Before I took this class,  I may have completely agreed with Gonzalo Frascou’s article, “Videogames of the Oppressed”. Throughout the article, he describes why videogames cannot be an integral part of social change. When asked if it is possible for social and personal change to occur through videogames at the end of his article, Frascou simply says “no”.

Due to not being the most avid videogame player, the only games that would have come to mind would have been games such as “World of Warcraft” or “Call of Duty”; games that don’t particularly encourage personal or social change. However, through this class, we’ve played games such as Dys4ia, Spent, and ImmorTall; games that, to me, can inspire these changes that Frascou disagrees with. He states that while games and narratives share many elements,  a narrative is  a “fixed series of actions and descriptions, videogames need the active participation of the user not just for interpretational matters” (Frascou). While this is true, a narrative also requires user participation of a certain sort. If one reads a novel, such as “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, but doesn’t interpret the meaning of the novel or even attempt to, then the narrative of the story is wasted. Videogames are very much the same, especially, in my opinion, Dsy4ia and Spent. For me personally, both games made me rethink certain elements of my own life.

Frascou also states that “videogames are not a good choice for historic or characters making moral statements” (Frascou). For certain events, such as Anne Frank as he uses as an example, I agree, because they are too controversial, even for certain writing, movies, and other forms of media. However, the game we played, ImmorTall, used the alien character to make a statement of war without explicitly saying so within the narrative of the game.

While Frascou makes good points, I think that with technology and globalization paving the way for the future, he has outdated ideas. Places such as Facebook and even, within recent years and the expansion, videogames are becoming important ways to spread moral statements, ideas, and proponents for social change. People use these and other parts of technology every day and traditional methods of communication are becoming less used. While these games we played in class are not very well-known, are there any recent games that are popular in our culture that can be viewed as vehicles for social change or how can they be changed or modified in order to do so?