Before I wrapped up my blog with a slight reflection on the course itself, paired with my own thoughts on gaming and gaming communities I wanted to speak one last time on the subject of my final research paper. When ending my paper I noted some facts about race, and also went slightly in depth mid paper about the players mother as a character. I felt these two topics are possible areas where I could expand on the paper in the future, particularly while showing how the player’s mother is always a nurturing symbol within the games, whereas the one father we have is a powerful gym leader who shows “leadership”. Race and Gender are two topics in the Pokemon universe that I feel me and many other fans often have overlooked as we care so little for NPC’s and rather focus on when our one Pokemon will finally evolve so we can dunk on our rival. Still, I think the interactions with NPC’s and why Game Freak chose certain dialogue, and roles for certain characters is worthy of a closer analysis in the future, and hope to one day see more criticism related to the topic. 

As for my final thoughts, as with my last post I find myself a bit sad in that this course has finally come to a close. I have never taken a Media Study course, and being an English major I must say the entire course has been a great breath of fresh air. Cody has been an amazing Professor and has truly cared about his students during these troubling times. And though I wish I could have experienced the course at its fullest in person, the transition has been handled so well by all included in it. I’ve enjoyed watching streams, videos and playing along with each other on the Discord server, and most importantly I’ve learned something. I’ve learned a great deal about game communities, and the flaws of the gaming world, while also finally viewing it in a positive light despite these negatives and flaws. Growing up I always saw gaming as something bad, something that shouldn’t be a focus of anyone’s life, or even the focus of an hour in someone’s day. But in the last few years I’ve grown more comfortable dedicating more and more of my time to gaming, especially with friends. 

And, most importantly I feel this course really led me to think outside the box. I think one of the most interesting videos and aspects of gaming we went over was those enshrouded in “GamerGate”. After the in class discussion we had that day after watching the youtube video I sent the video to a group of my friends, and debated some of the responses that came from it and some of the interesting things the youtuber had said. I found it interesting that we had this discussion in a gaming community, on discord, of a pretty substantial size, and yet only me and my friends chose to discuss the topic. Never had I seen the topic arise outside of when we had discussed it, nor had we ever discussed the hardships of girl gamers and how certain people are targeted in gaming communities. Also of note was the absence of the members who seemed truly so interested in gaming, certainly more interested than me. It would seem that so many fans of particular franchises, stories and games are passionate when it comes to discussing said games and franchises, and perhaps even argumentative, but when discussing the hardships of others in relation to those games or to the gaming community as a whole the voices are less loud. Either way, I enjoyed the discussion the video led to, and we also analyzed the two videos that followed it for hours of that day. It was enlightening, and eye opening and made me see many faults within gaming communities as well as the one I was a part of. Despite seeing the faults though I saw so much good from others responses to it, particularly those closer to me, and learned more about their views toward the subject and how they coincided with mine. I will never forget that experience, and that’s more I can say most of my classes have led to when it comes to considering their information outside of the classroom itself.