Silly Politicians, Games Are For Kids

I would've failed 7th grade history without Civ 2.

Oregon Trail taught me to never try to go across the United States, because me and my entire family will die horrible deaths.

I learned a ton about the Vietnam war from men of valor.

I actually learned a lot of German history from Gabriel Knight 2, most of the stuff that was in the game was actually true, except for the werewolf stuff.

I've had a long day at work -- time to ramble:

I've often felt this way about video games in the past, but one thing that worries me is if this argument might be highly supportive of the claim that gamers aren't fully capable of separating 'make-believe' from reality in some applications of gaming.

One of the strongest arguments against violence in video games is that people may not have a fundamental ability to differentiate 'playing' or 'fiction' from reality, especially those with under-developed minds, like children. For one, I know that as a child, certain dreams and make-believe concepts seemed much more real to me than they do now. However, a counter-argument is that even primates and many classes of animals have a fundamental understanding of when they are 'pretending' or 'playing'. For example, when cats play roughly with each other, they do not react as though they were truly threatened or trying to fight.

The way in which I would say the concept of learning from video games differs from pretending to play a video game, is that information is often taken for face value. People often know to be skeptical of assertions made in video games, for instance historical assertions made throughout a game's story (i.e. Command & Conquer: Red Alert), just as someone would be skeptical of an author's retelling of history (Dan Brown: DaVinci Code). Thus any learning that actually occurs through a video game would generally occur through a rational state of mind rather than an immersive state of mind in which someone was simply coerced to believe something.

However, I still don't know if this rule of thumb would apply to children and underdeveloped minds. A child often seems to be capable of accepting information from any source, rather than critiquing it for validity or trusting reliable sources.

So, my question is not so grandiose as to ask whether games can brainwash children. Yet, does the fact that children/people can be so involved in a game, such that it effects their beliefs and how they live their lives, lend credence to the possibility that an underdeveloped mind might accept the content of a game as fact and act on it without critique?

If I werent into racing video games I don't think I'd be as good of a driver as I am. Here me out...

I'm not great but I'm pretty damn good. I'm not saying it's because I think I'm a race car driver or that I learned anything FROM racing games, but because of racing games I became interested in the physics of vehicles and handling and so I educated myself.

I'm probably going to get in an accident today because I posted this.

I learned how to sail from Pirates

I learned how to kill a man from Hitman 2....

I learned how to masturbate from Dead or Alive. Does that count as educational?

Let's see:

* Lemonade stand burned decimal number calculations into my brain.
* Taipan helped me learn percentages and profit margins.
* Karateka taught me the basics of hand-eye coordination.
* Ultima I taught me the basics of resource management.
* Carmen Sandiego helped me with my geography skills.


And those are the older games. MUDs helped boost my typing speeds from 20-30 to 60-70 words-per-minute. FPSes helped boost my reaction time... not that I really use it for much, but it's helpful when I'm multitasking -- I can concentrate on two disparate tasks without having to slow down much. Computers pretty much rule my life, and I'm ok with that.

You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

Age of Empires 2 taught me more about history than any class i had taken up to that point...