Technology is always changing, and along with all those changes goes society. We always want the newest, the biggest, the best. It applies to cars, houses, and, now more than ever, technology. I just read an article from Apple yesterday that said they had exceeded their own expectations and sold 35 million Iphones, which was way higher than they had anticipated. 35 MILLION! That is almost 10% of the nation that now has an Iphone. That many people now have the internet, a phone, movie playing device, mini-computer at there fingertips 24 hours a day. Will this ruing society? Personally I don’t think that it will, I just think that it will change it. Will it be better than before? Maybe, but it might ruin it in the long run. I think that as a society we still need to interact with people face to face and not over texts and emails. We are becoming less of a social nation, we would rather text a person and have a full conversation with them instead of calling them to have the same conversation in half the time. If we have a simple question we would rather email a person than remember it and ask them in person. We take the technology for granted, take advantage of it almost. We need to slow down and remember what is important, each other. We need to listen to each other, talk with each other, and interact with each other. That is how we can avoid having technology ruin our society. Going back to basics, seeing people and not screens.

Today for the Palmer Symposium, I attended the session that was put on by the EDUC 300 class. It was a just a little presentation that was a little over 30 minutes long. All 5 people on the panel were well dressed and looked well prepared. They presented on the education method of “COME IN.” This states 6 different ways that teachers can keep control of their classroom and become a very good educator. In this presentation, 4 of the 6 presenters were very good. The good ones all used all the key points of being a good speaker. They all used excellent eye contact, commanded attention with a strong voice, and had excellent visual aids that went along with their presentation but didn’t read off of them. The other two weren’t bad presenters, but didn’t look as prepared as the other ones. They looked almost like they were over their head by doing the presentation. Overall, I would give a good grade to this presentation. It taught me a valuable teaching technique that will help me a lot in my career. It also showed me how a well thought out presentation can be put together and used in an educational setting.

The game Evoke was created by Jane McGonigal as a way for the general public to be aware of problems that could happen in the future and give them the opportunity to solve these problems collaboritivly with others. It is designed to target the people of the Africa to help them develop answers to the problems that they have now, and encourages them to take the problems that they have and to try and conquer them themselves, because Jane McGonigal says that the people who will be our problem solvers in the future will be the ones that had to overcome the problems now. When she said this is made me think about that thought more and more. Does she mean that if we don’t have to figure anything out ourselves we will fall behind in the world, the homeless people who struggle to get by are actually farther ahead than the people who are getting spoon fed because of the money they have, or does she just mean that the world problems will get figured out by people who have first-hand experiece with them. I personally think that it is the latter, the only people that can figure out how to save Africa are the people of Africa, and we have to develop technology to help them. That is why I believe instead of trying to figure out a way to fix Africa, we just need to help them get the technology to help them, and the education they need to fix the problems. Thats what the game Evoke is doing, giving them the change to get the technology they need to help them fix their problems and it gives us a chance to help alongside them.

The video game I am going to review is MLB 12 The Show. This game has multiple game modes that you can play. The first one I am going to talk about is the Franchise Mode. In this mode, you take over control of a major league franchise, and have control over everything from the 40 man roster to scouting players who you might want to draft. Even the minor league rosters you have control over. You go season to season, signing free agents, resigning players, making trades, trying to turn your team into a winner with a budget that is assigned by your owner. You have a “contract” with your team and can get fired if your team loses to much and you can then take over a different team and turn them into a winner.

The next game mode is called Road to the Show. In this mode you make yourself, create your playing style, and use the xp points they give you to make yourself better. You then start out as a fairly bad player in AA, and then start playing games to gain xp points to make yourself better. As you improve, you get to move up to AAA and then eventually the majors. Then after you have 7 years of major league experience, you get to be a free agent and let all of the major league teams bid on you.  Then after you retire, you have to wait 5 years to see if you are a Hall of Famer.

The final game mode I am going to talk about is the mode called Rivalry mode. In this mode, you and a friend pick a team, decide how many games, and then set the rules for different aspects of the game; like who is the home team, if there is a DH, and other baseball related  things. You then start the rivalry and see who is the better player.

This game has many different things to do that appeal to a wide array of people. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who is interested in baseball or baseball related games.

The new video game that I started playing was MLB 12 The Show, and it doesn’t really have an “opening sequence” but it does have different game modes that can kinda have them. The game mode that I will talk about it Road to the Show, and in this game mode you create yourself and pick a team for him to start in. You start out in AA, which is the lowest level that you can play in, and start as a starter for that team. As you play more games and get more XP points you can use them to make yourself better and as you get better and start performing better you get called up to AAA which is one step away from the major leagues. Once you perform well enough at AAA and the major league club has a spot for you take, they give you a call-up to the majors where your career really starts. After being in “The Show” for awhile, you reach free agency where you can sign with any major league team that offers you a contract to be on the team. Once you have been in the show for an extended period of time, you can make the decision to retire, and if you do, after 5 years you could be elected to the Hall of Fame, where you will be forever immortalized as a great baseball player.

My favorite video game is MLB 11 the Show, which I purchased at the same time as one of my friends. When we would play we would be constantly texting and Facebooking each other telling what we did and who we beat, really just trying to one up eachother throughout the whole thing.

This video game made me more social with my friend but I would say less social with other friends because when we would talk about it with them, they would laugh and tell us we needed more to do with our life. I have had this same affect with other video games too, you become more social with the ones you play it will, and less with the ones that don’t.

Chapter 5 begins by talking about playing games on Facebook and how playing people we know makes the gaming even better. It talks about the fact that we are playing with other people and being able to interact with them is what is makes it fun. It goes on to talk about how we find it fun to publicly humiliate the people we are playing. Not in a bad way, but by either updating your status or posting on a message board that you beat them. I completely agree with what they because I find playing with other people online or even in person makes the games that much more fun because you are constantly interacting and trying to beat each other.  I love to trash talk a little bit and rub in the fact that I won a game or scored higher than a friend in something. This little things are what make playing online fun. Chapter 6 talks about how fun games can be when you become part of something that is bigger than the game itself. It uses the example of Halo 3 and how the gamers made it a goal to get to a billion kills then to 10 billion kills and they are striving to reach 100 billion. They made it important to the gamers that every little thing they accomplished means something to the game as a whole. Being a sports gamer, I have never really experience being apart of something bigger than the game but I have been apart of non-game related activities that were bigger than the activity themselves. Being apart of things like that make the game, activity more enjoyable and give us an opportunity to be something bigger than just the average person. It gives you a sense of self worth and a sense of belonging.

Today in the presentation we learned about the video game research lab that we have here at Morningside College. We learned about the experiments they are doing, like trying to determine how playing games affect you physiologically as well as socially and we also learned about they research experiments that are still ongoing today.  I think that the presentation was very interesting, it taught us that video games do have an affect on our everyday life, and that they can be used to affect the future. I also learned that there are people out there that are trying to prove the video games are unproductive and not worth the time and people are out there trying to prove those people wrong. I think the most interesting part that I learned today though was that telling girls that there is a gender effect while playing actually does have an affect on the way that they play. I feel like that if you tell them that it shouldn’t have an affect on the way that they play, but that it does really intrigues me. I hope to be able to find more out about it in the future.

The article I found was an article from The Economist that is titled Playing to Win that was written in 2004. The article starts out talking about how video games are becoming more and more lifelike that they can be used as training for the real world counterparts. It talks about how Dwight Freeney won the 2003 “Madden Bowl” and attributed it to his knowledge of the game from playing it. Then the article talked about how the military uses video games as training because using the actual machinery was becoming too expensive to use the real thing. I think this is a great article because it compares the video games to real life. It shows how the games can be used to affect the real life world around them. Because of this, the games can be used  as training methods for people in different professions to further themselves in life. I compare this to Nascar drivers using video game machines to learn the race tracks they are going to race at even though they are nowhere near the race tracks that they are driving on. Because of these features that video games bring to the table now, they will continue to revolutionalize the way that things are conducted around the world. Things have even changed so much that some weapons in the world are so advanced that they can be used remotely, kind of like a video game but in real life. Because of these advancements video games are becoming like real life, and real life is becoming like video games. They are almost becoming interchangable.

While hanging out with some friends, we talked about how they viewed gaming and they said that the older generation is the only one that views video games as negative. They said that the only reason that they view it as negative is because they never had the experience of them to base it off of. We believe that they view them negatively because our generation is so into them that all we do is sit on them all day long. We believe that our generation’s brains actually get a work out from our video games. We have to think our way through levels and situations which makes our mind work even when we don’t intend them to be getting a work out. The older generations don’t realize that, they just see us sitting on the gaming systems not doing anything and say that were killing brain cells because we don’t go out and do other things. We think that the only reason that someone from our generation would have a negative view would be because of the lack of physical activity that we get while playing. While our generation is getting working out our minds, we are working out our bodies which causes us to become overweight, which is one of the biggest problems that our generation has. But we decided that is the only reason that someone from our generation could have with video games and not liking them. It’s such a widespread phenomenon that its hard to find anyone who does have a negative view of video games.