Video Games Are Easy

When Diana first explained to me the conversation she had had with Nick (poor Nick; our first blog topic is all about proving him wrong) I found it amusing that even though, in principle, I disagreed with him, I understood exactly where he was coming from. My teenage years were filled completely with video games and I often assumed that my friends were extremely bored with out them. My bias came from my intense devotion to games and how a particularly engrossing game would not only occupy most of my free time but most of my thoughts during the rest of the day as well. And when I had finished that game, the lack made life very boring. I assumed that my non-gamer friends felt like this all the time.

Now, admittedly, I’ve got a bit of a video game addition (and most of the previous chapter could be in the present tense as well) and this sort of gaming, which was mostly one-player gaming, might not be what Nick was talking about. However, having video games makes entertaining yourself much easier. Once you’re into the scene, it’s easy to pick up something new when you’ve finished a game. If you’re bored, just find a new video game to play. You have your entertainment planned out for you.

So I don’t think this is a gender issue. I think this is a social issue. We gamers may not understand that people who don’t play games aren’t bored but I know that my friends were perfectly entertained; they read books or did crafts. In truth, my one-player games were the equivalent of these activities in that they are all solitary. The difference comes from addictive quality of video games and how easily they can be entertaining.

But I knew that other people in my high school figured out how to spend time with people outside of school, something I really didn’t care about until senior year of high school. Being less socially mature and definitely more of a staying-in kind of person, it took me a while to realize that talking to people wasn’t the most boring thing you could do (especially when video games were always so much more flashy and exciting). Maybe this is where Nick’s idea of mischievousness comes from; kids hanging with nothing to do, chatting it up, then, bored, finding illegal ways to entertain themselves. This may be true, especially in places like my hometown where there was never anything to do, but it is definitely not gender specific.

I guess what I want to say is that I don’t think that there is really a problem here. Would bored girls (and boys) benefit from more games that are multiplayer but not necessarily competitive (as Simone mentions)? Probably, but there are already a lot of games out there and those who want to play them are going to. I think kids are different from each other and will entertain themselves different ways, but illegal and mischievous activities are not going to result from boredom on its own.

~

Becca is an MRI tech for a neurology lab in St. Louis. She lives with her boyfriend, Justin, and dog, Sokka. She is not a well-known writer, but thought it was really hilarious to do this bit in italics like she was a guest writer for a newspaper.

Every Man For Himself

After graduation, I came back to the land of my high school days – Harrisburg, PA. I’m getting to see the place I hated so much as a teenager (claiming that I had nothing to do around here) now as an unemployed 23-year-old with a penchant for going to bars and playing pool. Bars provide a place to just hang out at night without pressure that is all but unavailable to younger kids. During the day, being a mall rat is pretty common, but it leaves a sense of pressure to spend money on clothes that is damaging to female self esteem, not to mention the parents’ wallet. The mall closes at eight or nine, which is way before you want to sleep. If you want to stay in, the options available seem to be watching TV, playing video games, or talking. Watching TV requires little interaction and conversations cannot last forever, so the best way for older kids to interact is through group video games. However, many group-friendly video games involve just beating the crap out of your friends, every man for himself.

When that phrase, “every man for himself”, first came to mind, I thought that I should politicize it and go for “people for themselves,” or whatnot. Then I realized that it was appropriate the way it was because I don’t think it is a female social construction. Personally, I like an atmosphere where I can either just strive to get better without being attacked (or attacking anyone else!), or where I can collaborate. I’ve always felt extremely uncomfortable in situations where everyone is out to get everyone else: whether that’s my femininity or not, I don’t really care. For example, I don’t particularly enjoy games like Smash Brothers or Goldeneye 007 (if you’re kicking it old-school). It’s difficult to welcome a new player into the game, because they are likely to be totally destroyed. Let’s face it; getting the shit kicked out of you repeatedly isn’t that much fun. I think this makes them unfriendly to women, and it can contribute to boredom for adolescent girls.

My most distinct pleasant memories of hanging out and playing video games were playing Dance Dance Revolution. It was one of the few group games I really got into. It’s somewhat competitive because you go one on one, but because you can play the same song on different levels of difficulty, it takes a lot of the pressure off new players. Furthermore, you aren’t directly attacking your opponent, and you get exercise! Win, win, win. I think games like DDR, Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band are the way to go to get more girls involved in group video games. Healthy competition is good and fun, but I, and possibly many other girls out there, may not enjoy the every-man-for-himself atmosphere present in most games.

I decided to focus on the video game aspect of boredom for teenage girls, although you could probably write a book on it. To go back to my remark about bars providing neutral ground for people to hang out that is unavailable to the underage, I think this problem could be alleviated by an increase in coffee shops that are open late, cheap, and teen-friendly. There need to be more avenues for girls to spend their bonding time with the option of being in a social/collaborative rather than competitive atmosphere. They get enough competition in the horror that is high school.

Letz start some blog postz

Hi everyone, and welcome to our blog! A brief introduction: we are four recent graduates of the University of Chicago who got placed together first year by some miracle on the part of the housing system. We all liked each other and proceeded to live together all four years, first in housing, and then in apartments. When we graduated, we scattered - and I'm now working as a computational biologist in Boston, MA. Which is awesome. (Disregard the fact that I'm writing this at work; I do actually like my job, I promise.)

I'm going to start with a sort of random question: do you think teenage girls are bored? And if so, what sort of games/activities should be created to change that? I should explain where I'm getting this train of thought. Last night I asked my boyfriend which gender child he would like to have if he could only have one. He said a boy, which didn't surprise me, because I would have said a girl. But I found his explanation surprising: "Girls are mischievous" (hello, aren't boys the ones who are supposed to play pranks?). According to him, boys do things when they hang out together, such as stereotypically masculine activities like shooting hoops, other variations on tossing a ball around, and playing video games. But girls only have one thing to do when they hang out together: talk. He doesn't know what they find to talk about, but whatever it is, "they must be up to no good". I'm guessing he meant by this that the lack of female hang-out activities leads to the sort of drama we all remember from Mean Girls.

At first I laughed at him, but after I read a paragraph in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex that basically stated exactly what he had just said without the video games, I started to reconsider. What is it, exactly, that girls do together? Other than talk? I couldn't think of anything until my tween years came flooding back to me and I remembered one thing: Klutz crafts books. My 13-year-old self enjoyed nothing more than sitting down and making some (very tacky, very ugly) jewelry, or decorating cookies, or making paper dolls, or, at one point, making a pin-ball machine with my friends. What made this really fun was the aspect of collaboration, and I think that whenever the act of creation got touched by competition, it ruined it for me. Competition for me meant that someone was doing better than someone else, and that inevitably meant someone wasn't having fun.

These activites mostly ended when I got further into my teenage years, though; the tacky jewelry and paper dolls started losing their glittery charm and I got very busy with music lessons, plays, and schoolwork. But my love of collaborative creation has never gone away: for example, some of my favorite memories from college are of sitting around drinking cheap wine and making bad art with cheap supplies. There's only so much bad art you can make, though, and there's the real problem with creation: you take stuff and create more stuff with it, all of which is stuff you don't need. What's the solution?