Games: An Expanding Industry

While there are no shortages of articles or stories that sensationalize video games as a destructive force, many seem to overlook the benefits gaming has on our culture and society as a whole.

Sure violence, sex, and drugs are all pervasive elements and themes in several games like Grand Theft Auto IV, but not all games are built for these mature (looking at you, angry reporters and parents) audiences.

In fact, like many entertainment sources, such as movies and films, video games have expanded beyond the boundaries of pure and simple entertainment, making it even more likely for games to be widely used by the public in the near future. Video games, however, have one trait that makes it potentially more useful and far superior to other tools like film.

Interaction.

At best, films and movies can cause an attentive viewer to think and critically analyze whatever they’re watching. Not everyone is an attentive viewer though.

The Holy Grail equivalent for education would be something that can make education fun. The youth are a generally an easily distracted group, and education is not widely seen as a “fun” activity. Now video games, in the educational sense, are unlikely to reverse this trend any time soon - especially with most students exposed to more exciting titles.

What video games can do though, is grab and maintain an audience’s attention by keeping them engaged in a subject matter, which is difficult to say with educational videos that cause many to doze off over an extended period of time.

In addition, technology has advanced to a point where games have become as physically engaging as well as mentally. This may not have much educational value, but the fitness value of this is highly praised.

Wii Fit has become the new quick and “hip” way to lose weight. By making exercise fun (if you call putting yourself in awkward positions fun), the game has easily supplanted the likes of Jenny Craig and Dan Marino amongst the moderately tech savvy people.

But while systems like the Wii are a great personal tool, what about the general public?

In the field of medicine, recovery is often as difficult as dealing with the affliction. Physical and mental rehabilitation programs stress making progress slowly – baby steps, people.

Amongst the elderly, a demographic that is clearly not within the target audience of game developers (note the lack of election poll games), the Wii has been used to prevent Alzheimer’s and dementia. Maintaining physical and mental activity has been shown to prevent or delay the brain from entering a degenerative state.

Additionally for surgeons, those that played video games are on average more efficient and precise during operations.

Above all though, games keep people focused, which is necessary in both fields of education and medicine. Every game has clearly defined goals that give clear projections of a player’s progress.

It is difficult to communicate the impact a good education may have on a student 10 years into the future. How can most high school or middle school students relate to something like that? To them 10 years is an eternity away.

The same goes for patients who seek to prevent future complications or those who need guidance through long and painstaking recovery processes.

In games the objectives are a lot more immediate and the results more defined. So, much like rehabilitation programs, educators need to look to slowly build on success rather than having students look at the big picture, such as a good college and a successful career.

Further, games offer an easy method of charting success. By simply progressing through a game, one is easily able to measure their performance. Video games are not bound to an abstract concept of grades that are often influenced by the teacher’s own rules and values.

However, the value of a human presence should never be undermined. There is an unmeasurable quality to human interaction. Although video games are great tools, they are limited to the developer’s concepts of reality. Therefore, it can never completely simulate a real life situation in an accurate manner.

As time passes, games are more likely to become fixtures in our culture than tools of human enrichment. Who knows? Maybe the image of gaming will gradually shift as its use becomes more widespread.