I can't believe my last post was Oct 29. Time slips by pretty quickly. I'm now in my next class on the way to my doctorate. This class is so interesting. It's PSY 764B "Media and Social Psychology."
We have just read Marshall McLuhan's book "The Medium is the Massage" which is a thin and strange little book but full of complex yet somehow (after I read it twice) simple and logical thought. I highly recommend it.
We are now reading our prof's (Karen Dill) book called "When Fantasy Becomes Reality." I think it is well written - exactly like how Karen sounds in person, very bubbly and enthusiastic about social psychology and the media. Her specialty is video game violence. One of the things that stuck with me while I was reading her book is that some violent video game players lose levels of empathy - they might be the least likely to respond to an accident victim's plea for help, etc.
I was talking to my co-worker Matt about this. He plays a lot of video games (per him) and wondered outloud if there were any "gateway" characters that lead up to the hard core violent characters that some people play as. I don't have an answer to that but will definitely ask Karen.
My knowledge of video games is limited to Pong. I was a poor Pong player (slowest level).
*Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong
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