Skin Doc response blog #2

This is the second time I have actually seen this documentary and both times it has had me in shock of how people live this way. I do not understand why someone wants to waste so much of their time and money on something like WOW and Everquest. I guess it must give them a sense of life that they don't actually possess in the real world. Some people are small, scrawny, short, fat, bald, or whatever bad characteristic that society looks down upon, and in a MMO, people can create someone that is envied by a large group of people. This kind of relates to what we read in Culture Jam where the point was made that we as a society have advertisements, commercials, movies, and billboards, or whatever can promote the "desired" norm of what we should be like or look like. Corporations promote fear of not being like other people, and that will in result make you not liked or weird to those who have conformed to what is accepted.

I have a younger brother (age 17) who is big into first person shooter games on his PS3 video game console. We never used to be into such things like that, but with a lot of people talking about it, we had to know and understand what was so amazing about it. Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and other games within this franchise have really given me a firsthand look at what "gaming addiction" may be like. When we first got the game, we spent hours online progressing to a new rank and level. We quickly realized to be accepted you had to great. Your statistics as a player had to be good to even be liked by other gamers. We started caring about our "kill/death ratio" more than we did our homework or even eating some nights. My brother was never really a great student in school, and he started to take a lot of pride in how great he was in the game. He started realizing how others plays and figuring the logic of how to manipulate them to basically walk right to him and him kill them. He became better than I ever imagined. But in the meantime it also consumed a lot of his time. Like gaming did to the men we saw in the documentary. Luckily though, after moving last February,  my family has recently been living in a neighborhood that has very limited internet that my brother can not play these games online. He has started to care about other things and doesn't have Call Of Duty run his life like it did a time before.

Gaming addiction can be equivalent to alcoholism, gambling, and drug addiction. I feel as if it is not worth the time and money given up to put yourself into that state of being. Instead of having all of these people sit in front of the computer and play a game for hours on end, how about we do something productive. Volunteer for something, community service, coach a team or play a sport. I was shocked by the statistic that 60 percent of the online gamers were between the age of 20-35 years old. What does this say to our younger crowd? It shows them that it's okay to stay behind a desk and socialize in a way that comes second to how we were meant to come together. We meet people technologically now, and never face to face. They did say they built strong relations, but some people are not who they say they are. Technology brings this new danger to the table that we never thought we had to worry about. Online gaming can possibly be harm more than aid to a lot of people.