Scarlet I's List: Games-based Learning

• “Video games are something you do, something you do to your head, a world you enter, and to a certain extent, they are something you ‘become’
• When we watched “The Matrix”, mirrors and reflection were symbols which appeared continuously throughout the movie. When broached from a Lacanian point of view, Neo’s encounters with seeing his reflection in the mirror, doorknob, and spoon are indicative of him really seeing himself for the first time. Like a child, he is coming into the knowledge that he is an autonomous being which is separate from his mother.
• The “construct” of the Matrix is said to be a “loading program which can make anything happen”; it gives us a “residual self-image, or a digital projection of oneself”. Is this not what video games do for us?
• As Turkle states, “Involvement with simulated worlds affects relationships with the real one”
• In doing so, this changes how we actually come to view ourselves as individuals in the real world
• Similarly, video games allow us to wall the world out. However, we have to return to that world. When we do, we return as altered beings, changed by our interaction with the machine. Turkle says, “Television is something you watch. Video games are something you do to your head, a world that you enter, and, to a certain extent, they are something you become
• when we penetrate the screen of a computer and “hack the code”, we come out of the experience with a changed perception of who we are and the world we live in.
• One aspect I found most interesting is her theory on how the virtual worlds and characters created in these video games has stimulated the mind of the children of today.
• The data and codes created by the designers of the computer games have taken the fictional magical worlds of 2D text and transformed them into digital 3D spaces, where a player can become the character and actually live out his story. Especially after computer games became more complex, with more customizable options for the character and his story, the player can literally move about in this separate world as he pleases, or so it seems.
• However, as the author explains, these scenarios all follow very conclusive rules that determine their outcome
• Yet, with all the rules set in place within these games their imagination is limited. When a child reads a book and is allowed to create their own world within their mind there are no limitations or rules to hold them back.
• Given that in the past, video games were often viewed as merely entertainment for little children—it is now clear to see that technology and aspects of reality, which in the past seemed irrelevant, are becoming much more influential within the present context of reality
• This may be because those little boys and girls who grew up with these video games are now using the same thoughts that went into the video game to produce much bigger theories and aspects of science based off of the rules and regulations surrounded by aspects of video game play. If this is so, then the future of humanity is directly linked to the current technologies that seem irrelevant to reality.
• Ian Bogost talkings about visual rheteric within his artle “Procedural Rhetoric”. He states that “One would be hard pressed to deny that advertisements, photographs, illustrations, and other optical phenomena have some effect on their viewers” (24). Video games obviously are appealing to their players on more than one level—huge corporations advertise within video games constantly and our children are directly affected by these images
• When I play video games against the computer and loose, I feel as though the computer has control over the game and that it made me intentionally loose. By reading the article it made me think that it was designed for that purpose, for the game to be very captivating so that when you lost on a level you would keep trying until you succeeded at it. Most people I know play games for fun and relaxation but it really is not. You get upset when you loose which causes you to get stressed. So why would anyone want to keep playing a video game that causes the things you are trying to get away from? “The holding power of video games, their almost hypnotic fascination, is computer holding power.”
• but at the same time losing a game is okay. In life, failure has serious consequences, within a game it is okay to fail. Also, the chances of you turning around a failure in a game is more likely than in real life, so in a way games are a place where you can escape the normal consequences of life to a place where you can take risks and not be as severely punished for them.

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