Last week’s discussion of computer games and the technology of such games led to two really interesting ideas; that computer games help make people more comfortable with technology and that our childhoods are being remediated and sold back to us.
As far as computer games making technology more comfortable for many users, I would have to say that I agree with this assertion. There is something to be said for the level of comfort we develop unknowingly as we play. Play has been a form of education since the emergence of higher life on Earth. We have used play to teach in schools, at home, and at work for years and yet we have for whatever reason created an understanding of computer games that not just ignores their potential to teach but that also suggest that they are harmful, unless they are produced for the intentions of education. We have managed to look so deeply at the potentially scary parts of these newer forms of play, that we have all but lost sight of how they help us. Learning to move a character in a game, or to interact with another player, or how to perform an ordered series of keystrokes or actions to perform a given task. Not only do we learn from each of these tasks, we become more comfortable with manipulating computers and playing with our technology.
I would also say that these games are just one more way our childhoods are being remediated and sold back to us. We grow up with a cartoon and the toys with it, then when we have kids we find that same cartoon again. Now there is a game, a movie, more toys and a new show. We also have new more technologically advance versions of the toys we grew up with. Toys we will buy our children because of our personal nostalgia. In many was thus is genius, we got our parents to buy this stuff for us, now we are buying it for our kids, it is like two for the price of one marketing.
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