Blog 2
It is pointed out that teenagers in previous years prefer playing online games rather than watching television, especially men. Apparently, not only have the quality of TV programs been dramatically declining, but also habitus have changed because the technology is fast-growing.
Social games in computer (online games) become prevalent since social games provide an instant and convenient platform for those players to communicate and interact. The platform assembles a large group of people from all around the world and no matter what genders, races or occupations you are, you are welcome to join into this synthetic world. This kind of convergent culture creates its own community, economic value, social value as well as entertaining function. Compare to just passively watch television at home, playing games online requires players to actively accomplish missions or build up their social networking. Watkin (2009) said MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, people spend a lot of time on playing social games with “virtual friends” would probably cause social isolation in real life that get along with people. I agree most of his views since it accurately reflects a common social phenomena that youngsters are over addicted to play social games or being captivated by the virtual world. On the other hand, it also plays an important role in educating people, learning something new and making new friends.
Moreover, an interesting viewpoint is carried out by Watkin (2009) that playing MMORPG, the character, behaviours that players have could be a sort of self-representation and it helps people in some way. There are no restrictions that men can only create male characters, but female characters are allowed. Gender stereotypes or discriminations do not exist anymore in this virtual world since players are free to do anything they want.
However, is playing games online in computer still popular in recent years? In my investigations, many of companies which run online games have already shut down in recent years and the consoles games, such as will, ps3 are not good in selling. This is because all of them are being replaced by mobile social games gradually. The function and value of mobile phone are more stronger than playing games online in the computer. Therefore, I would conclude the phenomena as “survival of the fittest”.
No. of words: 378
Reference:
1. Marwick, A. & boyd, d. (2011). To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17(2), 139–158.
No comments:
Post a Comment