First off, what is entertainment? It’s an activity that is diverting and that holds the attention. Entertainment is of any doings that provides people to amuse themselves in their leisure time. Next, what is multimedia? Multimedia literally means multiple media used, where text, visuals and sounds are combined together. So then, what is the relationship between entertainment and multimedia?
With the combination of these two, multimedia entertainment applications aims at engaging them with superb experiences such as reading books, listening to music, enjoying videos and playing games. With the existence of the Internet, the network communications have been boosted up in a way that is not available elsewhere. This has improved the possibility to interact with real-time applications. There are different kinds of entertainment. First of all, there are different kinds of music genres to entertain different people seeing that all of us have different taste on music. Like music, movies also have different categories to satisfy people with different preferences. As for games, there are other kinds; arcade games, console, handheld, online, board games and a lot more.
There are a lot of gamers in this world. Be it those who play console games, or those who enjoy going to the arcade, or those who take pleasure in playing traditional board games with their family. The definition of game is well, basically a contest that has rules to determine a winner, or where you need to reach a particular set of scores to win, or for you to play and waste your time while having fun. The question now is, how does it influence us? There are a lot of cases where gamers would try and attempt suicide if they lost playing a game, or get bankrupt by buying too many virtual items for their character in games, especially those who are playing online games such as World of Warcraft or Ragnarok Online.
The games we play and enjoy are somehow brainwashing us. Brainwashing is the application of coercive techniques to change the values and beliefs, perceptions and judgments, and subsequent mindsets and behaviors of one or more people (Wikipedia). For example, once you sit in front of your computer for a game of, let’s say, Left4Dead2, you’d be playing that for hours with your friends. After you finished a campaign, you would want to play more and more. After you stop playing, you would get addicted with the concept of the game and would discuss about it with your friends the next time you see them. You have this feeling that you can’t wait for the next time you would play with your friends, or even play by yourself if it’s too hard to resist.
People who easily get influences are teenagers. They are the ones who have a lot of time on their hand and they would give in easily to peer pressure. Once a new game comes out, they are guaranteed to be playing it the next few days after the release. They would spend their time that was supposed to be for studying to play games. Users would get obsessed with the game and if they could, they would not want to stop. They would stay up all night to play the game and would end up sleeping during school. Not only does it affect their sleeping hours, it also affects their education as they used up all their time for revision to enjoy playing games.
Why are they so obsessed with it? First of all, it’s probably because it is entertaining them. They would prefer to play games than to study biology and whatnots. Secondly, it’s because of the multimedia used, how it has improved throughout the years. The graphics nowadays are at Blu-Ray level, mostly everything now is in High Definition. Who would want to miss that? Those gamers who would spend countless hours playing games is because they were bored and have nothing better to do. Not only that, these gamers would have a certain “value” implanted in them. Something that would make them believe in something, or change their interpretation on a certain topic. Hence they would get brainwashed.
To conclude, brainwashing is crawling towards you via entertainment. Not only through games, but through other needs of entertainment such as music, films, movies, videos and etc. It may be entertaining and making you feel jolly good, but it has effects that are slowly taking over. Entertainment will also slowly change your point of view on different issues. There are those who would try and follow a stunt they see on television. It may be entertaining to watch, but is harmful to do so in reality. Entertainment may be fun and enjoyable, but it is also dangerous you do not know how to limit yourself. So, are you ready to be brainwashed further through entertainment?
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