B4GD

This semester has been one of the most difficult ones I have had. I gained about fifteen pounds from due to spending countless hours reading and I don't know that I really gained exactly what I was looking for. But then, considering I don't know what I was looking for in the first place, I can't really say that much.

More than most semesters, I feel like my theoretical perspective has shifted dramatically. Where I was once exceedingly excited to learn more and more social theory, i've shifted to jst wanting to know more about 1 theory. I suppose that graduate school is all about specialization but it's somewhat disturbing.

The last thing that is just weird to me is that graduate school forces you to talk about your own feelings as opposed to hiding behind basic social theory. Even the assignments change.

The most important things I learned this semester I think I can list.

1. General social theory seems to revolve around creating things through which we try to box everything and everyone in. In other words, functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and every other theory that's out there.

2. As scientists, we box people and ignore the action that people create. We tell them what they're doing.

3. Sociology performs a very important function in scoiety but tries its best to not acknowledge that function by maintaining objective ideology.

Despite these criticisms, the rest of my program, the rest of my time in school, is going to be spent perpetuating the very thing I spent criticizing. In order to graduate, I must be able to prove that I can perform in the preformatted Sociological Tradition. I have some issues with this but being in school is really about doing this in the first place so I would say that this is nothing new.
In any case, I learned what it would take to really write about a group of people this semester and I find myself somewhat overwhelmed by it. To blog is one thing, to really write about something is another.

And this gets me to a summer project. Over the past few weeks, I've seen a tremendous amount of hufflepuff about gender, race, and inequality in gaming. Discussion like this seems to be very critical on one end while at the other end, the privileged end, it seems to be filled with apathy and frustration as they don't understand exactly what the argument is supposed to be. The later is where I think more discussion is needed. Namely, I want to look at what exactly is happening there.

There seems to be something wrong in gaming. I think that perhaps this is a safe statement. Something is off. We could point fingers to game makers, we could point fingers to gamers, advertisers, game resale shops, chains, commercialization or even the ever quickening rate of technological change. But, this would be taking a very narrow path and would only lead to blinders and dead ends. I am curious as to what's really going on here and i'd like to think about what i've been doing this semester as a means to explore that possibility.

I'll begin by offering as a means to remind myself later of what it is that i'm trying to do.

The unit of measurement here is Generic types. It's not really a term so much as it is a concept. We see these in almost everything we do or build that requires something of a general concept. Marketing uses this to target specific audiences, stores build themselves around the general needs that the research group in charge of them feel that would benefit them the most and schools are a supreme example of this. Schools are designed with a singular purpose, a place to speak and a place to listen...these days there is typically a television or projector, screen, dry erase board, and perhaps a sound system.

These generic types are created through a wide ranging amount of definitions and constant emulation of the first iteration of that idea. For example, schools and that have been around for thousands of years and you could, if you were so inclined, to trace them as far back as there was written record of them. Tied to this, you could also trace the association of learning and literacy to the christian religion. An illiterate populace could not worship through the bible if they could not read it.

So in this case. I want to trace associations that gamers have (in particular, video gamers) and see where it takes me. I want to look at video gamers as a generic type. The difference I want to make is that I want to look at it from how pop culture refers to gamers and not how gamers identify themselves. It's one thing to look at this from the video gamer's perspective, it's another to look at it from pop culture's perspective. What does pop culture think about gamers and how is that perception shaping and fueling video games in general. This is not to say that I don't want to look at it from the gamers perspective as well. I want to start on one side of the definition and walk to those being defined and look back. How do gamers, how do games, react to these things?

My general thought process is that the type of games that keep coming out are inexorably tied to social movements that begin and end with certain types of people coming in and out of pop culture's focus (also, technological innovations on the part of sound, graphics, and processing). Further, gaming is tied to technology and the recent console generation actually brought about a shift from more power is better to something else. I want to explore the technological implications behind gaming. Because paradigm shifts happen so regularly and furiously in pop culture (I am sort of looking at this from more than a trend perspective) about subject content, tracing associations should be relatively easy. These groups of people influence the creation of games by being the type of person that would be considered the "general type" that fits the mold of the gamers these days.

From here, things should prove to be interesting. I suspect that many people who read this will think that it's common sense and will be little more than stating the obvious. However, I really think that it is our common sense that is creating this nagging feeling in my mind that we are missing something and it is from there that my want to do some basic tracing begins. I will have to limit myself and stick to one path so choosing a path is important. The beginning will be simply testing the waters. Once the right path is found, we will dig in and see what that trail has to offer.