Ryan McConkey

Background

About Ryan McConkey

My ultimate objective is to become a high school U.S. History teacher. I’m interested in focusing on a career in education. As a history major in college, I was required to perform extensive research to compose noteworthy research papers that provided a clear and accurate representation of history. My college degree in history required me to do extensive research on varies different topics. It was important to fully understand the ideas of the past through different primary and secondary sources. This required myself to spend a lot of time doing research on the different websites and libraries to uncover the truth instead opinion on a certain subjects. For my senior seminar paper, I wrote about the rise of Nationalism and Xenophobia in American video games after the events of September 11th. With this research paper, I need to have a basic understanding of the video game history, so I decided to go to an arcade and play the old time games like Pacman and Asteroids, to get the basic understanding of the video games before my lifetime. Then I started working my way up through the generations of video games by either playing or finding playthroughs of the most popular or bestselling games of each system to see change in video games over time. This was to see the difference in how different ethnic groups were represented in video games through the generations. Then I viewed in the library to see if anything was written about this subject. Even though nothing was, I kept looking to see if there was a book or article that was written that was closely related.