Monday, April 5, 2010

Representing Teenagers: Photo Project

I would like to start by saying that this study is about one male teen and is most relevant to other male teens, while some female teens are also in this situation I have chosen to use male pronouns as they refer to this particular gamer and the other male gamers he interacted with during my observation.


Video Games are a major part of teenagers lives, especially in boys. Because of this fact, the content of these games is more important than ads and shows on T.V., as well as other forms of media, in shaping the physical, social and ethical habits of teens.


Video games have a particularly powerful effect that places you in a "different world" Because of this effect the players perception of time is altered and 2 hours can feel like 15 minutes. Since it is in the nature of all video games to have this time altering effect, gaming can lead to poor health choices, such as eating less often, because the mind is fully occupied with the game and less so with hunger and thirst.


When observing one teen gamer (Floating Phantom981) over the course of two weeks and paying special attention to diet, I noticed that the majority of his diet consisted of liquids, mainly the soda Mountain Dew, other sodas and occasionally Gadorade. The human body is not designed for a primarily liquid diet, it seems that this is a consequence of excessive gaming.


Video games are mentally stimulating. This is an important part of their design because if they were not mentally stimulating, then the consumer would not keep interest in the game for very long. Another reason this is crucial part of the video game's success is that in conjunction with the loss of a sense of time, this leads to late night playing, and deprivation of sleep cutting into time that the gamer may not actually have available in his day.

In the few times that FloatingPhantom981 was not drinking liquid for nutrition he stuck to convenient foods with little to no nutritional value such as chips and ramen noodles. And in the few times he was not gaming or eating he was at work. I took the opportunity to talk to him about why video games take up so much of his time. He said, "I want to go outside and play wiffleball and stuff, but all my friends do is sit and play games, no one wants to do anything anymore, I wanna get back into shape and stuff but no one else does." It seems like even the teens who have a desire to be more active feel as though they have no other choice.


Every different game FloatingPhantom981 played had something very interesting in common. Whether it was a FPS (first person shooter) an RPG (role playing game) or even a sports game, there was always some form of "achievements" Even if the game had been beaten or he had been claimed victorious over the opposing team, there was always incentive to gain awards for 'scoring 3 goals in one period', or 'killing 50 men without dying'. This "false sense of accomplishment" establishes a relationship between the game and the gamer that becomes stronger with each accomplishment, making it harder and harder to stop playing the game.

Just as Facebook and Myspace are Social Networking sites, the realms of online gaming are social networking sites. Entire social personalities are developed through online gaming. Because players need not be physically held accountable for their words and actions online, there is a tendency to be poorly mannered and often times intentionally disrespectful and crude for the sheer sake of their own entertainment. The normalization of racist, sexist, and narcissistic discourses is commonplace in the chat rooms and in-game-chat of these games and is dangerous in the least, strengthening the dominant culture in perhaps an even more effective way than in advertisement and media, it comes directly from the peers and participants of the culture itself.



The majority of the games FloatingPhantom981 played involved the killing of other players or AI NPC's (artificially intelligent) non-player characters. A constant exposure to killing, war, and destruction has an ethically numbing effect. And especially as the games become more and more realistic as time goes on, killing, war, and destruction become more and more normalized and naturalized in the mind of the gamer. This desensitization leads to less public outrage against war and more support for it. As this generation of digital gaming natives becomes a bigger percentage of the voting public, the chances that war will not be strongly opposed is higher, allowing the greed of certain politicians to go unchecked as we plunge into more years of war. In this photo the gamer is pointing the weapon at his enemy, but really he is the target. Media Literacy is crutcial. Media Matters. In the words of Providence's own Slam Poet Jared Paul "Its a war, one side doesn't know its going on, the other, is committed to winning at any cost"

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