Essay Proposal

For the upcoming essay, I was leaning towards doing it on The Gamer. I feel like I'd have more choices as to what I can write about. Something specific that caught my attention though was the comparison of lifestyles in the movie compared to what were living like now. How we were portrayed to have an extreme end of living a slave like life (Slayers) or living like a prostitute (Society). I'd like to specifically write more about that topic; comparing our current lifestyles to how its projected to be in year 2XXX.

Ethics Behind "Slayers" & "Society"

I feel like the moral principles of “Slayers” characters can be both good and bad. For example the Kable is trying to get through 30 rounds to be released in order to go back to his family. Also take into consideration that he imprisoned for something that he didn’t do. There can also be characters who really were murderers or rapists previous to being convicted. The ethics behind all characters is likely to be different. As of this second I don’t think that it would be right in any case for someone to die for public entertainment. Now when I think or myself in 15-20 years when everyday society does not have any decent morals left in themselves, I really wouldn’t care what would happen to a death row inmate, especially if I was as well off as the boy in the movie.

Looking at society, the only thing that came to mind was that I was seeing a real life version of “The Sims” being played. Knowing that these people get payed for what they do didn’t really make it easy for me to accept what they were doing in the beginning. But later on in the film when I started to see that modern society has changed so much that we were living in an almost robotic world, I couldn’t figure out another way the middle class could make a living. After getting myself to accept the fact that people sold themselves for a certain hours a day so they can make a living, I saw that the “consumers” almost all had he same deficit of moral ethics. All they used their “avatars” for was sex and partying. Seeing that the life in “Society” was almost identical day after day seemed a bit cliché to me because it shows just how narrow minded people are thought to be.

Video Games

Seeing how popular video games have gotten in recent years didn't really surprise me. I feel that it is one of the primary ways that an individual can live a "virtual life" the way they would actually want to. For instance in Grand Theft Auto V, I would always drive around like a maniac killing innocent bystanders because to me that seemed fun. Now in the real world if you asked me if I would do that, I'd respond saying not in a million years. The fact that what you can do in the virtual world is simply limited by the game boundaries gives me the freedom to do whatever I please in the certain setting of the game I'm playing without feeling guilt or sorrow.

I recently started playing Skyrim and I will agree that its a pretty bomb RPG and that it's super addicting. The only thing that I didn't like was that once I turned on my xbox, I could have kissed that day goodbye. There were back to back days that I'd wake up, wash up, and start playing and thats all I'd do the ENTIRE day. It was a bad addiction like smoking and one of the most productive things I recently did was get rid of the game.

These days its pretty crazy seeing how in depth you can get with your game character or "Avatar". I never really knew what an avatar was until i read Waggoner's essay. It was interesting to see that it really meant "descent" so in essence it was a part of you which you can structure in any way you wanted to. As a child I never knew what creating an avatar was so I would always make them look stupid with wacky faces and weird skin colors and clothes. But when I started playing Skyrim, I noticed how much I made the avatar be what I wanted to be. In my case, it is pretty safe to say that I wanted to put myself into the situations my character was in and see how "I" would survive.