Later this month, Gamers Gridiron (gamersgridiron) will allow you and your dormmates (or anyone else online using the service) to compete for cash in a secure environment. "Gamers can compete in head-to-head challenges, group-play battles, or bracket style tournament challenges using multiple game console platforms (Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii). Additionally, Gamers can choose from a wide variety of popular games." But is this really the best way to spend the limited funds on your Pride Card?
Troubling: Gamers Gridiron put in their press release a quote from RMIT University senior lecturer in Art Larissa Hjorth's article (one not mentioned on her website) "The Games of Causal Reflection: Gaming in the 21st Century,". In the article Hjorth is quoted as saying "Social media games are characteri[s]ed by the sandbox genre (procedural rather than goal based) that continues to parallel the domestic, ongoing 'flow' once occupied by the TV soap opera." Gamers with Pride Cards beware. Notice anything strange with that? Why would a site offering services for competitive play be using a quote describing a non-competitive form of gameplay? This is deceptive at best, using academia's time spent on the research of gaming and gaming culture to offer a "hook" into parting those with cash from it.
In another of Hjorth's articles, "The place of mobile gaming: one history in locating mobility in the Asia-Pacific region," she takes on the "presence" of gamers. The article, focusing primarily on Japanese and Korean gamers (Korean gamers, if you follow gaming news, will know they have a massive competitive gaming culture, Starcraft Doritios for example). play Bingo Games
From her article: "The local impacts on what it means to be co-present. Co-presence can infer the traversing between the virtual and the actual, being here and there as is prevalent in the practice of mobile technologies and gaming spaces. For Doreen Massey a sense of place is defined through representational processes, a practice that is always mediated. It is easy to romantically conceive of technology as the scapegoat for increasing feelings of dislocation in redefining place. But this can be too convenient and requires further analysis. As Massey notes, place has always been mediated—by projections, imaginings, representation and the very acts of practising culture and performing identity. Technologies such as mobile media re-enact earlier co-present practices such as SMS remediating 19th century letter writing traditions... 'remediation' is a reworking of McLuhan's argument that the content of new technologies is that of previous." Gamers Gridiron, a free service, may not be taking money directly from you (the money is taken from whichever form of payment you choose, put into an escrow account, and then available for challenging other players), they will be sustaining themselves with the lure of gambling your easy-come, easy-go loan (or otherwise) dollars. Best Bingo Sites
You and a dorm mate should be able to have a fine time playing with each other while playing with yourselves in an environment free of competitive gaming. The scale of the field Gamers Gridiron offers to players in reaching riches is equal to that of buying scratch off lotto tickets in hope of hitting the jackpot.
If you are going to lay down a few dollars per game, keep it in cash with agreed upon rules. Allowing a few dollars here and a few dollars there go out through an online presence only allows that much more abuse to take hold. Without having access to Gamers Gridiron's software, there's a chance of real competitive players using real exploits to win your real money that should be spent on a healthy student life, not one spent gambling with your amateur skills.
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Source: dakotastudent