Skill set and knowledge are important

This week's lectures draw our attention to videogames and persuasive games. It becomes clear that for someone to say videogames cause violence and the society to rupture is flawed. The problem of early videogame researches was that they were not correctly done and were sponsored by institutions which have their own political agenda. The difference between representational violence and actual violence is important because a player who is skilled in killing and murdering in games does not necessary have the courage to carry a weapon. More importantly, videogames are designed to have winners and losers at the end of the gameplay and players have to kill in order to win. Context always matter as there are stories and narratives inside the game, which may influence what violence mean in videogames.

For games which have a procedural rhetoric, I come to think that the player must also have that skill level or intelligence to comprehend what the games are wanting to say. Players themselves have to figure out how the underlying system works. In SimCity for example, the player has to figure out how the taxation system works and link it back to the actual world. Similarly in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, eating might just be another game element that the player has to be concerned with. It requires a further level of thinking to link this element to real world social concerns, the relationship between low income and high fat fast food, poverty and hard work, etc. It also highly relates to how these games are designed or framed in order for the players to explore the rhetoric.

At times these representations in persuasive games might be over-exaggerated and mono-focused for the players to see the effects of the decision-making during gameplay. How many times did I play Monopoly and said to myself this is not how the society and capitalism works right? Similarly the Shadow Hearts game mentioned by Maddi might have taught certain aspects of Japanese culture. However, people have to be extremely cautious in dealing with the educational content in games, particularly what is real and what is unreal, and whether there are misrepresentations.