ashlayla, bell hooks (response to Rico72)

Bell Hooks' reading was definitely easier for me to get through and to understand. Like in Rico72's post, I was also able to connect this to the reading on Medal Of Honor. I have never played Medal of Honor or any other similar video game. However, one of my friend's plays Call of Duty and I have noticed how the creators of the game have "othered" the foreign people. Just like in Medal Of Honor, the Japanese and Germans are seen as savages and the player is determined to defeat the savage "other." In these games, Americans are the victims and the Japanese are the murderers and savages.

I agree with Rico72 that games like these could be used to teach history, however I think it could hurt the "other" even more if we use Medal of Honor and Call of Duty as teaching tools. During WWII, after the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese across the United States were put into camps. We were "othering" the Japanese because we associated them with those that attacked our troops at Pearl Harbor. Because people that looked and spoke like Japanese Americans, we automatically assumed that all Japanese were criminals and we felt like we needed to keep them away from our families. To me, if we used video games such as Medal of Honor as a teaching tool, it would make othering worse. I feel like we would start treating today's Japanese Americans like we treated those from the 1940s. We would create more stereotypes for the Japanese and to us, that is what they would be. We create these stereotypes from the games that we play and the movies and television shows that we watch. I think that if we could overcome those stereotypes that we have created, we could stop "othering." Once we stopped "othering" people, we would realize that they are just like us but with a different skin color and a different spoken language.