As my post this week, I’d like to focus on Videogames of the Oppressed by Gonzalo Frasca. This was particularly interesting, as it explores how video games can be used to help people gain a better understanding of reality and encourage critical thinking about important social and political issues.
Frasca provides a good example to illustrate his point that video games can promote a better understanding of reality. The example he uses is the popular Sims game, which allows a player to control his or her Sim or Sim family. Within this, Frasca discusses forums and modified versions of characters, such as “Dave’s Alcoholic Mother version 0.9” which allows a player to experiment with personalities and habits of characters that may be less than ideal. Alcoholism, in this case, could have a negative effect on the family. Additionally, as Frasca mentions, a player could have the ability to further modify his or her character’s habits if he or she isn’t satisfied with the level of realism displayed by her character (such as taking liquor out of a liquor cabinet instead of hiding places around a house, which is more typical of an alcoholic).
Also important was Frasca’s mention of video games being a tool that could be used to encourage critical thinking about current political and social issues. This idea ties heavily into material we covered in class, where we played September 12. September 12 illustrates perfectly the idea that video games can be used to offer political commentary, as a player is put in a position to kill “terrorists” in a heavily populated urban center, with civilians dressed in Islamic-style clothing interspersed. If the player kills civilians while attempting to kill a terrorist, other civilians will cry over the dead bodies of their compatriots and turn into terrorists. This means that, at any one time, a player could kill a single civilian and a single terrorist and end up creating three more terrorists from the grieving civilians. This is meant to highlight perceived failures (such as civilian casualties from aerial bombings) of the American War on Terror, failures that many people claim to have created more terrorists.
However, Frasca stops there, and will not go so far as to say that video games create social change. As September 12 illustrated for our section of Honors 353, video games can make us think about and debate the issues of our day, but they do not carry the kind of weight to stop bombings that kill large numbers of civilians.