If video games teach us to salute, what about SL?
By Adam Reuters
An article in the Utne Reader magazine by New York Times columnist Chris Suellentrop explores why video games are making kids smarter, and possibly more obedient.
Drawing from game designers like Raph Koster and Will Wright, and from Stephen Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good For You,” Suellentrop explores how the best games enhance spatial organization and problem solving, walking the fine line between frustration and pleasure as they test players’ abilities. Or as Atari founder Nolan Bushnell put it: “The way to have an interesting life is to stay on the steep part of the learning curve” — a line that Suellentrop tags as “a statement that probably best distills the gamer ethos.”
But even if violent games a la Grand Theft Auto aren’t “murder simulators” as some critics allege, there may still be a fly in the ointment: That the constrained rules and goals of video games may create a generation which is content to play by the rules rather than question them, jumping through each hoop, beating each level boss and (aside from a few cheat codes) doing what they’re told. Suellentrop writes:
Whether you find the content of video games inoffensive or grotesque, their structure teaches players that the best course of action is always to accept the system and work to succeed within it. “Games do not permit innovation,” Koster writes. “They present a pattern. Innovating out of a pattern is by definition outside the magic circle.” …
Our video-game brains, trained on success machines, may be undergoing a Mr. Universe workout, one that leaves us stronger but less flexible. So don’t worry that video games are teaching us to be killers. Worry instead that they’re teaching us to salute.
So where do virtual worlds like Second Life enter into the equation? The article mentions that there is debate about whether Second Life and its ilk even qualify as games because they do not offer competitions or quests (although there are certainly games within the Second Life platform such as Tringo and the recently announced promotion for “Smokin’ Aces”).
Second Life offers no prescribed path or activity for its users (often to the chagrin of newbies who wonder, “I’m here, but now what do I do?”). For that very reason it seems to me that it doesn’t fall into the “teaching to salute” pattern described by Suellentrop.
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