quest than creating your city and concuring the other cities. It required too much time and too much planning, it wasen’t fun anymore.

This is the first level of my back-in-the-day Warcraft:

So I dont really fit into the “non-gamer” category, like my mother who was hopeless at warcraft as she only wanted to build up gold reserves and get her peons to cut trees, and then she would be attacked and die. But I do no longer consider myself a gamer, especially to todays standards. Recently I have been thrust back into the gaming world via my boyfriend and his addict friends.  

In my effort to understand gaming, I have thought about this topic sociologically, perhaps more than another would. I know that when in a guild there is immense pressure to be online at least once a day taking down some big boss so a cool sword, or knee pad, or wrist pad can drop, and then your ‘guy’ is just that much cooler. I tend to wonder why it matters what your arm guard looks like, but I can only infer that to the people in the game, they can somehow recognize that that is a positive thing, and therefore assign value to it. It is what Jakobsson and Tayler wrote about, that gaming has its own language and community to learn. They write about how groups are essentia for achieving success. So gamers must create social networks online and interact with real people.

So why do I have a problem with this? I wonder why gamers must hide behind a distorted, exaggerated character online, instead of interacting with their RL (real life) friends. I also wonder if their online characters become the only thing they feel sufficently valued in, and that is why they spend so much time on it. I also have a hard time (as I stated before) valueing the time and effort devoted to getting better ‘things’ for their ‘fake’ character.

I do acknowledge that leisure time is to be spent how you want. But I believe these new games are taking on a new dimension, where people are addicted and shirk other responsibilities to spend time with their game.

Advertisement

Explore posts in the same categories: SOC3390, Week 11