Video Games: Masculine or Feminine?

Video games have been my source of entertainment for nearly eighteen years and they have proved to be beneficial and detrimental. Various generalizations are always made about how video games affect teenagers or how they affect intelligence. One generalization that is nearly always made is that men play video games more than women. Shirley Matile Ogletree made several generalizations about gender in video games in the article “College Students' Video Game Participation and Perceptions: Gender Differences and Implications”. Shirley studied 206 college students and their video game endeavors because the rising number of children playing video games has caused her to inquire about its effects. The most blatant observation made was that men were drastically more likely to play video games two or more hours a week than women. Although Shirley tested 206 college students, she may need to repeat her study at various universities with a larger population because the population by chance may have been composed of male video game players. Men were also more likely to specify that games interfered with their education and their normal life cycles. As a result of this one-sided revelation, Shirley found that women were more likely to complain that their life partner played video games too much. In my own experience, women tend to dread the fact that men feel entertained by moving an inanimate character around on a television screen. The fact that men are increasingly more likely to let video games affect their education may actually correlate with college dropout rates and success rates. Another observation made was that the students felt female game characters were portrayed to be more helpless and were degraded more than the male characters. The portrayal of women in such a degraded manner may actually affect the perception that children have about women. An elaboration that was not included is what physical properties makes gender a connecting factor in determining who will most likely play video games. The correlation of gender with the impact of video games is a significant topic that is widely debated.

Text messaging is an innovative form of communication that being widely used throughout the world. One thing that completely surprised me is that the United States is actually behind the rest of the world in this area of technology. Everyone looks at the United States as a technologically advanced society that has all the luxuries of every country and more. The assumed trivial nature of emoticons and abbreviations were shown to have more significance than I thought before as was shown in the experiment. Never did I ever think people in other countries were using text messaging with abbreviations because of the difficulty involved in texting in various languages. Texting is a valuable tool that allows people to communicate instantly without interrupting a person’s day as a voice mail would do. Text message is also used as a form of sublimation in that kids are spending money on texts rather than spending it on buying drugs. The articles demonstrated the importance of texting and its various uses around the world, but the articles contained various mechanical errors such as in “Red Oxygen” indicating that it was not a professionally written article.

Scholarly articles are a crucial tool in research because of their reliability and their informative content. The information contained can be trusted because the articles were written and revised by scholars of the subject. The professionals of each subject are going to have more valuable insight on the topic than a novice in the same subject area and this is because they have simply been exposed more too the topic. Scholarly articles are credible and contain relevant information that is analyzed in depth rather than superficially.
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