Tag: video games

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The Darker Afterlife of Electronics

While the story behind “Landfill Legend,” and the dump of Atari E.T. games was charming, particularly with its myth-like status and cult following, I had always been warned that the life cycle of electronics as detailed by Raiford Guins had a far more nefarious end. My parents and older brother would chastise me about tossing batteries or electronics in the trash because of the environmental consequences. However, I recalled a NYT article I once read that argued the health risks of our electronic disposal system are more immediate than even their long-term environmental consequences. I tried to hunt it down, and whether it is the same article or not, I found one detailing the conditions of electronic dumps in third world countries. Leyla Acaroglu describes what happens to our digital devices after they’re dumped: “In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside.” Acaroglu paints a picture of the legacy of our electronic devices that is quite a bit darker than Guin’s statement of the legacy of the Atari dump: “the invisible presence of decaying matter deep below my feet attests to a complex life history, one pieced together and sustained by the various projects that refuse to forget (234).” While tracing the afterlife of our electronic devices certainly may tell us a lot about where they came from, it’s hard for me to focus on much other than the relatively gruesome health and environmental consequences.

An image of an electronic dump from “Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?”
www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/where-do-old-cellphones-go-to-die.html%5B/caption%5D

Acaroglu, Leyla. “Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?” The New York Times. 4 May 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/where-do-old-cellphones-go-to-die.html.

Guins, Raiford. “Landfill Legend.” Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. USA: MIT Press, 207-235.

 

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When It All Becomes Too Real

When I look at video games now, I remember how old I am in comparison to this technology. When I was a kid, I was navigating a pixilated Frogger across a congested roadway and completing secret missions in an animated James Bond game. I would sit with my brother on the couch facing the bulky old TV, holding PlayStation controllers with wires that often tangled. It was easy to see it was all fake.

Today, it seems that technology has graphics that match the real world and is taking them to the next level through more interactive means. Virtual reality technology has brought a new method of interacting with the horror, violence, or whatever theme is represented in the game.

This YouTube video is gameplay from a horror game using the virtual reality gaming technology called Oculus Rift, which makes a variety of very interactive virtual reality games that truly transport the user to the world of the game.

While this game relates to how more real and scary horror can become through a video game, this same type of virtual reality system can also be used to put yourself into war situations, holding a fake gun that is incorporated into the virtual reality experience.

Virtual reality gaming allows the user to fully immerse into the gameplay, turning you into the main character, violence and all. Photo can be found here

You are no longer playing as a character in the game – you are the character. This is your gun that you are shooting and killing people in the game with. Yet, even with the added reality effects, killing people still doesn’t seem to be a problem. That is what you are supposed to do, and even if the death might look real (with real blood color), it will never actually simulate the feeling of shooting someone and watching them die in front of you. The larger media industry would never allow that sort of reality.

So you have video game technology that is incredibly realistic in almost every sense, except that it is still easy to kill people. Players are still, as Kocurek argues in her article, dehumanizing the targets because their deaths do not carry the full emotional impact that killing a person must entail. Are video games making kids more violent? I think that in these interactive video games where the point is to kill your way to the end, the gaming industry is making it pretty easy for gamers to pull the trigger.