The marketplace of video games is a creative update to Mill's marketplace of ideas. I am intrigued.
I have my doubts about truth's ability to win in the end and about economic explinations of teleology. This for another time...
My doubts do not mean that certain subject matter should be inherently off limits for a game. Just as you can use words to discuss any subject in a meaningful way, you can use the gaming medium as well. I just think the game developer has a moral obligation to structure her game as carefully as the moral rhetorician must choose her words.
One of the most revealing conversations about games and the way in which youth are using them was a casual conversation started at a holiday dinner table. I have long been an advocate of games in education so I kind of asked my little relatives if they used games in education , in school." No", came the answer we don't get to use the computers very much. This is in Fairfax County , reported to be one of the most wired school systems in Virginia.
I asked because i noted that my nephew was holding a game theory book, and beside him was a game and the explanation or roadmap or whatever the directory is for playing it. I can't remember the game, but he was studying it religiously. So I asked how many games did they have. I think they had that I could see about $5000 worth of games.. not a lot of books, but some, not a lot of other educational assets that I could tell. The niece piped up. Oh , we have a lot more games that that but we share and in that way we have more games. She went on to let me know that they owned a lot more games than I could see. So my attention was riveted on this conversation.
The other adults around the table gave a few passing nods to the conversation, and then the nephew brought the games upstair to demo.
Of course we could not play all the games, but it was interesting to know how much the adults in the home did not know about the games the children were playin g or of the net worth.
The nephew is supposed to be not the best student , but in the neighborhood there were people who sought him out because he was a good player. I was thinking about the ways in which we limit education because I sometimes work with the National Center for SuperComputing on visualization and modeling.
There are links at www.eot.org for some projects and methodologies that are not games, but that are visual .
Seems a shame that a public that loves Shrek and all of the animated games does not take advantage of the learning resource, of any kind that seem to let students learn in different ways.
Bonnie Bracey
Student at SC2005 and participant in
Visualization and Modeling from Shodor.org
I agree with Frasca. That is why this last year I have been focusing on developing computer games and simulations concerning the Shoah.
One such effort deals with one of the central questions concerning this event: why the United States did not do more to stop it. Just this week former Senator McGovern expressed regret that the United States never bombed Auschwitz. I am working on a flight simulation that would allow people to ask the question: What it would have been like if we had done this. How would it have worked? Its one thing to think about it in the abstract but how about in the real or as real as we can make it. Yesterday marked 60 years since the liberation of this death camp. The issues this place and what was done there are still with us and I believe just as with other media games and simulations should be used to wrestle with them. We must however do our best to avoid being burned. This is too important a subject with too many powerful consequences for people to do otherwise.
Michael Rand
Educational Software developer.
Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
