One thing that i have come to learn very well in the past few years is that, with out hardships, you would never know the good/joy in life because you wouldn’t know the difference. More specifically, if you did not know the sorrows of death, you would not realize how special and sacredlife is. This idea is brought up and highlighted by Burkert in his article. He goes a bit further however to say that in order to keep this recognition going, sacrifice became a ritual. To mortalize and organize social structures, sacrifice became vital. He also goes on to say that “the gruesome ‘evil’ at work in the ritual (of sacrifice) fulfills a function i.e. to preserve a social structure over the course of generations” (66).  This is where war came in to play originally. In order to keep social structures of tribes and various other groups in order and to reaffirm the morality of all included. Burkert goes on to say however that as time has progressed, war has been made messy and insignificant. He says that “Male society finds stability in confronting death, in defying it through a display of readiness to die, and in the ecstasy of survival” (67). Men are afraid to die and so they must prove to themselves that they are capable of overcoming it, beating it, and living on. War is ritual, sacrifice is ritual and they both lead to the recognition of the sacredness of life. Bringing this in to virtual reality and video games, this goes hand in hand with what Girard states about projecting our sacrificial violent needs onto something/someone else. Video games allow people to prove to themselves that they can defy the odds. It lets them repeat the action of death to solidify the speciality of life, and it sets in place (although not necessarily real) social structure that when they (the player) is victorious, is the elite.

Politics today is a very sensitive/hot/debated topic in today’s society. Everyone has an opinion about how people should lead, what they shouldn’t do, what they should do to improve, why they should never have been given the title in the first place, etc. etc. The way that Ian Bogost opened up this chapter on political processes brings everyone in the United States into a mind-frame of remembrance, sadness, and criticism of the government. While I do think it is important to highlight and recall those instances, I feel that Bogost used them in a disrespectful way and to his advantage, to get readers angry with the government as they started to read his ideas of politics in games and entertainment. While I do think that Bogost makes a vital point, and I do agree that a majority of these political entertainment dull down the complexities of the structure, I don’t know that I love how he went about arguing it. But aside from that, in support of his idea I do agree it is bad to simplify them because they are complex issues and should be recognized as such. Dulling them down or making them purely entertainment will make them seem less important and could effect the perception that an individual playing that games has on the issues. This is extremely important to notice esp. for the upcoming generations who are surrounded by video games and other various forms of entertainment that depict political figures and ideas in cartoon-ic ways. We want to keep generations after us interested and concerned in the workings of their government and their world, not laughing at them and brushing them aside.