Game Purpose

I think she brings up good points such as if reality applied gaming conventions such as leveling up/giving the person tasks that are within their capabilities. This is so the consumer feels more positive towards their achievements or actually interested in new challenges as they believe that these challenges are within their reach. If reality just applied things like awarding a person for doing well or acknowledging a person for achieving some sort of level up, this society that retains a strong gaming ethic may become more motivated to apply these new skills and positive thinking towards challenges in reality. Her interesting message was that you create bonds when you play games with people as even though someone has beaten you really badly in a game you still create a sort of friendship or bond with each other. I agree as when playing a game with another person you actually get to learn some of their habits, traits and some of their quirks during the game play leading to the creation of trust as you continue to learn more about the other player. You learn things that you generally wouldn't even notice about a person. Games also don't give the player challenges that they can't achieve, as they are always training for these hard stages as they progress through the game. She thinks that games can change the world because of these good points however, reality is never as easy to be in control of as a game. In the gaming environment you know your role in life and you are placed into a controlled environment. It is controlled because even though there may be bombs going off or chaos erupting every where the gamer is at least expecting some of these things to happen.

This is where I think her theory is flawed as you can't control reality like you do in a game. Real life is messy, unfair and can be hard. There are no restart buttons, no guardian/map/oracle/event that is meant to guide you on your quest as in real life you don't get the luxury of straight up knowing what you have to do/what your mission is. You are not given a goal and it is unknown whether or not you get help along the way. And at least in games you can choose your purpose in life and are given tools to achieve it along the way you are not restricted by money, education or race as in a game they provide you with a multitude of possibilities for the player to earn money. In reality accessing resources is not this easy for some people due to the differences in power and society. And in reality you also have more commitments and there may not be a lot of chances to better yourself as some might not even notice such opportunities as in reality they are not as obvious.