My Last Post: Effects of Media on People

           From what we see in the various media forms, there are numerous different messages we get from them. These messages influence our lives in a multitude of different ways either subtle or straight forward. How the audience, reader, or viewer interprets these messages is very important. From these interpretations, there are positive and negative outcomes. To start this final blog, let us begin with the negative effects of media.

            In our first example, in most forms of media, a main character is always good-looking, muscular, and generally male. From this influence, most men would try to emulate this character only for them to end in futility. A second example is the emulation of media; this one is debated the most due to the amounts of violence in video games, for example, the video game Doom was suspected to be one of the influences of the Columbine School Massacre even though it barely had any significance to motivations to the shooters. Only a few people cannot understand the difference between reality and fantasy. Finally, the last negative effect of media is the way some people express themselves online. One example of how people express themselves is in the comments below a topic. These comments range from “First!”, advertising their website, or arguing with other people. People act this way because of the anonymity they receive while online and feel that they cannot be penalized for their “trolling”. With the negative effects, there are also good effects of the various forms of media.

            The first example of good effects is the creativity which inspires others to make their works. With inspiration, other people can create different works with morals and meanings to express how they feel about anything in the world. The second example is the morals of the work. In most media, the viewer tries to emulate the protagonist mostly for their appearance, but they also emulate them for their sense of morals. In reality, the world isn’t a very happy place to live in, which is the reason why people try to emulate the hero’s sense of morals in order to make life a little bit better. The final example is the access to a fictional world. For most people, they are unsatisfied with their life and want something to make things more exciting like explosions or car chases. Unfortunately, those two examples are seldom seen in reality. When people see a fictional world they like, then the reader tries to imagine themselves in that world. In the fictional world the reader can do anything from exploring other planets to infiltrating the Fel Brotherhood to find a recipe to create a healing potion. It is the access to escape that helps reduce stress found in reality.

            As negative as the bad effects of media are, there are also good outcomes which come from them. People will continue to try to blame life’s problems on media for it is a very easy target to scapegoat. There will also people who will continue making works to entertain the public. In the end, the media will always have controversial topics which questions society’s beliefs, morals, and standards, but it will be through this questioning that society can justify or alter their code of conduct.

Controversies in Demographics

Hey viewers, as I written the first actual blog post, I realized that the controversies in video games are not just limited to games, but include all forms of media. For now on I will be talking about controversies in media. Anyways, here is another post.

 

            There are many forms of entertainment in media; this can range from literature, television programs, video games, animation, comics, etc. With these innumerable types of media, each one has a targeted demographic or age group in laymen’s terms. We have these groups mostly due to society’s need to protect the impressionable younger generation from the harsh realities of the real world full of cursing, violence, and everything else the older generation wants to protect the youth from. Society then creates programs with age ratings to divide citizens into groups so one group will be slowly introduced to a different world when they get older instead of a child watching Scarface or the Saw series. Occasionally, there comes a time when the people who work creating the media will try to sneak questionable content into the media or as people tend to call it, “getting crap past the censors.”

            To begin this blog, let’s start at shows aimed towards children. In most kid’s shows, censors are the least lenient to questionable content put in by the creators. This is mostly due to the fact that one cannot tell a child about death or refer to it in any way, as well as any other harsh aspect of life. As I have said before, sometimes the creators try to “get crap past the censors”, one animated show which did this the most was Animaniacs, the show itself was very clean, but occasionally snuck something past the censors. To a child seeing the objectionable content, they probably wouldn’t understand the joke; when an adult sees the same content, they would understand the joke and find it humorous. When the kids get older they learn more about the world, and learn some pretty colourful language at the same time. This then leads to the next demographic.

            In various media targeted to teens, there is more leeway in what is shown by the creator even though the censor is still somewhat hot on their heels. This kind of media has been undergoing the most flak due to the various groups claiming that the media is making teenagers bad people. It is somewhat understandable due to the amount of former questionable content to children becoming standard in teen media. Another reason for this flak is the association of violent people to violent games, ignorantly dubbing them, “murder simulators”. This is inaccurate because there are numerous types of games in which the game gives the player a choice to what to do while playing ranging from morally good, morally ambiguous, and morally bad choices. From teenagers, they slowly become adults in the very short amount of time they have lived.

            As adults, they must focus on tasks which will help them live healthy lives and thus, lose most of their time they have for entertainment. From this, shows targeted to adults appear to give the viewer a good laugh, some decent drama, or anything else the audience desires such as fan service. Even though it may seem out of the woods, the censors still have control over what is broadcast to homes. Most of the time, the censors censor content which may be extremely offensive to some such as jokes about 9/11.

            In conclusion, every type of demographic in society has different standards to what is shown in the shows targeted to them. The question is how to clearly define what is alright to show to an audience. People will always scapegoat media for the wrongs of society instead of looking for the actual source of the problem.

Violence in Video Games

            The first controversial aspect of video games which is the amount of violence found in them. This blog post is to give some reasons why game developers may have violence in their games and their effects. The reasons I am going to discuss are the aspects of realism, the demographics, and to show what life is actually like. To begin this blog, I am going to discuss the aspects of realism in video games.

            In real life, if you were to accidentally poke yourself with a needle you would bleed. If one sees a normal person fall off a building, land on the ground, and get up without a scratch in a video game, that would be ridiculous. Game developers try to make a fictional world as real as possible, like how comic book artists try to make a realistic setting even though there are people with superpowers saving the world on a daily schedule. In a video game, depending on the targeted demographic (which I will explain in the next paragraph), a game could have no blood at all and the worst thing that could happen to the characters is to be vaporized by a cartoon-like blaster. Though there may or may not be heavy aspects of realism, it usually depends on who the game is targeted to.

            There are multiple demographics in Canada that range from children to adults, so if a game developer was going to make a game about the Second World War, who would they try to sell it to? The obvious solution is to sell it to the young adults who find interest in the War. If one were to sell that game to children, the children would probably not even understand what is going on while they’re playing. As a general rule amongst various medias, the younger the targeted demographic, the less violent the media is. With this rule in mind, young adults are less interested in the “lighter and softer” games and prefer to buy a “darker and edgier” game. As more violent content is put into games targeted to young adults, a rating system has been put into effect in order to protect children from graphic content. From this, we can learn that a more mature demographic has seen the reality of the world more than a child, but developers may try to show a reality to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

            For most Americans, D-Day was an important turning point for the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. The D-Day landings have been seen in multiple games about World War Two due to the importance of the events which occurred. Most Americans can say that the lives lost on that day were a hefty price to pay. Some people would say that war is a glorious event in which heroes are made to fight against a menacing foe. When the average person sees a film about the D-Day landings, they often see soldiers getting killed, hear some swearing, and by the end of it, they stand victorious. The movie, Saving Private Ryan, contains the events of the landings, but the extended opening sequence makes two firm statements, "This is as close as we can get to D-Day and maintain our rating," and "Please remove your children." In a game with a similar setting, Call of Duty: World at War, features what the aforementioned movie contains: blood, gore, harsh language, and everything else one may see during war. Using the same reasoning, both game developers and movie producers produce violent works to show how much “war is hell” or to show the ignorant viewer what the reality of a situation was like to one experiencing it.

            In conclusion, violent content in video games is not isolated to just games. Violence is found in books, movies, animation, and TV. Shows, it is something that the older generation has experienced with and we try to protect the younger generation from it. Those who only blame video games for acts of violence also have to blame every other type of media in society. For my next blog post, I shall be discussing the demographics of video games.

First Controvercy

Soon I will post my first of many controversies in Video Games. The topic will be: Are Video Games becoming too violent? I will be posting this article in the days to come.