So today during lecture, there was a presentation on Gaming.
And since I love to game myself, this topic definitely appealed to me.
What interested me was the fact that gaming was used by the military to recruit kids or young teens. It was discussed in class how some of the teens actually believe the army would be as exciting or as fun as it would be in a game like Call of Duty. However, obviously in reality, it is quite the opposite.
I don't like the idea of using video games to train because it is definitely different than being in action in real life. The argument ab55out guns as well. Just because someone might be extremely good with shooting and aiming on a game, might not necessarily be that great with a real gun. I find it strange that people think it's the same thing, when clearly it isn't. The game controllers aren't as heavy as the real guns nor will it recoil as hard when you shoot. The game controller might shake a bit because of the vibrating function built-in, but it won't budge as much as a real gun would. If one were not to hold the real gun properly, one can seriously injure oneself.
There was also an incident, which I don't really remember when it happened, but a kid, no more than 9 years old, decided to steal his grandmother's car and drive it down the road, hitting other cars as he goes. When his grandmother called the cops and found him, they asked the boy why he would do that. He said he wanted to be like Grand Theft Auto, the game.
Personally, the Grand Theft Auto Series are my absolute favourite game, so I understand how the kid thinks it's cool and exciting to copy what you can do in the game. However, I thought it was a bit dumb since just because the cops are slow and doesn't see to be smart enough to catch you in the game, doesn't mean, you can escape that easily in real life.
The official Website for GTA: http://www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftauto/
I think that the youth during the recent years are more aware that the virtual world is not real compared to the youth when video games first got popular.
And even though video games now have games where you can exercise both physically and mentally or even learn a new skill (eg. learn a new language). But because the older generation wasn't born in this virtual time, they think that gaming is a bad and useless thing.
Do you think the problem is that technology tries too hard to hide the fact that it's technology? I remember playing computer games as a kid, but the graphics were so terrible that you would never for a moment think your "virtual" skills were comparable to "real world" skills. Are video games just too good at tricking us, or are we actually less aware of "reality"?
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