- Visting family over Easter, we played console games at home and also had a trip to a local bowling alley
- Thinking about the types of games that I am making at the moment, my head was full of questions about play – it’s functions in a family and how gender might be operating
- With teenage boy, we played a first person shooter which was (to my eyes) very violent and realistic
- He really seemed to enjoy this game and did not have any issues with violently killing bystander NPCs, even when the dialogue encouraged us to think of them as people with lives (e.g. “I have a wife and family”)
- It made me think about the research that I have read about the complications of drawing a line between game violence and real violence and my instinct tells me that game violence of this sort, must have some kind of desensitization effect
- Interestingly, with the younger boy, we played a co-op game which was about geese and he really enjoyed the mechanics and challenges of the game
- In saying this, he is very much enjoying playing with guns and imagining war situations in his play and again does not seem to draw a link between imaginative violence and what happens in war. I wouldn’t expect this of a child his age, but I wonder how or when he will be given the opportunity to reflect on the real implications of war and violence.
- We later went to an arcade where we played bowling and I wondered about the role of competition in gender performance
- Again thinking about the game that I am making – I wonder how I might encourage your average male / man to play it – what will be in it for them? If I continue this project into semester 3 I will need to think more carefully about the game mechanics and how they can balance out some of the more serious ideas in the concept
