Week 12 - Video Games, Narrative, Modality, and Literacy

I'm one of those people who doesn't play video games, as I confessed in class. However, I found Gee's support of games as active learning, problem solving and even good for the soul believable and comforting. I do want to play video games, I do.

I really liked the whole layout, design and use of color in the game lab. It was inviting and fun. I liked the way there were separate corners where players could be isolated from other parts of the room.

Being a complete novice as a player, yet knowledgeable because my son was so into video games until he left for the Navy, I wanted to first observe how a game was played before deciding to try it. I played the Wii cooking game. This would have been a fun game to play with my 3-year-old granddaughter. I watched while Melissa and Ricci played the game with the bongos and gorillas. Afterwards Ricci exclaimed, "That was fun!" I also watched while others played Guitar Hero.

Finally I tried the Sim tutorial. My character got really tired of waiting for me to learn to use the controls and he sighed endlessly - poor thing. He had the same name as my son who likes the games so much. I kept imagining it was him dying of boredom while I got orientated. So enough of Sim, I moved on.

Finally, I went back to the separate room on the east side of the game room where I had observed earlier. I watched while Moushumi was winning BoomBox (I think that's the name). I was offered a controller, so I played the next round with Moushumi and Janice. Moushumi was ahead when I managed to knock down a whole bunch of blocks, putting me in the lead. After that they couldn't catch up and I won. That felt really great. We moved on to the next level. Moushumi, who played with such steely determination, got ahead in score and won. I really wanted a rematch but we were out of time.

I think that most of the 36 game principles applied to role playing games or games of strategy. But I didn't see anything there about competitiveness. That was the one thing that finally hooked me into actually really wanting to play a video game. The desire to win!

While I've never been hooked on video games, I did enjoy other games, especially board games and card games as a kid and a grown-up. And it was a desire to win that always made me competitive. I think there's still a streak of that in me! But next time, I do want to try a strategy or role playing game.