Dr. Ian Bogost, a proponent of educational gaming

This week’s reading was an article by Dr. Ian Bogost, an award-winning designer and media philosopher who specializes in gaming media. Bogost earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and his Ph.D in Comparative Literature from UCLA. According to his personal website, Bogost is currently a Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and also a founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC. He has published several books on the subject of video gaming, including Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, and Newsgames: Journalism at Play.  In his work, he tends to view video games as an “expressive medium” and is particularly interested in gaming in the spheres of art and politics.

Animal Crossing teaches players real world financial concepts

In his article, “The Rhetoric of Video Games,” Bogost discusses how the popular Nintendo video game Animal Crossing possesses educational merit. Like many seemingly entertainment-only games, Animal Crossing is not just for playing–rather, it is for learning as well. Through certain tasks, such as fishing, players can earn money with which they can purchase items and increase the size of their home. However, players also have a third spending option: to put their earned money towards paying off their house. This introduces the principle of debt into the equation. Just like in “the real world,” the game isn’t all about making money to buy the things you want. There is an added element of responsibility for more basic necessities (i.e., a house). Animal Crossing and similar video games are able to plant this idea into the impressionable minds of their young players, who subconsciously learn the lesson of longterm debt merely by playing a game. Bogost discusses other ways in which the game parallels real life: the character of Tom Nook, a real estate tycoon, is “a condensation of the corporate bourgeoisie,” and players feel the pressure to keep up with the growing material goods of their neighbors. Bogost makes the important claim that:

[…] 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. When understood in this way, we can learn to read games as deliberate expressions of particular perspectives. In other words, video games make claims about the world, which players can understand, evaluate, and deliberate. Game developers can learn to create games that make deliberate expressions about the world. Players can learn to read and critique these models, deliberating the implications of such claims. Teachers can learn to help students address real-world issues by playing and critiquing the video games they play. And educators can also help students imagine and design games based on their own opinions of the world. When games are used in this fashion, they can become part of a whole range of subjects.

Bogost’s article calls for a reevaluation of an entire medium. In our society, I think video games are often brushed off as merely a source of entertainment for teenage boys. People tend to lob genres of video games together and label the entire category as violent or intellectually irrelevant. However, many video games do have educational value. There is more to video gaming than shooting characters in a jungle or racing cars down a track. Games like Animal Crossing offer a chance to experience real-world problems/situations and experiment with varying solutions.

Gaming: time-consuming, addictive, educational?

I found this week’s article to be highly relevant to a recent discussion in my Communication and Media Studies course. Just yesterday, my class engaged in a debate about the legitimacy and appropriateness of popular video games in society. Interestingly enough, our conversation centered around games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Madden sports games. Many of these games are violent, while others contain profanity, aggressive behavior, and offensive/explicit background music. However, what makes all of them attractive and so successful is their entertainment value. Players don’t buy these games to learn a lesson about the real world. Rather, they purchase them for their recreational quality. Everyone has their own way of relaxing during their free time, and I don’t find issue with that. However, what my class was concerned with was the ability video games have to withdraw players from the real world. Many can become addictive, and players often spend hours at a time sitting in front of their television screens or computer monitors playing these games. At the end of our discussion, our class deemed video gaming as a general unproductive activity due to their ability to absorb so much of a player’s time and energy.

However, after reading Bogost’s article, I see a whole new side to the argument that went unmentioned in my communications course. Not all video games are purely recreational. Rather, many of them contain important and valuable life lessons, whether their players realize it or not. It’s easy to get lost in the game, but when educational messages are being transmitted (even subconsciously), this could turn out to be not such a bad thing.