Casual Gaming

When I first took this paper I thought "Nah, I'm not a gamer. I don't play games." Then we had our lecture on casual gaming and I still tried to defend myself saying "nah, I'm not a gamer. I don't play games." I'm sure they call that denial. I suppose I didn't want to be labelled OR even be known as a person who plays games. So I have a confession to make and it seems appropriate to 'come out' on the class blog: I might be a gamer. I downloaded a few games on my phone and just recently have I downloaded two games that have really eaten up my time: Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga. I wake up in the mornings and play Candy Crush Saga until I run out of lives and then I play Bubble Witch Saga until I run out of lives. Then hopefully by that time I have a couple more lives on Candy Crush. I was stuck on level 29 in Candy Crush for almost a week and it was killing me - almost like winning level 29 was my highest priority. I didn't think one could become diegetically immersed or intra-diegetically immersed in either of these games. But perhaps I had allowed myself to forget about the outside world and let the game take top priority. Over my uni work, over my social life. Everything. I even go to my boyfriends house and the whole time I am playing on my phone. When people talk to me I don't pay attention because I am so into my game. And then when I can't finish the level I get frustrated and I start to blame the designers of the game for my inability to complete it. A term I think people use for what I am going through is 'addiction'. But I will forever come up with reasons against the argument. 
I would also like to talk a little bit about what we have been discussing in classes this week: Violence in videogames. This of course will be my personal opinion. I grew up playing games like Crash Bandicoot, Tekken, Hercules, and Spyro. Now that I really think about the content of the games, in all cases the player is required to kill enemies that may stop them from accomplishing the mission. But none of them were violent or disturbing. And none of them influenced me in anyway to cause harm to others. Now I go to the net cafe with my boyfriend and his friends and they are playing Call of Duty and yelling at each other and I'm sat there thinking that they are all so weird. In this game they are shooting and killing people. Outside of the space of the game these people are the complete opposite to their characters. I like what Holm Sorensen and Jessen said in the Goldstein article that "the violent elements fascinate some children, but this fascination should not be mistaken for a fascination with violence in the real world. On the contrary, all children in the investigation repudiated real-life violence." I agree with this because children are not always influenced by what they watch on television, or on movies or what music they listen to. Another point to make is that people make choices to play certain games or watch certain things. We can't blame the designers for the way people turn out. Most times you will find that it was their own decisions that turned them into the people they are now. And their decisions might be more influenced by the people they are surrounded by. So instead of blaming the games, maybe people should take a look in the mirror and think about the examples they are being to each other. I'm sure we have more of an influence on others' actions than games do.