Thursday, April 17, 2014

Video games

I’m not a huge video game player but I do enjoy a few games and I have family members that play a lot of video games. The idea that playing video games can help solve world problems was a new and interesting idea for me; I was of the opinion that too much video games was a negative thing and not to mention, in my opinion, a waste of time. As to McGonigal’s claim that video games can give us a sense of accomplishment, I would say that yes it can, but it a false sense of accomplishment. Say you just finished a really hard game that you have been playing forever, yes you just accomplished something that was difficult, but what did you really do? Defeating a hard game isn’t really that big of an accomplishment, you did something exciting in a virtual world that doesn’t affect anybody but you. So I don’t really agree with her that playing video games can help solve world problems. Yes finishing a game gives you some kind of sense of accomplishment but is it going to inspire you to go out and solve a world problem to feel that sense of accomplishment again, or is it going to inspire you to pick out another game and get another fix of your virtual sense of accomplishment? I think that the people who will solve world problems are the people who get their sense of accomplishment from things in the real world, not the virtual world.

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