Virtual Scenarios, Digital Identities And Reality: Which Perspectives Towards An Educational Approach To Videogames

My search regards the implications in the culture of the education of the new scenarious and the new perspectives of the computers games. My interest beginning from develops limiting considering the definition of “videogame”, in how much is of forehead to true and just a cultural medium that places its “revolutionary force” in the being one cross-sectional media, hybrid and polisemico. Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them, requiring a pedagogic reflection , aiming at specific juxtapositions and complexity. Computer Games are an interactive and dynamic medium. This interactivity allows game designers to properly represent the causalities of the changing aspects of reality. As a result, game players can interactively explore the reality of the game. In addition, in all games there is the element of the conflict (like in the human live!). Conflict is a natural result from interaction. The players try to pursue a goal, but the active or dynamic obstacles (human or computer controlled) that prevent the easy achievement of this goal. Such obstacles should give at least an illusion of purposeful reaction to the players’ actions. If the obstacles are not active, even intelligent, the game is nothing more than a glorified puzzle. One should also not that while conflict is a fundamental element of a game, all conflicts are not violent in nature. For example, there is no violence in the popular SimCity games, where the player is to design a successful city plan. But there is a conflict between the player’s goals and the realities of the game world. So there are a lots of cultural, social and pedagogical question: how many of reality lives are in the virtuality lived lives, and also how many virtual is the knowledge and the relationship with different cultural identity? Should the virtuality and the computer games show, like a mirror, the human being? Do games provide safe ways to experience reality? In the latter, the new challenges of the education’s perspective are the development of participation processes and the improvement of strategies towards also active digital citizenship.