Bowl America!

This weekend I took a 4 hour bus ride to the town where I grew up. Rockville, Maryland is about 15 miles northwest of Washington DC. It’s a historical suburb with a lot of great visual culture. Last night my parents and I decided it would be a fun night to go bowling at local bowling alley one town over. Bowl America is situated off of Interstate 270, one of the main highways in the area. I had spent many fun times at this particular alley growing up, for birthday parties, fun weekends, and as I became a teenager it was one of the places my friends and I would go to hang out socially. Talk about blast from the past.

This time I was going back to Bowl America with a different mind frame. Yes, I wanted to have a good time, but I was also interested in taking a closer look at what it was like to be a teenager in this particular environment.

It was a league night so there were not as many teenagers as I was expecting. Bowling is something that I would consider to be one of the United States favorite competitive sports. As soon as you walked in you could see large American flags hanging above the bowling lanes. Half the lanes were available for recreational use, and a short wait was required.

I noticed that what few teenagers that were there were in the arcade area. Taking a closer look I realized the only games that were being played were the games that had guns. One Alien game in particular caught my eye. It had large futuristic looking guns that would draw any spectator in, by far one of the brightest most inviting games in the room. Why are these games the ones that the young men are drawn to? Why not the race car games or the skeeball?

 Violence in video games is common in our society. The male dynamic is driven towards the fantasy of what it’s like to be a strong and unbeatable force, perhaps the military’s ideological influences. Teenagers are desensitized to this type of violence and spend their money competing against each other on who can shoot the most aliens. “You suck!” Was a common phrase spoken by the two teenage boys I was observing. My Saturday night was bombarded again by this all to familiar subject!