Be Fair and Squarenix

Our discussion on video games today left me really frustrated. I didn't understand why so many people who'd never played video games were chiming in. When I involve myself in a conversation I do so knowing something about the topic, and I try very hard not to participate in something i have admitted ignorance about. This is why I don't say much about diet culture or music. I don't really know much about it, besides what I see in passing.

I feel like a lot of media that doesn't get attention from the mainstream populace gets an unnecessarily bad rap. This includes animation, comics, and video games, a long time domain of nerds exclusively. This could even be further extended into games like D&D, which ALWAYS have a negative portrayal in the media despite it being a bunch of people hanging out and talking. It never fails to perplex me how hanging out with beers wasting the day away=cool. Hanging out with dice wasting the day away=lame. Hanging out with beer and dice gambling=cool.

This brings me to the sneaking suspicion that most people that write these D&D segments in TV and movies have never played it.... like many of the people who comment in class, especially the women, on video games. Even when people have never touched a comic or played a video game longer than short demo at Best Buy, they feel entirely suited to comment on it. When I knew we have a topic in class coming up I go out of my way to at least immerse myself a little bit in the material. For example, going into film history classes, I watched all of Stanly Kubrick's works. I hate Kubrick and pretty much all films from that era. However, I pressed on so when i participated in discussions my comments would be relevant and not completely out of line. And if it was about a movie I had no seen, I did not comment. If I would have tried talking about Kubrick knowing only clips that had been parodied and snippets I'd read in books or things friends had said, I'd still be laboring under the delusion that his films were great and I would have said a lot of things that wouldn't have added any useful contributions to the discussion, having no firsthand thoughts of my own.

It is not that I think it is wrong to have negative opinions about these things, or that I'm frustrated people disagreed with me or agreed with me. It's simply that people professing ignorance and then climbing on their soapbox seems contradictory. As a fan of video games, animation, and sequential art I have to constantly combat the ignorance about them and I guess I just found myself disappointed that this sort of uninformated criticism was being sancitioned in a university environment.