Journal Entry #3

Over the last couple of years, games that deal with any form of war have been on a steady popularity rise. The reason for this is simple. When game designers have to come up with a new game, they try to reflect on what events are happening around them so that people would be more interested in their product. A great example of this is sports games. Companies come out with the newest sports games for all the sports just before the season would start for each respected sport. So when gaming companys such as Microsoft and Sony came out with war games, they new that people would sweep them off the shelf with the on going war in Iraq. Also, these games are very great when it comes to the actual gameplay. Games such as "Call of Duty" and "Socom" bring you right into the action. In respect to the comment that "If it's not realistic, it's not worth playing.", I believe that playing games like these is all fun and games but i truly think that it desensitses people on the real aspects of war. When we look at a bloodied cartoon character, we see no harm in this because it is just a cartoon, so in relation to these war games, when someone dies in the game, you don't really care and you move on. But now picture yourself in an actual battlefield. If someone in front of you just stepped on land mine and was killed, you probably would be paralized in a trance that you wouldn't know what to do. So in conclusion, i fell that war games are a great genre of games. They are very exciting to play espically with friends and when you do, you have fun. But we must remember not to be insensitive to the actual people that are fighting in the war right now. To them, it is not a video game, it is their life.