Jacob’s Post: Advocacy and Reality

The gaming industry and gaming in general has grown in size and popularity and has a large reach of influence in politics and ethic or morals. This reality is why organizations like the United Nations are approaching video gaming with an academic approach, wishing to incorporate video games into educational programs that can offer differing perspectives where most people wouldn’t have the opportunity to have. Video games decades ago may have had simpler sets of rules — Tetris, Pacman etc. — you have one objective and there’s only a small handful of ways to get there. Now video games are so complex, the game will have an end goal, however with so many side quests and secondary missions and characters sprinkled in its easy to get lost along the way. The recurring theme with these new additions is to offer the player choice in situations that involve conflict. No choice is ever so black and white, there are only different shades of grey, some choices you make will leave you with very little satisfaction and a sense of doubt whether you actually made the right choice. These perspectives on what consequences come about given certain actions, or choices made offer a different perspective that most don’t have in their normal life outside the confines of virtual characters. Take 1979
Revolution: Black Friday, the example used in by Colin Campbell article, “Here’s why the UN is getting interested in video games, or Rachel Ament’s, Screen Saviors: Can Activism-Focused Games Change Our Behavior?” a game where the protagonist is a photographer in the midst of the Iranian Revolution and the player must side with family or friends with differing political opinions and traverse the historical warped in violence. Unlike other games where fictional conflicts, war, and characters are conjured up this game offers the perspective of someone who has a personal stake in an event that actually took place decades ago. We often forget there in many games fictional factions, or parodies of current world events or countries are used in
place to avoid public outcry but still emulate world events, and usually exaggerate them. Since games are providing even more opportunities for players to influence the outcome of their games, which typically bear certain consequences regardless of what choice is made, this offers an easy to create gaming scenario that can teach people the effects of their actions and how
important different viewpoints are in the grand scheme of things. Video games in many cases need a backstory or environment to be set in, and what better and easier stage to use than the one we are all familiar with, our very own reality.