College Writing

Dear portfolio readers,

My name is Tyler Dutra, a first year student here at Bristol Community College. In this portfolio, you will be reading about my experiences and opinions on technology. I mostly talk about video games specifically and what they have done for me throughout my life. I will also discuss articles that I have read and give my own personal opinions on them. The first piece you will read is an ethnography on the life of a gamer. Then, you will read a personal memoir about my own personal experiences with gaming. Finally, you will read my summary of 2 articles I read about technology and gaming. I will be summarizing these writings, giving my own personal opinions, and even connecting some of my own personal experiences to what was written in these articles.

In my ethnography, I talk about the life of a gamer and explain what they normally do when they begin doing what they love. I visited with a friend who is one of the biggest gamers I know. I explain and describe his background and what he normally does on a weekly basis. I then describe his normal gaming environment and talk about what he normally does while he is there. While visiting with him I sat back and just simply observed what he did and said. I didn’t want to interfere too much with his normal activities.

Within my memoir, I talk about when and how I began playing video games. I go all the way back to the beginning to when I was about 7 or 8 years old and received my first ever gaming system. I discuss the evolution of my gaming experience and how it became more and more about making friendships and less about simply playing games.

Finally, in my text wrestling article I will be summarizing 2 articles about technology. One of which talks about the many consequences of being addicted to technology, while the other discusses the cognitive benefits of playing action video games. I will be giving a summary, demonstrating my ability to use in-text citations, and also throwing in some of my own opinions on certain issues.

I hope you enjoy my writings and appreciate what they are all about.

 

The life of a gamer is quite simple, and not much different from that of a non-gamer. Except when a gamer goes home at the end of the day and is done with anything else that they may have to do, they will sit down and play video games for hours at a time if possible. I recently sat down with a friend who is one of the biggest gamers I know, and we’ll just call him “John” for the sake of anonymity.

John is a 17-year-old high school senior who also works part time at a restaurant. Being in high school, he has a long week that consists of 5 straight days of school, 7 hours at a time. He will work his part time job after school on certain days during the week, and in the evening hours on the weekends. Despite this, he still finds time to do what he loves and plays games when he is finished with homework, his work shift, or whatever else it may be that he has to attend to. In his free time, John walks into his finished basement that consists of 2 couches, a chair, and his computer desk. On the shelf on the side of the wall, you can see the boxes his PC, keyboard, and PlayStation 4 came in. He likes to have them for aesthetic purposes, and also so that he can easily sell them if he ever chooses to do so. He turns his computer on, then his monitor, and then sits down at his computer and waits for everything to boot up. “This thing is so slow sometimes”, he says as his computer takes longer than usual to boot up. Finally, when everything is ready to go, he loads Steam on his computer and notices something interesting. He notices that Destiny 2, a sci-fi first person shooter, is available for free with his Steam membership. “Look, they gave this to me for free”, he says as he begins to download it. In the meantime, he’ll go onto YouTube and watch a video, or even just get up and go do something else.

While waiting for the new game to download, he began playing a game that he has a lot of experience in: H1Z1, a battle royale game. In this type of game, you drop into the world with up to 99 other players for a total of 100 players. Over time, the large world will get smaller and smaller as a circle of gas continues to close in on one certain area and the actual safe area becomes more and more condensed. Your goal is to simply stay inside the safe zone, eliminate any enemy you see and be the last player standing. If you do that, you win.

John is very adept at winning these games, and it is not uncommon for him to do well. I sat back and just watched as he played because I didn’t want to be a distraction. He is very quiet and focused. You can just hear the mouse and keyboard clicking in the otherwise silent room. I watch as he is taking on an enemy player that he sees in an open field. Initially, this player is driving a vehicle, but as John fired at the vehicle it caused the player to exit and fight back. John and this random player exchanged shots at each other, ducking in and out of cover until eventually John was left standing while this other player dropped. I noticed that the rapid keyboard clicking had slowed down significantly and heard John exhaling a quick sigh of relief. Then out of nowhere, John’s in game character dropped. He had gotten taken out by another player from a long distance. John threw his arms up in the air in shock and said “What? Are you kidding me? Where was he?”, then just sat back in his chair and clicked his way out of the game. This time, exhaling a quick sigh of frustration.

That is just the nature of these types of games. When you have 100 players trying to fend for themselves, truly anything can happen. However, this does not discourage John. After taking a few minutes off, he jumps right back in and tries again. A common characteristic of most gamers, this is why John continues to play games and manages to stay interested in them.

Technology has always been a big part of my life, just like most other people. One piece of technology that has been important to me is video games.

I began playing video games at a very young age. I began playing games on the PlayStation 2, which was the first gaming console I ever owned. It was given to me by my grandmother who had 2 of them in her home. One day my aunt who lived in the house at the time said “I have a surprise for you” and brought me to the room where the system was kept. She began unhooking at and handed it to me and I was ecstatic about being able to bring it home and play it. A game I can remember playing on that console was Need for Speed: Most Wanted. However, this was only the beginning
Of course I loved playing video games at that time, but I hadn’t yet formed any friendships over it because I had only been playing single player games such as Need For Speed: Most Wanted. I wanted something more.

At the age of 11, I asked for an Xbox 360 which was the newest iteration of the Xbox console at the time. I began playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on my Xbox soon after receiving the console. This was where I began to fully experience what online gaming was all about. I began talking to some friends at school, getting their gamertags, and playing online with them after school. Then of course, we would go into school the next day and talk about it. Sitting at the lunch table, just talking about things we’d done within the game, barely even touching our food. We would become so engaged in our conversations that we’d forget why we were even supposed to be in the lunchroom. Experiencing online gaming allowed me to form deeper bonds and longer-lasting friendships than ever before, because regardless of who we were, and other personal interests, we were still able to grow close because we had that one simple thing in common: we loved video games.

Year after year, new games come out and we play the older games less and less, but the friendships between gamers lives on no matter what game we are playing.

 

It seems that in today’s world, many people seem to turn to technology and social media as opposed to simply talking to another person. We seem completely obsessed with technology and rely on it to keep ourselves entertained or stay connected with others. And for the most part, social media does a good job of doing these things for us. But could it also be a bad thing and lead to more negative consequences than positive consequences?

The article “Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie” by James McWilliams discusses the negative consequences of being digitized as much as we have. He starts by talking about Paul Miller, a journalist who began to notice these negative consequences on his own. “His ability to read difficult studies or to follow intricate arguments demanding sustained attention was lagging. He found himself easily distracted and, worse, irritable about it. His longtime touchstone—his smartphone—was starting to annoy him, making him feel insecure and anxious rather than grounded in the ideas that formerly had nourished him.” (McWilliams). Miller also said that if he lost his phone, he’d feel like he could never catch up and his attention would just bounce all over the place. Our need to stay connected can cause us to lose focus and make us feel anxious all the time.

McWilliams also talked about a full-time college student named Erica and the compulsive need to check social media and stay connected. “The first thing she does when she wakes up in the morning is check her smartphone”, McWilliams says. “She checks texts that came in while she slept. Then she scans Facebook, Snapchat, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter to see “what everybody else is doing.” Throughout the day, she checks in with social media roughly every 10 minutes, even during class. “It’s a little overwhelming,” she says, “but you don’t want to feel left out.” Erica’s experiences can show us what social media can do to us mentally and her experiences are not just unique to her life.

This seems to be the case with many people these days. Everywhere you go, you always see others looking down at their phones, scrolling through social media pages, and checking on their own pages. Personally, I always see this whether I’m at school or out in a public place. And even I’m guilty of this, as most people are. It is great that we are able to stay connected, and we are more globally connected than ever before, but it is also stressing us out more and more as we get deeper and deeper into this digital age that we live in. Many people are always checking their Facebook or Instagram posts for “likes” and many people get stressed over not getting enough of them. Considering Erica’s situation, being stressed is something that is bound to happen in life. In the case of being stressed or overwhelmed by social media, it is important to isolate yourself from it temporarily before you become too overwhelmed by it. Removing yourself from the situation is an important step in “saving yourself” as McWilliams says.

While I wouldn’t say that social media in general is a bad thing, it does lead to some moments where you get the feeling that individuals are becoming more and more anti social. However, in my experience, social media has had more of a positive impact on me due to its ability to keep me connected with friends and even with people who I otherwise would never have interacted with.

In recent years, it has been speculated by many that video games are a negative influence on people, specifically kids and teenagers. Violence in today’s society is often blamed on violence in video games, due to the violent and graphic nature of many action/shooting games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Gears of War. Some even believe that sitting down and playing video games can be bad for both your physical and mental health. However, contrary to the previous article which talked about the many disadvantages of technology, there have been many studies showing why playing video games regularly can actually be good for your health.

I recently read an article called “Cognitive Benefits of Playing Video Games” by Peter Gray Ph.D., Gray discusses the numerous positives to playing video games and the various things it can do for your brain. Gray states that “fifty hours of action video game play (spread over ten to twelve weeks) improved visual contrast sensitivity (the ability to distinguish subtle differences in shades of gray”. He also talked about improvements in attention and vigilance. Video games have been found to help locate stimuli in a field of distractors. One thing that I found to be particularly interesting is that this has also been found to help predict an individual’s driving abilities, due to the fact that they help people make decisions more quickly and efficiently. As Gray mentioned in his last point, video games help improve someone’s response time which leads to a person being able to make quick decisions on the spot. For example, when someone sees a traffic light turn yellow as they approach it, they need to make a quick decision as to whether they will keep going or if they will hit their brake to come to a stop. Playing 50 hours of action video games can help improve your reaction time, allowing you to make that decision quicker and more efficiently.

Gray also discussed how these mental improvements can be applied to job-related skills. “ One correlational study, for example, demonstrated that video gamers were better than non-gamers in ability to fly and land aerial drones and were essentially as good as trained pilots on this skill”. (Gray). I personally have experienced this in my own life. I was once with my father flying a remote controlled drone that had a camera attached to it that was linked to a headset giving a live feed. This meant that you could get a first-person perspective of the drone. While he found it difficult, I was able to fly it using the headset very well. This was most likely due to my experience flying helicopters in action video games such as Call of Duty while using dual analog stick controls.

While many people view video games as a negative thing for physical and mental health, there are many positive effects they can have on a person’s mental health. They can help teach hand-eye coordination, can make your reaction time much faster and even help improve your problem solving abilities

 

Works Cited

McWilliams, James. “Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie.” The American Scholar, 2016, theamericanscholar.org/saving-the-self-in-the-age-of-the-selfie/#.W_WjpehKiM9.

Gray, Peter. “Cognitive Benefits of Playing Video Games.” Psychology Today, 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201502/cognitive-benefits-playing-video-games.