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Posted: October 25, 2010 in EssaysTags: college, english, essay, mirror's edge, video games
Look what I wrote for English class! We were supposed to write a “descriptive narrative” based on something we remember. Well, what I remember best is video games. So that’s what I wrote about! Take a look!
I was going to make my first blog post of the new school year special and cool and exciting. I was going to talk about my new classes, my new ideas, my new driver’s license.
Instead my best friend just told me she isn’t my friend anymore.
I feel kind of shitty right now.
I feel helpless and useless and hopeless and I have no idea what to do. She says she wants to feel good about herself. That she’s tired of us and trying to help us. She’s angry that we’re different and apparently won’t take care of ourselves or fight for our friendship.
I’m trying to get mad. I thought I was fighting and taking care of myself and working on us. I thought we were talking and I thought things were okay. But I’ve thought that before and I was wrong. I want to be mad. I want to be mad that she’s decided what I need to be as her friend, and that I don’t fit those parameters, and therefore I’m not her friend. I went to Missouri to see her, I’m trying to get my life back in order, and I’m trying to be a friend to her and I don’t understand what happened or what I did wrong.
All I know is that I have now been dumped twice by the same girl. And it doesn’t get any easier the second time.
Bye, Becca.
I found something while going through an old TIME magazine: an article about Jenny McCarthy and her crusade for mothers of autistic children. Always fascinated by autistic stuff (who doesn’t like reading about herself?), I cracked it open. About halfway through, I came across this quote: “What number does it have to be … for people just to start listening to what the mothers of children who have autism have been saying for years … I told my pediatrician something happened … after [he was vaccinated] ?… Boom — the soul was gone from his eyes.” McCarthy said that on Oprah in 2007, according to the TIME article.
It was at that point that I threw the magazine across the room.
McCarthy’s stance on autism is that it is a disease to be cured. She never uses the word “cure,” preferring “recovery”–like how one recovers from a bus accident, she says. To be honest, that’s not much better, because either way, there is something fundamentally wrong with the child, something that keeps him from being fully functional, fully normal, fully human. According to McCarthy, autism is the fault of MMR vaccines (despite numerous tests and studies proving otherwise), causing issues within the child’s body. From her website: “We believe our children’s bodies are overwhelmed by a combination of heavy metals (mercury, lead aluminum), live viruses (particular from their vaccines), and bacteria. These toxins serve to slow or shut down normal biochemical pathways in the body and lead to the physical and mental manifestations we call NDs [neurological disorders].” Therefore, like any other disease, it can be cured.
This may be reassuring to the parents, but it is dangerous to the kids. It means the parents will spend all their time and effort on bullshit “alternative treatments” to try to cure the mercury poisoning or what have you–and not on giving the kids the counseling and psychiatric therapy they need. It’s true that what works great for one kid won’t work at all for another (I responded really well to Zoloft; I was the only one in my therapy group that did), but that doesn’t mean some treatments don’t work at all. McCarthy, for her part, doesn’t actually endorse not seeking counseling and psychological therapy–but she doesn’t think it’s the root of autism.
This completely misses the point of what autism is.
Autism is not caused by vaccines. It is not a disease, and it is not a biomedical issue. It is not cancer, it is not poisoning. This is way, way, way oversimplifying the complexities of autism. Autism is a cognitive disorder–it affects how you think, the very basic processes of your mind. That is how there can be physical issues associated with it; the brain affects the rest of the body, after all. The way you view the world, the way you process it, the language that it translates into, all of that is changed by autism. It’s so much more basic than toxins, and so much more complex.
The best way I’ve found to describe my experiences with autism (as an autistic myself, mind you) is that it’s an operating system. Brains are the fastest, most complex, most powerful computers in existence, and like all computers, it has an operating system. Neurotypicals have one; autistics have another. My operating system is autistic. This can make it very, very hard to interface with the rest of the world. Input can be difficult to handle, especially if it’s a file type I’ve never seen before or that I’m not equipped to handle. Have you ever tried running .exe files on a Mac? If you know how to use a certain system, it can be just as functional and just as useful as another–but you need to know how. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to use my operating system, and even now it’s a difficulty. Now imagine someone else trying to interface with me, putting their system against mine, and you can see how communication can be a huge issue.
Isn’t that more complicated than mercury poisoning? It’s like being from a different planet. You can’t cure being from a different planet. You can evolve and adjust and adapt–but not cure. Telling parents their autistic children can be cured is giving them false hopes, it’s completely misinformed, and it’s offensive to us autistics. We are not something to be cured; we are not a blight. We are another kind of humanity–but that doesn’t make us less human.
I am trouble, yes. I am a puzzle, a problem, and a fascinating project, to various people. But there is one thing I am not.
I am not a disease.
So while I desperately run away from the mountain of reading that is following me around like some sort of zombie horde, let’s talk about RPGs.
I’ve been playing a lot of Mass Effect and Final Fantasy X lately, and that’s given me some food for thought on Japanese (or Japanese-style) RPGs and Western (or Western-style) RPGs. Basically the two of them are decidedly different, and the way in which they are different–other than WRPGs’ turn-based-combat-phobia–is their style of storytelling, or more specifically, their style of roleplaying. JRPGs tend to have a passive style of roleplaying, while WRPGs have a more active style.
What do I mean by this? Well, let’s take Final Fantasy for example. Your typical FF game has a definite, linear story, a specific main character that is uncustomizable outside his equipment slots and ability pool, a bunch of party members, and a lot of cutscenes in which you do nothing but watch. The actual playable sections become a way to get from Cutscene A to Cutscene B and learn more of the story. It’s almost an interactive movie, albeit occasionally it feels like the “interaction” is walking from one theatre to another in order to see a movie that is weirdly in parts and scattered throughout the city.
Here’s the thing, though: often the playable sections are really fun on their own merits, with an engaging combat system and lots of minigames and sidequests (though in FFX the sidequests are all collection stuff). In Kingdom Hearts especially, the most fun part of the entire game is the combat system. I could go back and play through the whole thing just to fight the boss battles again. In fact, once I beat FFX that’s exactly what I’m planning to do. It’s good, clean, bash-’em-up fun, and that means someone in the design department did their job right. The storyline is engaging and well-told and keeps you wanting to get from Cutscene B to Cutscene C, just to see what happens next–even though you really don’t have any control over it. This lack of control means the player really has a passive role in how the game plays out.
On the other hand, all WRPGs I’ve played take the “roleplaying” part very seriously. More commonly in WRPGs, the player creates–or at least heavily modifies–their own character and directs how the character interacts with its environment. Mass Effect does this on a massive scale, as does Fable, Knights of the Old Republic, and Neverwinter Nights. In the end the story is essentially linear, but the player has a greater hand in the direction the linearity goes. The player chooses what his–or her–character says, how it acts, the friends it makes, even the morals it has (although moral choice systems aren’t limited to RPGs alone). It’s much more about the player actively shaping the story, rather than watching the story unfold.
However, this does not mean that WRPGs are inherently “better” than JRPGs. Many JRPGs have engrossing storylines that would be good fantasy stories in any medium, as do many WRPGs–and many more are boring, repetitive, and generally rubbish. The way they tell the story does not truly affect the individual worth of that story, and either way can be equally fulfilling for the player. It’s all about style. Many Western action games actually have passive storytelling, so it’s not limited to JRPGs only. Roleplaying simply has a different meaning for the Dungeons and Dragons sect of Western culture.
Personally, I enjoy both styles. It can depend on the mood I’m in which one I’d rather play, just as it can vary between playing an action game or an FPS. I honestly don’t think that one is superior. In the end it comes down to a matter of personal style and taste.
By the way, I changed the name of the blog to better reflect what I write, which tends to be much geekier than artsy. If you know where I got the title, you … get … something or other, I haven’t really planned that far ahead. …shhhh
Gooooood evening everyone! So I haven’t posted in at least two months and you probably all hate me (all five of you), but I am back and better than ever and I want to post so I will post and SO THERE, NYAH. And so, since I dropped off the face of the planet during Christmas break, a few updates. In bulleted form!
- I got a new computer for Christmas! It is an Asus Notebook G60Vx, with 320 GB of hard drive space, 4 GB of RAM, a 2.13 GHz processor, and 1 GB of VRAM. In layman’s terms, it is a Jaguar. Some girls get cars for Christmas; I get a computer. And I am equally free. Also I got this to go with it. Together, they form a geeky monstrosity that is just wonderful.
- I am officially a Communications major, and for Interterm I am taking Young Adult Literature. I didn’t realize when I signed up for the class that it was actually an English Education course, so we talk a lot about not only the books we read, but teaching them. It’s actually really fascinating. I’m not the only non-ed minor in there, though; one of them’s an Engineering major and she’s just taking this for fun. It involves a lot lot LOT of reading. Currently I am working on Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.
- I haven’t done much story-writing lately, but I have been thinking about it, and I think in my spare time between writing essays, reading books, going to class, and playing games, I will begin writing again. I have a lot of ideas that need to be freed. Also Skye and Vien have been very active lately and they need to get out and play for a bit or else they will drive me crazy.
- Be proud of me: I got up this morning at a quarter to seven, took a shower, got dressed, blow-dried my hair, did my make-up, printed out my essay, and had breakfast, and I still got to my 8:30 class with time to spare. My roommate was amazed that I was up so early, but I’m trying to make a habit of it. I want to be ready for next semester.
- Next semester! My classes shall be Elementary Statistics, Thinking and Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Oral Interpretation. That’s two gen eds (Thinking and Writing is ENG 101) and two for my major. I’m also taking a guided study course, where I go in and the Academic Support advisor helps me schedule my week, make timelines for assignments, and organize my thinking so I know what to do next. I also have to go in for two hours a week for supervised study time. It’s a bit embarrassing that I have to take this course, but at the same time I know it’ll help tremendously. Everything Dr. Claassen and I will be working on is stuff that my therapist has recommended I work on anyway, so why not get his help? I need to learn to accept help, too.
As I write more stuff (and play Mass Effect *cough*) I will show you what I’ve done and what I think. But first I need to concentrate on my schoolwork. I know that sounds kind of cliche and stupid and just saying it to make my parents happy, but I am totally sincere when I say it’s not. Well, it is cliche, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I’m terrified of becoming an adult, yeah, and getting my own place and my own job, but at the same time it’s kind of exciting. I might actually live the life I dream about and read about. I might actually be someone special and important. But I can’t do that without working on it, and that’s what I’ve got to do now.
Even if it’s hard. And scary. And tiring. I guess that’s the most important part of becoming an adult in the end.
P.S. WordPress is being a bitch tonight so if this posts twice it is not my fault.
I went to see New Moon with my good friend Robert today. Here is my summary of it, as told to Alexanthra.
WARNING: SPOILERRIFFIC
