Gaming

Let me preface this blog post by saying I have never played video games such as World of Warcraft, or Grand Theft Auto, and maybe it is just because I am a girl, but I do not understand the appeal of similar video games.  It seems hard to grasp the fact that people spend millions of hours every week playing them collectively.   Let me be clear – I don’t want to “bash” video games or insult the people who play them.  To this day my favorite Christmas present I probably ever got as a kid was my Nintendo 64.  I absolutely loved it, and still get excited when I have a chance to dust it off every once in a while and play it again, but just like so many other things in my life, I outgrew it.  Maybe today’s gaming systems are more complicated or technologically advanced, promoting more interaction for adults and thus creating the culture of gamers we have today, but my own experience has not been this way.

In our article for today, the author talked about how we actually need to increase video game usage because it promotes better critical thinking skills and gives us confidence and the ability to better solve large real world problems.  Maybe the author was not talking about older gaming systems like Nintendo 64, but all those games did were make me anxious.  As an 8 or 9 year old girl, I thought the games were fun, but as soon as I got to a level where I had to compete or race or beat some time, I panicked.  I would usually volunteer my dad to “help” me aka play that level for me.  If anything, I believe that my experiences playing those games allowed my dad and me to bond and become closer because we could talk about the game or experienced the stress together, but I have a hard time believing that they helped me with anything other than wasting time or procrastinating.

Like I said, a number of factors could contribute to this:  it could be because my experience playing video games as a girl, or the fact that I have never played on a gaming system other than Nintendo 64, or even that my biggest “gaming” period ended before I was even 10 years old, but either way, I cannot justify video games as a legitimate learning tool.