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Wednesday, November 3, 2010

EXTRA CREDIT BLOG: Isolation U

A Brain is a Terrible Thing to Waste

I decided to go to the extra credit opportunity Colleen emailed us about last week. I thought it was going to be a bigger lecture but it was only in a small room with about fifteen other people. You know the saying, “ I didn’t understand a word you just said”? It could not have been more true for me during this lecture, with absolutely no exaggeration whatsoever. The main speaker threw around words I not only did not understand, but words I have never heard before. I was literally swimming in a sea of confusion for which there was no escaping. I suppose this is the reason I stick to science. Besides the fact that I had no idea what he was talking about most of the time, I did pick up a few key points. He was talking about zombies and their effects and meaning in video games. He and a group of his students were making/testing a new game in which they developed that was an interactive, on campus, zombie game. It required students to carry around a small computer that is oriented by GPS and would prompt you to different scenarios based on where you were on campus. Personally, I would consider myself a “gamer” and it sounded pretty lame, especially when he was describing how it represented a bunch of stuff I don’t know anything about.
He did make some really good point throughout the rambling, some that really made me think. He compared zombies to a few different things in our society, such as video games. He addressed the fact that many people think that playing video games turns people into zombies, sitting staring for long periods of time with little intellectual thought. He appeared to be an avid gamer because he countered this statement by comparing gaming to work, “sitting for extended periods of time, inputting commands into a mouse and keyboard, and having little interaction with real people”.
Another thing he said was that the zombies in media today represent the AIDS epidemic, for which the reasons are obvious; everyone being scared of catching this super virus that causes the infected to eventually die. He also mentioned the fact that zombies represent conformity in society, which in my opinion, could be true. Zombies all conform together because they have nothing else to do besides try and find something to feed on. Overall I didn’t learn much from this presentation but it was interesting at some points and I am glad I went. It would have been much better if I could understand more than ten percent of it.

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