Persuasive Essay: Because Games Matter

Because Games Matter

My fascination with video games began when I was nine. I was a bored child who didn’t have much to do when I was not in school; going to the library wasn’t always an option because my family was often too busy to take me. Television and movies offered no refuge as I grew tired very quickly of reruns of shows and of movies that had little depth. Only in watching my cousin play video games on his small hand held gaming device was I consistently entertained. I thought that watching video games was a huge privilege, the thought of ever getting to play my own games was ridiculous to me; this thought was reinforced in me by my mother who saw video games as a waste of time and harmful to me. My mother, who had every single intention

We reluctantly obeyed her wishes, but would soon return to our gaming habits once our mother would ease on her restrictions as she was wont to after a period of time. It was this adversity to something I liked that turned my attention to the prejudice that video games faced. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, one of the earliest and most influential individuals in the field of media theory, “The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.”One important thing to keep in mind about video games is that they are the newest medium and that with that title video games are going to face a plethora of opposition, that is the nature of response to new media, it happened to film, it happened to theatrical plays, it even happened to books. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, argued against the consensus amongst the general population saying, “The most debased forms of mass

There has been an increasing movement of advocates that want to take this concept and apply it to video games, a gamification of education. All this would really entail is that formal institutes of education need to engage students through the use of games and design elements from these games. The theoretical simplicity of this goal does not mean that this goal should be dismissed as easy or not worthwhile. Schools are facing a crisis right now in which students are having trouble being engaged in school; a problem of engagement is not limited to schools alone, this is an issue that concerns society at large. As a society, too much time and effort has been placed on making recreational activities, our play, more engaging and fun that real life activities have been been growing with more and more negative connotation. Work is boring, frustrating, and it is something that should be left alone in favor of play. If refreshing your social media wall is more engaging than school or work, than something is wrong. The goal of gamification, and indeed all institutes of work and education, should be that all work should be play and that all play should enrich our lives. This should be the purpose behind