Tom’s Second Blog Post!!!
After looking into the article Video Games Are Better Without Characters, I gained a better understanding of why video games can help benefit and educate game players in an entertaining way. In this article Ian Bogost uses the video game SimCity and other Sims games to explain why video games are better without characters. Will Wright is the creator of the game SimCity. As mentioned in the article this game was a “classic city-building game”, giving the game players an empty map to start building their own city with the “game’s brittle, indirect tools” (Bogost, 2015).
I believe that this game can be extremely educational for all ages because it introduces different values that could be more fun to learn through video games. Bogost mentions, “SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth and other factors” (Bogost, 2015). These are all factors that I think would be more interesting to learn through video games. This game helps us better understand the relationships that help make a city run, succeed, and decay. Bogost explains, “this was a radical way of thinking about video games: as non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves” (Bogost,2015). I believe that’s what life is all about, to learn about systems and get involved with organizations that introduce aspects that about bigger than ourselves.
Games like SimCity are most definitely less popular than games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and sports games. All of these games listed usually have one singular character. “Big, burly, furrow-browed men with a grudge” (Bogost, 2015). In the article there is a survey mentioned that less than 40 percent of high-school boys prefer playing as a male character, while 60 percent of girls prefer playing as a female character. With one given character such as a big, burly and furrow-browed man it can make a game less appealing and can result in someone not to enjoy or buy the game. A point that liked in particular is “If we must have characters in games, let’s do make them represent the diversity of their players and of our society” (Bogost, 2015).
Lastly I would like to talk about how these games evolved into the game Sims which was released in the early 2000’s. The game Sims is a game where you have a character and you can control your character on a “moment-to-moment basis, directing them to the bathroom or the television, gardening at the bottom of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” (Bogost, 2015). I can remember my sister always on the computer playing this game, she would always talk about her “Sims family” and how she could take care of them or how she would repair or even buy a new house. I believe she was emotionally attracted to her Sims family and logged continues hours on our computer to make sure her “family” was doing well.
To conclude I believe that games such as SimCity can open our minds to different aspects of life that could be more interesting to learn from a video game such as: land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth and other factors. The video game Sims, which evolved from SimCity can also help game players learn different values and can lead introduce them to different emotional connections through there “Sims family”. All in all, both of these games introduces game players to values that are bigger than themselves and I believe that’s what life is all about.
