Whenever I read a piece about or having anything to do with games/gaming, I almost instantly feel like I'm drifting into rhetorical waters that I can't navigate.
Within Kairos I read Vie and deWinter's piece on surveillance and games - really I'm not sure why I chose it - perhaps a vague hope that with every piece on gaming that I read, I will begin to feel less like a rhetorical outsider (which is a bit odd I suppose because I don't really care about gaming, but I like understanding things) and begin to gain knowledge on the topic.
Welp, still trying to gain. Still not getting much. I get the gist - gaming, surveillance, peoples patterns, strategies of the game companies to get more traffic, privacy issues, etc., but there is still so much lingo and terms within that rhetorical sphere that I feel like I'm missing things. I get this inner vibe that I can't even discuss it correctly...
Personally I've never played Candy Crush, or Words with Friends, I've had opportunity and nearly everyone I know has played these and similar games. I have nothing at all against games, or the people that play them. But something about it - especially the way these companies PUSH their product on you - just irks me. I also think that privacy is something that is highly misunderstood. None of us have our privacy really, not anymore. So whenever there's an option to say 'no' to something that potentially takes one more chunk of it, I relish the choice to say, NAH.
I think within games on Facebook such as CC and WwF it's always interesting to see what type of privacy things you have to give permission to. Like sometimes it will include things that you wouldn't think the game would need like access to your gallery or your camera. I definitely connect with the "whenever there's an option to say 'no' to something that potentially takes one more chunk of it, I relish the choice to say, NAH" line because I think more and more we are needing to give access in order to receive certain aspects of the technology that we want. There is always a bit of give and take going on for sure
ReplyDeleteyes, and I wonder how much reflecting on that people do when they want to do a quiz online and to do it they have to share their personal information and contacts. Give and take seems to be a good observation....
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