response four Steam reviews

(Shortened/missing content to fit the around 600 wordcount)

Steam is the hub for most personal computer gamers. It has a selection of games to buy and download, a social system to create your own persona and befriend others, as well as a system for user written reviews. How does Steam’s way of going about user reviews change the mentality of using the application?

Steam uses a system of a thumbs up or a thumbs down, much like Youtube’s. To first write a review a user has to own the game before hand, this prevents people from looking at the game’s trailer and screenshots then writing how much they love or hate it based off of what little they've seen. Steam has a group of internet famous people, like TotalBiscut, who have a series of game reviews and games they recommend to the community. Then Steam has the reviews of the famous game reviewing sites like IGN. The last of the subjective reviews are the community written reviews that show how many people found a user specific review to be helpful or unhelpful.  If there are any replies to the reviews they will be shown underneath the original review. Finally objective reviews are those that have plainly stated minimum and recommended specs for the computer to run the game, what genres the game is under,and a brief description of the game.

Steam doesn’t have typical demographics such as children, or ethnic, but instead it’s broken up into categories of “gamers”. There are three specific demographic on Steam: budget gamers, value gamers, and elitists. Budget gamers are those that have a cheap gaming rig that plays games at low setting and usually don’t make many purchases for games. Then we have the value gamers that have decent rigs and have a medium amount of money budgeted off for games. Finally are the elitists. Elitists are those with rigs that can perform smoothly under almost any conditions, and have a plethora of games to play at their fingertips.

Someone who would be examining the reviews could almost tell each person’s demographic by their review. A budget gamer would be geared to write more on how much longevity the game held, and how happy they were with the money the spent. A value gamer would include how smooth the game ran for the specs they have. Elitists would comment how beautiful, and mechanically detailed the game was.

The way that review system works changes how reviewers think about the games. For example, gamers have mentioned how little reviewers talk about how fun a game is anymore, instead their attention is drawn more towards the mechanical aspects of the game. Steam’s community, regardless that they too post reviews talking about the mechanics, upvotes and spotlights the reviews that are humorous and give experiences of fun times as reviews. “If I had to pick this game or my girlfriend, I’d pick this game...Edit: I am now single,” is at the top of the highest reviews for the game Skyrim. The community makes local stars out of those that do a good job at correctly emphasizing the good times that can be had in the game world.

Call of Duty A.W.

     After a recent break up I escaped back into the magical world of first person shooters. My specific choice was Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, because the new DLC (downloadable content) introduced four great maps, and Exo Zombies, you may remember the last three times I've used Exo Zombies as a class example.
     I was expecting the new Call of Duty, my entertainment experience, to be fast paced and amazing. Turned out I was right. The media and every other person seems to bash the new Call of Duty as being the same, when that is simply not true. Changing how someone can/how freely someone can move changes the fundamentals, along with basically armor abilities, and improvement on a customization system used only once before.  Their words for about a hour tend to make my experience less enjoyable, however it's quickly forgotten when I start playing.
     I started playing months ago by myself, but recently I have had friends over physically to play online or the zombie mode with me. Recently I made an online friend with a similar skill level so I have had increased semi-social interaction because of the game.
     The game did fulfill my expectations. I felt escape and total control (cough cough I'm usually number one in the game, give me praise...please). The couple of times where I'm playing stupidly or someone bests me are when I get pulled out if the bad experience extends over a period of time. Having a personal blood lust, I always crave to join the game again if I have the mental energy.
    Over all the gaming industry seems to understand/have a formula to have people to have a strong desire to buy the game, and only a few companies seem to understand what makes a game fun. Although everyone hates on Call of Duty (I do for most of the games) most people when they sit down to play actually have fun. Thanks for reading, now go away.

Implications of advertisement trends

     An implication of these trends are that the lazy and controllable consumers are more prone to being controlled and rolling with the flow. The more skeptical and thoughtful oriented people are resisting and growing mentally stronger by constantly having to examine through all of the crap advertisers throw at us.
     The ones who don't try to find truth, their own thoughts on a subject matter, and take every advertisement at face value only allow themselves to be spoon fed more and more misinformation. The stereotypes, and sense of pleasure the commercials give to these types of people are supported and cemented into their heads because they offered no resistance or no questioning to the advertisers' logic.
     The ones who are cynical look at advertisements and ask, "what's wrong with this picture," "what don't they want me knowing about the product," or "how are they trying to manipulate me?" By looking deeper they are forced to use critical thinking and (not so common) common sense. Not that investigating into advertisements increases the whole of the intelligence of a person, but it certainly helps train certain parts of the brain.
     The constant spewing of these types of ads increase the divide between  critical and noncritical thinkers. Not that the advertising is the great divider of intelligence, but that it is a smaller part that applies to the every increasing gap between the well thought out people and the non well thought out people.