Always a Lighthouse: Video Games and Radical Politics - lareviewofbooks
VIDEO GAMES, as Robert Cassar recently noted in his Games and Culture essay “Gramsci and Games,” are often “sophisticated texts that can represent not just ideas but entire worlds, which invite players to explore them. Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, in their essay “The Play of Imagination” also for Games and Culture , make the crucial point that through these elements, games can introduce novel pedagogical practices that differ from other interactive and... They characterize traditional paradigms of instruction as being concerned with “learning about,” distinguishing this from video games which approach knowledge as “learning to be” — a crucial and largely unexplored dichotomy:. [Video games] allow players to construct vivid and meaningful “conceptual blends” by taking different worlds (such as the physical and the virtual) and combining them to create new and better ways to understand both the game world they inhabit and... It’s increasingly tenable to think that games “may teach us to see the world differently and to understand global conflict from new perspectives,” as Harry Brown put it in Videogames and Education , given the sheer number of titles that challenge... Source: lareviewofbooks.org
