At the beginning of Frasca’s article, he asks some rather conceptual questions:
Is it possible to design videogames that deal with social and political issues? Could videogames be used as a tool for encouraging critical thinking? Do videogames offer an alternative way of understanding reality?
After reading Bogost’s book, we all know that the answers to these questions is yes. As I’ve said before, it’s much harder to find things that you can’t do with videogames. It’s more interesting to ask the quantitative versions of these questions. In other words, how useful are games that deal with political or social issues?
The answer to this question is “not very useful.” I come to this answer by looking at the asymmetry of people who play videogames and people who care about social and political issues. Other than Professor Sample, what cultured, intelligent adult that you know plays videogames? (Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an attack on Prof. Sample; it’d be pretty chill if my Dad liked COD as much as I do.) Furthermore, what 12 to 22-year-olds (outside of the GMU Honors College of course) develop imformed opinions about social and political issues? These questions make it clear that games of a socially critical nature have a very limited audience.
My overall point of this post is this: non-entertaining and non-educating videogames are only made to show that videogames don’t have to entertain or educate. Other than that, they’re pretty useless.