The second skin documentary was very informative and interesting. Never before have I seen such displays of video game addiction. I know back whenever I was in middle school I thought I was bad when I played Halo 2 after school for many hours at a time. I now know that my time spent in Halo 2 doesn't even come close to the Hours spent by the people in the second skin documentary. To someone who is uneducated in these types of games it would seem that the gamer is just wasting his/ her life away in front of the computer. But me knowing a good deal about all sorts of games know what's going on. In these "mmorpgs" players cooperate to complete certain objectives or just socialize. In the mind blowing amount of hours that players put into these games it's not surprising that they meet people who they want to become friends with. It's the same thing with any sports team or organization. The only difference is their world isn't real. While I don't doubt the ability to create relationships inside these types of games spending days worth of time inside an imaginary is completely ridiculous. There is a plethora of examples of how people waste their time playing these games. The four main guys in the documentary all took off vacation days to play the new expansion, one of them even mentioned playing for 18 hours straight. Another player said that he had logged over 100 days of playtime. What a waste of time.
This video pretty much sums up the whole second skin documentary in 5 minutes
Games are not the only computer centered activity that solicits copious amounts of hours from our day though. In the post human section of Culture Jam there is a passage about a woman whose addiction to a chat room destroyed her life. she didn't shower in 4 days and her speech had become slurred so that there was no breaks in between any words. I think people take these social networking sites way to seriously. "liking" pages on Facebook has gone way out of control ie. the page "Turning off the downstairs lights and running upstairs so no one kills you". All of those pages are garbage, I know it doesn't take long to generate a page but all they want to do is have fans and it's obnoxious. Social networking has gone completely out of control and it's for reasons like the ones above that people get obsessed.
I couldn't believe the amount of people that said they met their friends or significant others in the online gaming world. It just seems crazy to me. I mean, basically, you have no idea who that person is that you're playing the game with or chatting with and these people just consider each other great friends or have entire "relationships" online.
ReplyDeleteI can see how people form friendships in the virtual world, my sister would play and get really into those games as well but never as much as those guys. I agree with you it seems like such a waste of time, time that could probably be spent doing other things. 100 days of play time is crazy to think about. It's actually pretty scary to think someone can sit in front of the computer for that long.
ReplyDeleteThat is so true about the Facebook pages. Some of them are so dumb.
ReplyDeleteIt's scary to think that people are really addicted to playing these games, like the one that played for 18 hours straight.