Chapter 12 of Reality is Broken speaks about missions impossible. Specifically, Jane begins speaking about epic wins and the strive for gamers to achieve them. She compares and epic win in a virtual world to an epic win in real life an came to the conclusion that an epic win in a virtual world is much more attainable because in real life we are too afraid to take chances. She then goes on to say that for every individual, an epic win means something slightly different. For one person an epic win may be the visual appeal of a particular virtual world. However another person may not relate to an epic win until they have a 10:1 kill death ratio in CoD. Jane then goes on to discuss how she believes we can bring these epic wins into real life; she begins talking about the Extraordinarines, a mobile phone app. This is a game that employs its users to create a map of all available defibrillators. While this doesn’t sound fun on its own, this game has taken many queues from Hollywood games such as CoD or WoW. Much like in WoW this game takes a simple task and makes it sound important, in this case, the game makes you believe that you are saving lives as you play. The game makes you believe that every time you track down one of these defibrillators that you have just saved a persons real life, quite the epic win. Although I do agree with her about bringing epic wins into real life, outside of the medical and scientific fields it would be quite hard to make people fell as if what they were doing matter. It seems that with binging an epic win into the real world it strongly relies on the narrative of the “quest”. We are doing little more then tricking ourselves into thinking we are doing something more then we actually are. What happens when we see someone in need in real life, a burning building an elderly person being robbed, would we then simply check our mobile devices to see if this “quest” is “active” or do we get up and do something about it. Although I have no problem with what Jane is trying to do, I believe that her methods make us as a society far too reliant on technology, that’s not to say that we aren’t already, but what she is imposing is to blur the line between what is real and what is fake, but it leads to the question of if we achieve this how will we know what is real and what isn’t?
Chapter 13 of Reality is Broken talks about collaboration super powers. As Jane puts it we all have the super power of collaboration because by the time we hit 21 we spend 10 thousand hours playing and collaborating in video games. While I do agree that I have spent this much time, if not more playing video games, I do not believe that they have all had me collaborating with one another. In fact for most of my life I have been playing games where the sole objective was to level up my own character, look out for myself, and not for anyone else. So in that respect I believe that Mc Gonnigal is wrong. Also she believes that every game is teaching you the exact same skill set for that 10 thousand hours you have been playing. This is couldn’t be further from the truth; different games and specifically different genres will end up teaching you different things. While a FPS may tech you how to work on a team and collaborate with one another an RPG doesn’t do any of that. In an RPG you are strictly looking out for your own characters self-interest. There are also games that fall neatly into the middle ground, such as a RTS game. It can put you in a position where you must look out for your self or it could put you in a position where you have to work well with your team, its really up to how you want to play the game. The only problem that I seem to be facing in this chapter is that Jane is speaking far too broadly, none of her points are narrowed or focused in on any one particular genre or game. How can you expect to paint all of these games with the same brush when it is so obvious that they each have something very deferent and very unique to offer?
No comments:
Post a Comment