Online Games: Addiction

The online gaming is getting a little out of hand, especially in my family. My mom has been obsessing over Farmville for the past year now and my father thinks he’s “uber” cool playing Mafia Wars (both games pertain to Facebook). My brother plays a game called Runescape—one of those Mass Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG…quite a mouthful).

Our September 8 lecture concerning games and the false realities that come with it (Internet: Social & Legal Issues Pt. II) reminded me very much of my family and their inability to stay away from them.

When I go home for the holidays I always remember how obsessed my family gets with these little games. I’ll wake up in the morning to find all three sitting on their respective computers (mom has a laptop, dad has a laptop, brother has a desktop), absorbed in their games.

It’s already enough, imagining this situation. It makes me cringe a little bit because there’s more to life than staring at a computer screen.

It’s mainly the fact that all three are so entranced in these games and forget about reality sometimes.

“Hey mom,” I said one night at the kitchen table. “Are we going to have that lasagna for dinner?”

“Oh sure, honey,” she said carrying her laptop with her to the kitchen counter. “I just have to harvest my grapes on my farm and then I’ll work on dinner.”

Really?

This is just one example. I spoke with my brother once about what it is you do on this…Runescape. He went on about raising fishing levels, collecting gold and fighting mystical creatures…or something like that. I can’t comprehend what is so fun about raising a “fishing level.” If I wanted to do this I would buy a rod and try and catch a real fish.

My dad, oblivious to privacy issues on Facebook, gets a kick out of adding random people all over the site in order to build up his Mafia and get better awards.

Sometimes dinner conversations include what happened on these little internet games.

“I made a second Runescape account so I could get better deals and get more gold,” my brother said once at the table.

To me, it seems that my parents and brother are creating a second, online life. We play games because it gives us a chance to escape from the real world, but by the end of the day, this is reality and we must deal with it.

I asked my brother once if he enjoyed being a hermit, spending his teenage years in front of the computer rather than going out and socializing with friends from school.

He told me that it was a lot easier to just open up Facebook chat and socialize. The reason for his obsessive Runescape playing is that “real people suck.”

I try to avoid online games that try to consume my life. Games like these should be played in small doses and should be played in a safe way that will not affect your computer’s security, or your life’s security for that matter.

The Newspaper and the Journalist vs. Generation Y

It’s time to face the truth: Newspapers are dying. The 21^st century has made everything so technologically accessible, that people are forgetting to buy their beloved papers every Sunday morning. In a matter of years, we’re bound to see newspapers becoming extinct. (Not saying that they will be extinct for sure, we’ll just have a steep decline in readers.)

I realized that this tragedy was beginning to unfold when I was becoming more and more involved with newspapers. Being a print journalism major, I have taken several classes concerning these white sheets of paper containing newsworthy events. Working on staff with The Voyager, I realized…everyone is resorting to online news. With the internet, it’s so much easier to publish a story online and get it out to readers. With a newspaper, you have to lay out the story, wait for the other stories to turn up before deadline and publish on a specific day. It takes too much effort and there’s always a better chance of news going stale. So many changes have been done this semester with the online Voyager page and I feel like that has helped.

We are what the majority would call “Generation Y” (The Millennial Generation). This generation is dependent on technology. We breathe it and depend on it all the time. People in this generation live off of text messages, social networking sites and humoristic TV news such as “The Daily Show.” (wisegeek.com)

We would rather have John Stewart tell us what’s going on in the world rather than a flaky old newspaper. I guess one could say that we, Generation Y, hate being traditional. Leave the pages to the non-traditional elderly.

Working with newspapers, I have grown to care for them and enjoy sitting at my kitchen table with it in the morning. Maybe it’s because I’m a journalism major, but who’s to say that that’s the reason?

My biggest concern with newspapers is not the newspapers themselves, but the reporters.

These days, with so much technology at the tips of our fingers, I feel like anybody could be a reporter (very much like how a person with a point and shoot camera considers themselves an artist). These “citizen journalists” don’t have enough experience to understand media ethics, or the terms “libel” and “slander.”

Sure, it’s nice, seeing people make an attempt to record news and publish it somewhere, but I’m in need of a job.

I feel like the only way newspapers will withstand the stands of time are advertisements. As our online lecture has taught us, newspaper subscriptions only pay for printing and delivery. The main revenue (50% of it) comes from advertisements, and even those aren’t doing so well these days.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-generation-y.htm