This weeks content on "Common sense" and play was very interesting to me. What I found interesting is games with gender or race slander continue to be produced. At what point will someone realize that we should be looking more in depth at the games we produce before just sending them online for everyone to play. I find it disgusting that kids are able to find most of these games online and play them, we need to be accountable for what young people see and learn. For example, the article written by Samantha Blackmon goes into detail about a game where you need to stack African American people on a slave ship. This is what blows my mind, someone had to have approved that. How can you sit down and agree with what goes on in that game and how are you allowing children play it?
My outside concrete example for this week is actually a personal citation. I myself have witnessed racial problems while online with friends and just by myself. My first example deals with the game itself, when I was younger I stumbled upon my cousins old playstation three. I was about twelve and staying the weekend at my grandmothers and I did what any other twelve year old would do and plugged in the console to the television. As soon as the screen turned on the first thing that popped up was "Start: Grand Theft Auto, Vice City." I did some research and found out this game is dated, it came out in 2002. I started it and the first loading screen had photos of guns and a half naked women with the reddest lipstick I've ever seen. I shut the TV off very soon after hoping my grandmother didn't walk in the living room and see anything!
My second example is playing games with my friend Gabe. Me and Gabe have been best buddies since pre-k and we both enjoyed playing video games. I remember after we "graduated" 8th grade both our moms finally let us get the new Call of Duty. We were so excited and I think we played the game for two weeks straight. Then one day out of the blue Gabe told me "I don't want to play anymore." Which was crazy to me because I thought he loved playing the game. I asked him why and he didn't really want to tell me so I thought about it that night. We grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota and I was blind to many racial slurs and I didn't know the meaning behind the words and phrases they were using towards Gabe. I never once even thought about what he was going through and how hard it must be to have to hear people say mean things all the time. There's so many things in these games that we let kids play these days that we might not even realize. We need to be careful what we let kids hear and say online because they are the next generation. We're supposed to be helping them not hurting them. We must gain common morals online for the future generations.
Blackmon, Samantha, and Samantha Blackmon. “Slave Tetris and Our Responsibility to Game Studies.” NYMG, 3 Sept. 2015, https://www.nymgamer.com/?p=10993.
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ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your argument and the importance of understanding how social media, and games in particular, effects people of all sorts. I would argue that a lot of people do feel similar but don't know how to act upon it because it is sometimes difficult to come to an understanding of why people create the things they do, or why some are okay with those games. I think of your example from Samantha Blackmon's article and the slavery game shown, questioning the same as you, how can anyone agree to make this? It is hard for me to understand how some people argue the meaning or lesson behind it, because it doesn't align with what I have been taught, witnessed and learned from others, specifically from people of color and the pain they still endure. It makes me wonder how the people, who agree and who have made the game, were influenced in their own development and what was taught to them, how can they have no compassion or empathy towards others? what kind of good guides them? Which leads me to think about your last statement that "we must gain common morals online for future generations" and I completely agree. I think the first step that is most important is educating others, especially learning from those who are affected the most. Yet I still wonder that because we each have different morals, how long will it be until we get to that point?
ReplyDeleteI can relate to your examples of how playing more graphic games at such young ages impacts children negatively, and I completely agree that we should be careful with what is influenced upon them over media. Growing up I had access to the internet at a very young age, and because of this I witnessed a lot of profanity from all sorts, and saw many posts on tumblr and youtube that I definitely shouldn’t have been able to see at thirteen. I also am witnessing my two younger brothers experience the same, influenced by certain online games where they have access to people from all over the world, and with that amount of people comes a lot of profanity and graphic scenes in their games. I can’t help but think about their development, and the impact that those games have on them and children everywhere. I am actually writing an argument about this exact topic for another class, because this is the first time in history that so many children have so much access to adult media at very, very young ages! I hope we learn to educate them and ourselves to protect them in the future, for our humanities future.