Topic 1:About You-- Who's who in Media and Society this term:
: Share a bit about yourself. I am majoring in Journalism in hopes of having a career in writing. I would love to write for a newspaper, that it why I am here at LBCC. I want to earn a degree in writing.
: What are you most interested in learning about the media? What I would like to learn is what form of media works the best. I mean you have so many to choose from, which one does the public read the most. What is the best way to reach people? These are the questions I have.
: Tell us something you are passionate about outside of college. What I feel the most passionate about would be my family. I have two kids, a grandson, a husband, a mom, two sisters and a brother. These people mean the world to me. I interact with all of then on a daily basis, they are my passion.
Topic 2: Online Gaming-- Let's discuss "Gaming Can Make A Better World"
Jane McGonial is a game designer and has some thoughts on how playing online games could solves real world problems. Her goal for the next decade is try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is on online games.
The plan for this is to convince more people to spend more time playing bigger and better games. As of now gamers play online games 3 Billion hours a week. She believes that if we want to survive the next century, we need to increase that number to 21 Billion hours a week.
" You may think that's a lot of time playing games when we have so many problems in the real world," siad McGonial, but The Learning Institution said the opposite.
McGonial believes if we want to solve world problems like hunger, global warning, and obesity we need to play more hours on online games. We need to have EPIC WINS, this will teach us to become masters of the four traits she says you learn from gaming. They are, Urgent Optimism( extreme motivation), Social Fabric (builds up trust, bonds and collaboration), Blissful Productivity (gamers are hard workers, they do hard meaningful work if given the right work), and Epic Meaning(they spend more time typing about the World of Warcraft, then anybody else, does about anything else).
McGonial believes that by making more realistic games she can empower the gamers to solve real world problems.
Rather logical or not, McGonial's ideals are extreme. When you die in a video game you are still setting on your couch with a controller in your hand, but if you die in the real world you are dead! There is no coming back for another turn.
When I play online games it is always gambling games. I like the constant movement of the game, it's kind of like my brain. I can't keep just one thought in my head, I always am thinking of several things I need to be doing. I also like the challenge of trying to guess whats next in the game. will it hit big or just take it all.
I can see where McGonial may want the virtual world to be the real world, but we can't live in make-believe, we must live life in reality. I mean hell if all the money I get in the virtual world were real, I would be rich.
Reality is we all need to learn to work together and fix our real world problems. Something you can't do by playing a game.
