Gaming

I've never been a big fan of video games. To the contrary, I've always been a bit skeptical towards their use to be honest. I suppose it goes back to my childhood and remembering the endless frustrations I had with my brother trying to communicate with him yet achieving nothing because his head was allways in the video game; leaving him completely numb every time he played a game it was as if he was in a paralel universe.

From then I'm simply unable to understand why people would rather stay indoors completely numbed by a screen than go out and actually experience life and interact with real people rather than man generated characters.


Having said this, I had no problem however trying out a video game for the assignment. I didn't however try the typical crazytaxi, grand-theft auto games, because I've played them before and gotten bored too quickly. So although some people may argue that its not an "actual" video game, I choose to try out the xbox kinect dance.

The question is would I consider this particular game to have a narrative? Not really, although it may have a backstory and somewhat of a goal in the game, which would be to win the trophy or the most amount of points. I feel that for it to have a narrative there would need to be somewhat of a conflict and resolution stage which I don't feel it has.

It may be argued that other games like counterstrike or world of warcraft do have somewhat of a narrative. I feel it depends a lot on the particular game however the one I chose to play serves two purposes, and that is for the person to learn the steps shown on the screen, and have fun none other.

Mind and Media : The brain in a vat

When we started talking in class about the relationship between mind and body, and the influence of media over the human mind, automatically the first image that came into my mind was of a brain being manipulated somehow, and Descartes theory of the brain in a vat.

Descartes theory of the mind-body dualism is an aspect that can be linked very closely to this modern issue of media-mind discussion. Descartes believed that the brain and the mind were two completely separate entities, as opposed to a single entity or one dependent from the other. His theory of "The brain in a vat" consists of the notion that our minds are in fact a brain that is being manipulated by an "evil scientist" who administers all the information that goes in and what we perceive to be the "real" or "tactile" world.

Having this in mind, I found it interesting to discuss in class how this idea may be applied to media vs mind as well; where the evil scientist is in fact the media, manipulating our way of viewing reality, and to an extent distorting it to a point where we cannot tell real from unreal anymore.
It's not to say that I believe or agree with this theory, I feel that to an extent although we are exposed to the influences of media, we as human beings still have free will to choose what we believe, as difficult as it may be to grow out of that mindset, it's still possible. However I thought it was an interesting analogy to make as to how the media vs mind relates to the mind vs body and vice versa; and how this image although satirical is quite accurate towards how we as humans are starting to feel towards our own realities illustrated by our surrounding media.