Varsity's Play

This essay was basically a reading on how video games have gradually assimilated into our lives and “have become a part of the cultural landscape.”

Now, I must admit I am not a very big video game player. Sure, I play the traditional Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Wii Sports, etc. but I have never felt the desire to take the time to play a game on my computer or a console. So in this respect, much of the things Turkle mentions are new to me.

In the second section “The Myth of the ‘Mindless’ Addiction, Turkle compared video games and television. Not having played very many video games, I too thought they were very similar until she argued against that option. “Television is something you watch. Video games are something you do, something you do to your head, a world that you enter, and, to a certain extent, they are something you ‘become.’” She also says “…Video games are interactive computer micro worlds.” However, being very familiar with TV and movies I have to argue with her on a couple of her points. When Turkle says that video games are “something you do to your head, a world that you enter”, I have to argue that television and cinema can also have this effect. Why do you think people become frightened at scary movies? Because in their minds they are right beside the main character who is walking into the pitch black basement. While movies and shows on television aren’t interactive like video games, they still can allow a person to be in another world.

Turkle mentions several benefits of video games throughout the essay. “There is learning how to learn” (recursion!), while a player generalizes the strategies of a game after the game is mastered (which takes deciphering the logic, understanding the game designer’s intent, etc.) The patterns you pick up have to be more then memorized for this to happen, and Turkle says “…in a way it is beyond thinking.” Another benefit is “The video world knows no such bounds.” This reminded me of Lucasfilm’s Habitat because that world also did not have constraints such as the real world has. People can feel confident and powerful, relaxed and concentrated, or competitive and driven just by playing a video game. These may be some of the best feelings a human can have but some are unable to find them in the real world. Video games have now given these people that pleasure.

There are negative sides to video games however. Like the reader sees in the story of Jarish, he feels cut off from the real world because most of his time is spent in the computerized world. I wrote a paper in 8th grade about the effects of video games on kids and this was one of the main consequences. These kids also benefit from mastering the video games like Turkel mentions, but there are definitely negative side effects. You can “lose oneself.” Just like in 1984, today there is an infatuation with simulated worlds that some people discover and start to prefer them to the real.