{"id":133,"date":"2013-03-07T15:18:31","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T23:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/?p=133"},"modified":"2013-03-07T15:18:31","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T23:18:31","slug":"the-reality-of-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/2013\/03\/07\/the-reality-of-video-games\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reality of Video Games"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MLB-12-The-Show_4\"<\/a>

Picture of the video game MLB 12 The Show. Source: terminalgamer.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Video games today are so life-like, you\u2019d think they were real.\u00a0 My younger brother has been playing video games for many years now.\u00a0 We had a Nintendo, a GameCube, and now a PS3.\u00a0 Over the years, I have played along side him and watched him play his video games, like Super Smash Bros<\/i>., NCAA Football<\/i>, and NBA Live<\/i>. But it wasn\u2019t until recently that I realized how realistic these games could be.\u00a0 One afternoon, I walked into the living room and saw that my brother was watching a baseball game. It was the Giants versus the Cardinals.\u00a0 Curious about how the game was going, I asked him what the score was.\u00a0 Without looking away from the screen, he told me that he was winning.\u00a0 I was a little confused, until I realized that the player up to bat had our last name on his jersey.\u00a0 And that the announcer was announcing that Joey Pecoraro was up to bat next, giving statistics about his recent games. This was not the real baseball game that I thought it was; it was a game called MLB 12 The Show<\/i>.<\/p>\n

From the movement and personalization of the characters, the digital scenery in the background, and the hundreds of different ways a player controls the game, recent technology has allowed video games to be so complex and so realistic.\u00a0 Ian Bogost<\/a> of the Georgia Institute of Technology discusses that video games can teach us various things about life through their rhetorical elements in his publication, The Rhetoric of Video Games<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 As he states,<\/p>\n

Video games have the power to make arguments, to persuade, to express ideas.\u00a0 But they do not do so inevitably.\u00a0 As we evolve our relationship with video games. one of the most important steps we can take is to learn to play the critically, to suss out the meaning they carry, both on and under the surface.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bogost implies that yes, video games do represent real life \u2013 he uses an example of his son\u2019s video game that teaches him how to budget his money, creating awareness of how the real world works.\u00a0 Video games can give us examples of what the real life is like, as they take inspiration from real life as well.\u00a0 However, it is up to us to determine how to interpret these lessons from video games. We have to take the content and see for ourselves how it relates to the real world<\/p>\n

This is an important distinction: video games are not just stages that facilitate cultural, scial, or political pratices; they are also media where cultural values themselves can be represented \u2013 for critique, satire, education, or commentary.\u00a0 When understood in this way, we can learn to read games as deliberate expressions of particular perspectives.\u00a0 In other words, video games make claims about the world, which players can understand, evaluate, and deliberate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Kids playing video games. Source: Evidencebasedliving.com<\/p><\/div>\n

This circles back to my previous example.\u00a0 While this baseball game is not exactly educational, it does present some perspectives about real life. It gives every young athlete out there an opportunity to put themselves in the shoes of a baseball player \u2013 further instilling the ideas of teamwork and decision-making. This game is relatively harmless.\u00a0 However, there are other games available for adolescents to play that promote violence and destruction. These games, like Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil, Halo,<\/i> and more, are also very realistic, portraying what the players might believe to be real life, warping the ideas and minds of the young players. Some people think that these games are linked to so many of the school shootings and violence that has recently occurred in our country.\u00a0 The players of these video games take the content in these games for reality and cannot distinguish between the two, then thinking that this behavior is acceptable. On the other hand, some people believe that these games are just a release of aggression and anger in kids, and it is better to have them take out that frustration on the screen rather than in real life.<\/p>\n

I think that the real question here is whether or not we should have video games with content that is so graphic and realistic available to young players. If we apply what Bogost says to this situation, we could see that video games do have the rhetorical ability to influence us, including these violent and harmful games.\u00a0 If a player cannot distinguish between reality and content specific to video games, should they be playing these persuasive games at all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Video games today are so life-like, you\u2019d think they were real.\u00a0 My younger brother has been playing video games for many years now.\u00a0 We had a Nintendo, a GameCube, and now a PS3.\u00a0 Over the years, I have played along … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":378,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","kk_blocks_editor_width":"","_kiokenblocks_attr":"","_kiokenblocks_dimensions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"gutentor_comment":2,"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"anapecoraro","author_link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/author\/anapecoraro\/"},"qubely_comment":2,"qubely_category":"Uncategorized<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Video games today are so life-like, you\u2019d think they were real.\u00a0 My younger brother has been playing video games for many years now.\u00a0 We had a Nintendo, a GameCube, and now a PS3.\u00a0 Over the years, I have played along … Continue reading →","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/378"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/anapecoraro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}