Game On/Game Over

THE BENEFITS OF GAMING CULTURE

By Ethan Biersdorff

Video games have become a massive part of pop culture worldwide, with their adoration growing exponentially over time and surging during quarantine. From video gaming’s humble beginnings in the 40s and 50s as a niche interest of scientists and technicians who wanted to test the limits of the devices they built or worked on, to arcades where friends and families could go to spend some coins and have a good afternoon, all the way up to now where it is a common household passtime. A survey taken by WAHS students shows that 40.7 percent of students would describe themselves as gamers. With gaming being so popular, it’s important to ask, is that healthy? Well as it turns out, gaming and its culture as a whole can have many benefits for casual players and diehard fans alike. Online connections One obvious benefit in the online age is social interaction. With the internet giving greater access to communication, it makes socializing with anyone from home just a few button clicks away. A research paper by Radboud University Nijmegen presents studies that show that playing cooperative games online with friends or even strangers can increase social aptitude among those who play. It is also surprising that even cooperative violent games show a noticeable increase in social skills and desire to be helpful in day to day life among their player bases. These games with group dynamics are especially effective in helping those who feel like outsiders find communities that they can feel accepted in, and gain emotional support from where it may be lacking in other aspects of life. Prior to the revolution of online gaming, you generally had a group of friends provided by life circumstances. You lived in the same area, you liked the same kind of things, so you got along. It was a matter of convenience rather than choice. Now we live in a world where you can befriend people from other cities, states, and even different countries. There is no longer a confinement to a community of nearby peers. You get to pick your community, near or far, based on the things you enjoy, and you can all do those things together. This sense of community is a large part of gaming culture. Many people find themselves bonding over TV shows, movies, or sports they like. With video games you are bonding over both an interest and a potential shared experience. Watching something with a friend has nothing on exploring fictional worlds with those you find community with. From inside jokes among gaming communities to shared likes and dislikes that are perfect to talk about and, at times, even debate. It makes for good distraction, entertainment, conversation topic, and so much more. So, games have an incredibly positive impact on social capabilities, but what else do they have to offer? Gaming On The Brain According to the same research paper by Radboud, several studies have shown that video games, especially action games, can increase people’s cognitive abilities, including their attention allocation, spatial reasoning, and neural processing, all incredibly sought after aspects of people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Put simply, many games are shown to functionally grow the cognitive strengths that we value in our best and brightest. Obviously this doesn’t mean gaming creates geniuses, but for a leisure activity, an increase in brain function is definitely a welcome benefit. The Fun And The Future Outside of the mental aspect, video games are also fun destressors. People from around the world can escape their stress in a world that they can call their own. Fun stories for us to internalize or share. A huge variety of games that we can all experience differently. From casual gamers to those who can make functional careers either streaming or playing professionally, gamer culture brings so much positivity into their lives that they just can’t find anywhere else. Gaming at large is only going to grow more and more, and as the world of gaming continues to evolve, only time will tell how much better it will get. For now, just game on.

CALLISTA CWMCWLAMARE FRESHMAN

“When my dad let me play as his character for the first time, [...] I died within 10 seconds, but that was amazing”

“My best gaming memory would probably be Lego Rock Band, or Beatles Rock Band, and just putting on concerts home alone” “Being able to go online and just play with anyone around the world in nearly any game you can think of, I just think that’s really fun”

ANDREW CRAIG SENIOR

AIDEN HOWARD SOPHOMORE

THE DOWNSIDES OF GAMING CULTURE

By Ethan Biersdorff

While gaming is incredibly popular, there are unfortunately numerous downsides to gaming and its culture. A lot of the negativity comes from two core flaws: poor business practices, and social issues A good place to start is with the disappointing business side of things that inadvertently reduces the potential enjoyment of games. There is one huge issue that has taken place ever since female characters first touched video games: The Oversexualization At the beginning of big name video games you commonly had your run of the mill damsels in distress, but soon after you began to see the shift to more heterosexual male targeting. 90s games like Mortal Kombat introduced incredibly sexualized characters alongside many other mature themes that had not really touched video games before. and with that, Mortal Kombat was a commercial success, even becoming a household name. This trend became common in games that turned a profit at the time, leading many to think that selling sex worked through mistaking correlation and causation. Teresa Lynch, a media communications researcher at Indiana University, compared 571 playable female characters from across 31 years, she found that from the 1980s to the 1990s there was a huge trend of sexualizing women, especially in games rated teen and up. This sexualization peaked in 1995, and while it has slowly decreased since then, there is still a long way to go. One great example of this transition is the change over time of Lara Croft, who is one of the most recognizable female video game character of all time. She went from having such a disproportionate body that it was even a joke among her designers, to only being unrealistic in the fictional sense. That transition was huge. Yet most female characters don’t get that treatment, or even a leading role. Companies get used to selling with sex, but that didn’t work. It alienated nearly half the gaming population and just generally didn’t sell as well as games that targeted larger audiences.

So Mature Games Don’t Work? If you look at the top selling games of all time, you see primarily family friendly games and action games, both of which see a large audience and don’t really contain many sexual themes. One exception that many point to is Grand Theft Auto V, which places second in sales right behind Minecraft. While GTA V does have many mature themes, there is a place for games like it. Outside of the infamous loading screens displaying underdressed women, there is nothing wrong with a mature game targeted to an older audience. However, there is a big difference between maturity and hypersexualization, and that is the line game companies need to learn to tread. Games like Call of Duty, as well as Red Dead Redemption 2 which happens to have the same developers as GTA V, play out with mature and violent themes, without creating female characters for the sole purpose of being looked at. These games also top the charts breaking many records in their own right. Mature games can be successful, but they also have much work to do to be more inclusive.

The Conflict For now the current sexualization of female characters in video games makes it difficult for women to get as into gaming as men. This then creates a stigma that women don’t play video games and that it is a man’s thing, while women make up just about half of gamers. The poor business decisions of the past, that were copied repeatedly in an attempt to match earlier success, has created a space that now has become a battlefield. Unfortunately, the push for progress will always have pushback from those who enjoy the status quo. While this group may be the minority, they make the development of a better space hard to complete. When surveyed, WAHS students rated the average online player they experience while gaming on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being very mean and 10 being incredibly kind. The average answer was about 6.25. This shows progress for sure, but it also makes it clear we have a long way to go before everyone can have the space they deserve online. As progress continues, we must all work together to create a better space online, and advocate for the companies that make the games we love to create games for all us as a whole. We only have two options left: progress, or game over.

AIDEN HOWARD SOPHOMORE

“Sometimes you’ll get someone who’s maybe not the friendliest person, and there’s always the chance for the occasional internet racist” “Every single argument it just goes to racism, or like insulting someone about sexuality, or using slurs, it’s just slurs it’s all slurs” “People in the community are often unwelcoming and that’s awkward”

ANDREW CRAIG SENIOR

CALLISTA CWMCWLAMARE FRESHMAN