A Non-believer in the Gaming Industry Sees an Alternative Light

So my mind's running a million miles a minute after watching all those videos...especially the McGonigal one. Chris Anderson was fabulous too, but it was McGonigal that really connected to two things for me.

I've never been able to look at gaming in another light; my brother has done it for years (headset and all - I would've been interested to see what she had to say about Call of Duty in that Ted Talks as well),and I've always been that girl who feels that, when friends complain to me that they have to compete with a game for their boyfriends attention, she is lucky enough to not have to deal with that relationship issue in her own. So...I've been on the "too much gaming, not enough outdoor activity" bandwagon. I mean, seriously. 5.93 MILLION YEARS of WOW gaming time? What about the trees and the mountains, man?

So the idea that McGonigal presents kind of made me look at all of this in a new light. We've kind of lost the battle on this one; gamings not going anywhere (and has apparently been around for thousands of years, though I'd argue that sitting on your bum for hours on end is slightly different than dice or tag...), so why not embrace it in the way that she suggests? By using gaming to change the way we look at the world and it's "unsolvable" problems?

I think her notion of the Super Empowered Hopeful Individual is a really important one - and I think the reason I connected to her in that video was because of the word "empower." I did a big project on child marriage and girls' education in impoverished countries last year, and when I was researching solutions for what could be done about the situations in which these issues exist, the one word that kept cropping up was empowerment. Over and over and over again. If we can empower these girls to feel confident, if we can give them educational opportunities, we can empower them to change the way they look at problems in their cultures (such as child marriage), and it goes on. So empowerment, that hope that things can get better, is where it's at.

I agree with that. I believe it - but I believe it more so in countries where the event of child marriage is taking place, where education is a hard won right if you are born female. The issue then, falls over here. And when we watch videos like McGonigal's, we feel that empowerment. We get it and we want to help. The problem is...how do we sustain that? How do we sustain that motivation to change the world? I really believe it can be done. I'm just not sure how, quite yet, we can pull gamers out of situations like the ones Call of Duty or WOW offers, and put them into others games like the ones she used examples at the end of her talk. How do we achieve that lasting empowerment?

Hillary

"Those who invade the linguistic domain of men must overcome their own sense of the inadequacies of a woman's speech. Unsurprisingly, then, political women are more "assertive, more venturesome, more imaginative and unconventìonal, and more liberal in their attitudes” than women in the population at large. The pressures of deviating from expected social roles exact a price. Female politicians tend toward "a serious and  manner and . . . a fretful uncertainty about themselves and their situation." "
-Jamieson (5)

It's awesome to see topics from three of my classes pulled together in Jamieson's article: eloquence and Margaret Fuller/women's issues. The thing that I can't quite get past is, if Fuller was writing in the 19th century (and I wonder what the date of this article is?) and we've evolved and matured and become more enlightened through the years, why do we still need articles and books expounding on this subject?

Apparently, because not too much has really changed.

The whole last part of Jamieson's article put me in mind of Hillary Clinton - that line about "women paying in shriveled uteruses for political standing" made me think about all of the comments I've heard about Hillary over the years, and and especially when she ran for president. There is only one guy I know who has anything good to say about her - even supports her political endeavors. But almost everyone else tone revolves around "she's a shriveled up witch" essentially, and "it's not that we don't want a female president, we just don't want her" which I doubt would change if another woman stepped up to the plate.

Hillary went from being the First Lady/mother to a high ranking politician in her own right - but that has not come without a price - and that price seems to be obvious from what I hear said about her.

It's interestingly terrible that female politicians have to give up so much of their femininity in order to run for office. The pant suits, the short hair that most women sport in those roles are all what we would traditionally consider "manly" changes to appearance - but why should women have to make those changes? Why should they have to sacrifice that part of themselves?

It's in circumstances like these that it seems like gender issues are even more apparent, and far from ever being over.