My social media ethnography

Well for my proposal my idea was to create an ethnography on why people from my community switched over from MySpace to Facebook. I decided to go with the number 1 and 2 ideas that were on the sheet we were given in class because it states that we could refer to an already used topic that we wrote about in our previous blog posts. So deciding to do this specific idea was very easy especially since I came home for the weekend. Well there it is my topic will be a well thought out ethnography about the transition of people from my community, why they switched over from MySpace to Facebook.

The movie Gamer was a very interesting movie that had many similar characteristics of a person in our current society playing a character in current video games. In both circumstance the gamer can control the character and make him/her do whatever the gamer commands. This pretty much makes the gamer in control of the entire out come. However the one huge difference is that in the movie the gamer is in control of an actual human being. I truly believe that the ethics in the "Slayers" program in the movie is very wrong, the reason being is because the gamers are allowed to control actual humans in battle scenes. In these battle scenes if the gamer and the character both die only the gamer is the one who actually dies in real life while the gamer just loses the game and then can just get another character and play again. Even if the characters that are controlled are criminals who are on death row i still do not think they should be played in a game in which they can die for some gamers twisted pleasure. I also do not think that these inmates should die for the gamers entertainment just because the gamers want to play in these circumstances but they do not want to actually risk the actual life endangering experience. However in the "society" i believe that it is a different circumstance because the people actually let themselves be controlled in return they get paid. In my opinion if the person wants to get controlled they should not complain however if the character is a good person they should not be put to do unimaginable things that the Kable's wife would do. I also do believe that us humans do sell ourselves in other ways, the main reasons why we sell ourselves is because we either need money or if we just do not want to do hard labor.

The article that we had to read this week was very interesting because of the fact that it talks about a huge topic that is really big right now. The video game industry has never been as big as it is right now with all the current video games coming out. If I recall most of these games have raked in more money than some of the biggest movies in recent memory. One of the main reasons why the video game industry exploded is because of the fact that most of these video games created a feature known as an avatar. An avatar is a person in the video game who represents the person playing the game. What i really didn't know was that avatars have been around since the beginning of gaming, for example in the article people say that when Pac-Man came out it was considered an avatar because the person playing the game was able to control the subject. However in recent years the avatars have become much more complex because in most gaming systems such as the XBOX 360 and the WII's the gamer is allowed to customize the avatar as much as he/she pleases. In these avatars the users can actually make them look like the user themselves. In my opinion now that these video games have become much more complex the users have become even more addicted to these games. This was evident in the article because it explains how the person rather play his video games than to study for his school work. This starts to show how the person may be to much into his video game than in his real life. This is not very uncommon because it has been known that most gamers would much rather play video games than to live their own life's because they feel powerful being able to control the whole scene. In my time playing video games I have known a few of my friends who actually stopped going to school for a while because they wanted to play their video game.

I have created my own avatar in my game console which is the XBOX 360, i believe that the avatars in this console are perhaps the best. When making my avatar i tried to make it as if it was me in the game so i designed it to look like me. In my personal opinion i do not believe that RPG's are such a good idea because when the people do make them they get to into them. In my opinion i do not believe that the video games blur ones ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. However, i do think that the video game users would much rather play their game than to live their life. These serious gamers think that their lives are far to boring and they think that video games are much more interesting. I did interview one of my friends who plays a lot of video games and he tells me that he tried to make his avatar as closely to himself as he could. He tries to include everything in his life to the avatar and then he wanted to try and do some things of the avatar to his life. Overall i do not think that playing so many video games especially with avatars is such a good idea because some gamers take it to a whole another level which can eventually take time from their actual life.