Susan Brownell’s book Training the Body for China I think gives an extreme form of the growing nationalism around organized sports. People in China, at least from what she said, seem to care a lot more about beating international rivals, specifically Japan, and find a lot more satisfaction in victory than other countries seem to. Of course Japan has a strange place in the minds of Chinese peoples because of the countries actions during 30’s and early 40’s, but I don’t feel like that is enough of a reason for the growing importance that sports has at the national level.

Looking at the United States, the importance of representing the country via international sport is still important to some people, but it isn’t anywhere near as important. Instead interest seems to spike around events like the Olympics and maybe, only recently, the Fifa World cup.

I feel like most countries are similar to the United States in terms the importance of international sports with few exceptions against rivals and such. I feel like it would be most interesting to examine any change in the importance of sports in China in the coming years and then try to trace why that change occurred because I am not sure whether or not China still find sports so important in the Future.

As for my Final Paper I really want to talk about the importance of a good narrative in video games, but i was also considering talking about the importance of characterization and not just characterization of the Main good character and the main bad character. If I talked about characterization then I would have a plethora of examples from Majora’s mask, the silent protagonist Samus from Metroid Prime and the many Fire Emblem games. Unfortunately I don’t know where I would find any information about either topic in the reading that we’ve done and the MSU library search results for Characterization and Video Games gave me this as the first response “Unpopular, Overweight, and Socially Inept: Reconsidering the Stereotype of Online Gamers.” so any help in finding places to get more information would be great if I can even research this stuff.