This weeks lecture was a viewing of the movie eXistenZ, the movie was based on the thought that if you played video games for long enough the line between reality and games would become blurred and what you view to be real could infact be a game or a surreal environment in your head. The storyline of the movie was based on the creation of a new game which plugged into your spine and you played the game as yourself in a copy of your body in an environment which resembled real life but were slightly altered. Through out the movie the main characters are troubled by how they are not able to distinguish there real life from the game and with this they react by killing more characters and becoming slightly disturbed. In the end of the movie the main gamers appear to be the characters (rebels) who were trying to kill them in the game and it appears that the two main characters personal thoughts had altered the plot of the game and in turn made the game a portion of there reality. In concluding eXistenZ as a movie leaves you wondering if this is reality of merely a fake version of reality created in our heads.
Reading
The reading The Military-Entertainment Complex: A New Facet of Information Warfare talks about how the use of military based concepts in games is altering how we as a society view war. The commonality in which war games are created makes players view actual war as more excepted and even in some ways more aggressive towards the "enemy". By incorporating general aspects of war into games it leaves a younger generation viewing war as more as a postitive gaming experience rather than a devastating world altering fight which can lead to thousands of deaths. Even as war is currently taking place in countries hours from ours, the way in which the war is depicted seems to be of a lesser amount than previous wars and in some way this can be contributed to the extreme violence we see in games and even television which have in some ways numbed us to the reality of war.
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