An article written by Dr. Ian Bogost called Rhetoric of Video Games, discusses the significance of gaming media. Dr. Bogost attended the University of Southern California where he received his undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature and Philosophy. He then went on to get his masters and Ph.D in Comparative Literature from UCLA. According to his personal blog, since school Bogost has accomplished many things in his career from the creation of video games including Cow Clicker and A Slow Year as well as a collection of other games, to co-writing the following pieces, “Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,Newsgames: Journalism at Play, How To Do Things with Videogames,Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10.” Dr. Ian Bogost is a very successful designer and media philosopher.
Dr. Ian Bogost uses a video game called Animal Crossing in his article. The game features many different aspects of the real world which Dr. Bogost believes to help train gamers for real life situations.
Animal Crossing is a game about everyday life in a small town. It is a game about customizing and caring for an environment. It is a game about making friends and collecting insects. But Animal Crossing is also a game about long-term debt. It is a game about the repetition of mundane work necessary to support contemporary material property ideals. It is a game about the bittersweet consequences of acquiring goods and keeping up with the Joneses.
Players of the game are faced with paying their mortgages and working in various stores as well as making social connections with other gamers. So does facing these real world situations on the computer screen help in the actual real world? According to Dr. Bogost this is exactly what is going on.
Animal Crossing has created their own community called ACC. This group is an outlet for gamers to discuss the game and they have even set up an adoption system where a veteran of the game can help a new member get started. Animal Crossing has gone beyond just the game. According to Dr. Bogost “the values of a video game community like ACC exist outside the game.” This game has expanded past just the game and created a whole community. Dr. Bogost says,
Video games are not just stages that facilitate cultural, social, or political practices; they are also media where cultural values themselves can be represented — for critique, satire, education, or commentary…In other words, video games make claims about the world, which players can understand, evaluate, and deliberate.
The tie that Dr. Bogost makes between video games and the real world is valid in the way that he goes on to describe it in the rest of the article. Experiencing situations, such as being in debt, on a computer screen could help educate gamers before they are faced with the situation in real life. This being said, I don’t necessarily agree. Before video games existed humanity somehow managed to deal with everyday situations like paying the mortgage. While video games have the ability to teach you things, there are many other sources from which this information could be learned. Personal experience has led me to have a different outlook on video games.
As a kid I was a Sims enthusiast which is a game where you make your own family and basically control their lives; telling them to go to work, to eat, go to the bathroom and take a shower. People die and have babies, you have to pay bills and there are different salaries for every job. Its real life in computer game form. I played this religiously over many years and I can’t say that it taught me very much or that I took aspects of the game into the real world. I understand Dr. Bogost’s sentiment behind this idea but from personal experience I don’t think that video games should or do help prepare people for real life situations. I know there are people out there that disagree with me, Dr. Bogost being one of them, but a big part of my disagreement is that I don’t want to live in a world where our youth is learning real life experiences through a video game. Technology is advancing every second but there are some things that need to be learned through actually experiencing them in real life.
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