It seems to me that the articles we've read for this week have been utterly biased against them. One is about someone overcoming an addiction denouncing the evils of it, another is about real life people who are a little..off in the game of Eve Online, and the last is about the abuse a researcher suffered while playing City of Heroes (the scenario described in the last article doesn't make sense to me, as a former COH player).
I feel that the readings seem to be more apt to point out the extremes of the game. What about the hundreds of thousands of people that play that aren't prone to abuse, or insanity, or excess? As a former player of MMOs, I've never really had any of these problems. I played WoW for a couple hours a day for a few months in the summer, found it fun, but didn't really take it anywhere farther than that. A person can get addicted to any activity in excess, but we don't see articles about people with an absurd love of basketball, or car collecting.
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I think there is always going to be a focus on the extremes in any situation. You never hear about Joe Schmo, but you always hear about Crazy Karl. It's just the way media and others tend to focus on because it will get more raised eyebrows.
ReplyDeleteBut I think with both pieces they were just telling about there experiences and clearly it was a bad one. So I'm not sure if we can call it biased or not.
I agree with the basketball comment. Every year we hear of a student from a high school football team suffering a stroke or even death from being pushed too hard at practice in the heat of the day during the summer months. It is the same thing as these games but there is a lack of concern with this. Football is cool, its okay, it makes you popular, video games do not.
ReplyDeleteYou are right to note the lack of actual numbers of MMORPGers in any of the readings assigned. This is something I also find problematic, that anecdotal evidence takes precedence over hard statistics. However, I think only "Human Cost of MMORPGs" has a strong bias against this particular kind of gaming. In my view, "Bad Crazy" almost appears to celebrate the insanity known as Eve Online, and the article about Myers/Twixt reads as more of a discussion about how similar online communities can be to offline ones (violate the established rules and you're out).
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