The Video Game Talk.

A couple of classes ago, we talked about how video games could potentially "save the world" as the Jane McGonigal, the author of the assigned article, put it. The argument was that the development of creativity and determination in those that play video games, along with the teamwork skills they develop in multi-player games, will give the next generation the skills they need to solve the worlds future and current problems. Although this is a nice thought, and makes sense on paper, there are a few fallacies that I would like to point out.

The first thing I would like to point out is the TED talk of her that we watched in class. It was discussed a little bit afterward that she seemed to be only talking about one type, or genre, of game, that being the MMORPG (Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games) genre. Examples of games in this genre would be World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. I happened to notice that she not only stuck to that genre, but really only talked about one game throughout the entire talk, World of Warcraft (WoW). While there's no doubting WoW's success and popularity, it's ridiculous to talk about it and assume that what applies in WoW applies in every single other game in existence.

When you just look at World of Warcraft, her ideas are really on point. However, I can take almost all of her points and throw them out the window, simply by replacing World of Warcraft with Snake. Almost everybody knows of the game Snake. If not, you can figure it out with a simple Google search. There is no multi-player option that requires any sort of teamwork, and there's no real amount of creativity required to play it. You simply move a line around, and try not to hit the walls or yourself whilst collecting dots that appear on the screen.

There are countless other games that one could find contradictions in Jane's argument. The whole idea becomes very weak when she's only using one game to run on.

Now I'm not saying that there isn't some truth in her idea, and I'm certainly not downing video games at all. All I'm saying is that video games alone are not going to be the cure-all ingredient for the worlds problems. They might help a bit, but they're only one factor in a plethora of all the other hobbies out there.