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why park slope was an excellent place to live:
no sexy witches here
via gawker... "so the Scores strippers maybe shouldn't have gone to the Daily News with word of their date with all the Park Slope kids. Now the school has disinvited them from the party and may cancel the event altogether. What has our society come to when a group of exotic dancers can't hand out candy to children?"
my favorite part is the comment that if you wanta see boobs in the slope, just head to the tea lounge. your eyes can drink their fill of breast feedin!
why philly's gonna be an awesome place to live:
philly filled with unattractive fatties
travel + leisure mag's readers rated philly basically unlivable due to its residents being least stylish, least active, least friendly and least worldly. god i can't wait to live there! i'm gonna gentrify it alllllllllllllll up!
way beyond pong
which of the many defenses of video games do you agree with? do you agree with his analysis of military reality vis-a-vis military virtual reality?
i am quite obviously not a gamer. but i'm also aware of how biased i am against everything barnett writes that it is difficult for me to sort through what seems like a reasonable claim and what isn't. here are reasons that i have an emotional keen-jerk reaction to discredit barnett's words:
1. he's in the military! and i've been around enough military dudes (due to growing up next to quantico) that i know the military doesn't encourage critical thinking skills or individuality, two traits which i prize, also, fighting and killing are not my deal.
2. fighting and killing are not my deal! i feel like i'm so completely thrown and horrified by even acts of simulated violence that it is really difficult for me to understand how anyone would want to spend their time fighting and killing (albeit simulated.) then it becomes difficult to respect people who want something-- to play at violence-- that i so abhor. i think it is important to relate that i have several close relationships (familial, fraternal, romantic) with people who do choose to spend their time playing these games. i don't judge them as harshly as i judge the unnamed gamer-nerd who personifies all the negative traits. fair? not at all.
3. i think the use of "game" as an action verb ('Microsoft's Xbox Live service allows me to game with friends from home via a high speed internet connection.') just seems so wrong. particularly in that context. it feels depersonalized, separated from any kind of fun action. it's like using the verb "interface" to describe the your activities with your friends at a bar. reading articles that use "game" in this fashion just sort of confirm how weird i feel about gaming as a social activity.
4. social activity? i think this is just my own non-participational bias, but it is really hard for me to consider group playing of video games as a valuable social opportunity. i haven't really done very much of it so perhaps i don't know very much about it. but i know when i play video games (i'm hearkening back to my semester of doctor mario before i began driving the bus), i had no real substantial or valuable contact with the other people who were playing or hanging out in the suite room. i never looked at anyone's faces. (and perhaps it is important to note the social cues that are founded in face-to face interaction.) i'd give standard, non-thoughtful responses ("yeah") to conversation, i wouldn't remember or apply the social capital gained from those conversations at any other point.
and maybe this is the crux of the matter! my definition of social interaction isn't just being in the same place as other people. it isn't even shared goals or experiences. those are important, but it is actions that these goals or experiences allow: it's having meaningful back-and-forth, the kind of conversation where i remember details and save them up for future conversations. it's how to make every dialogue into a springboard from which to further encounters with that person or use the social knowledge of the interaction to benefit me in other similar social situations. on those terms, 'gaming' can never be a truly social activity. yes, you can build hand-eye coordination. yes, you can further group identity and foster a common sense of purpose. but i don't think that it is as valuable as talking and interacting on any other level.
here's an important question to ask about gaming as a social destination: do you learn anything meaningful about the other people? about yourself? perhaps you get a sense of someone's skillset or competitive drive, or their problem-solving abilities (in more adventure-oriented gaming fields.) i just have never walked away from playing video games and felt like i really knew my fellow players better than when we started. to me, it isn't at all like talking in a coffee shop or sharing some physical experience.
speaking of sitting in a coffee shop, we were in one this morning, at a table next to a man who had a laptop hooked up to an external keyboard. thinking this external hardware was strange due to the size of the laptop, my roomate and i noted how odd this was. my roomate's boyfriend later commented that this man was playing 'world of warcraft' which, when played properly, demands an external keyboard such that one hand can work the mouse and one hand can work the keyboard. this blew my mind! not the keyboard-mouse split obviously, but rather that someone would go to a coffee shop to play a video game. would you? why? (it seems quite apparent that i would not, but i'm interested as to why anyone would choose this course of action.) coffee shops to me are warm, comfortable, sweet-smelling places. they are places to relax, make conversation with friends, read, think, etc. to me, a cafe has a double function: to provide serene mental space for me to conduct my own mental business, or to provide a nice atmosphere to interact with other people.
playing a game, a game set in virtual reality, doesn't seem to me to figure into either of those functions. in fact, it seems socially maladjusted... like bringing a book to read at a funeral you know is going to be boring. or answering a cell phone call when giving a public presentation. there's something about giving the virtual world precedence over the physical world that really scares me, and this is one of the many reasons that i hesitate to endorse video-gaming as a social function.
so now i'm going to try to understand why anyone might take their game and play it in public. let's, perhaps, consider this analgous to an activity i like to do: taking a book to the local park (the one with trees, not the one with concrete and dog poop) and reading. i like to do that, and it's going into the public zone while engaging in a private, technology-based activity. is this giving the virtual world precedence over the physical one? yes, it seems, perhaps it is. but i'm still far more engaged in the physical world. the thing that scares me about how i play computer games is that the level of detachment from the real world is incredibly intense. i become completely unaware of everything about my surrounding situation. (maybe people who play a lot of games become more inured to this, and they're capable of sensing information from their external environments?) not me, boy, when i'm tuned in, everything else is tuned out. but when i read my book at the park? i'm engaging the external environment on a level that is more involved! i'll look at people, overhear their conversations, watch the sunlight move across my lap as time passes, feel hungry when i catch a whiff of the local bakery on a passing breeze. i like this sort of engagement with the real world. why is this?
do i have some sort of misrepresented bias-- maybe older technologies have more credence because they've been tested with time? i'm not sure. the older generation always strongly protests the newest ideas, but then slowly comes to realize that the ideas are handy, convenient, moneymaking. perhaps i've been subject to this sort of obsolescence. or maybe i don't play enough video games to appreciate their finer points (that seems more likely.) from my game experience, it really seems more of a guilty pleasure, a way to kill time, a growing addiction.
i think sometimes people recommend to me their favorite tv shows based on how addictive the show is. what? in all other areas of my life, i try to avoid habit-forming behaviors, or at least try to analyze my rationale and control my own actions rather than be governed by an external stimuli. so how come television is judged on its ability to ensare one's attentions? video games seem largely the same way. perhaps in games as opposed to television, the "second life" aspect is so embroidered that it does enrich the imaginatory powers of the participants' brains? i don't really know. i just know that gaming as a social mechanism seems a little too mechanised for me to appreciate.
