What's a meaningful experience you've had from a video game?
From a book?
I teach an online class called “Arguing Comics” class: we find questions implicit in Calvin and Hobbes strips, ones we think we’ll disagree about, and the dive into arguments, so that kids get a chance to experience what it means to argue well. It’s a hoot!1
Anyhoo, after reading a particularly poignant strip about technology, we hit upon that hoary old question: are video games good for you, or bad?
The kids were pretty equally divided, and I thought that a good way to move the conversation forward would be to compare video games to another media source — books. So the question became: which are better for you — video games, or books?
But quickly we found that that is an unanswerable question, because “books” and “video games” are far too broad of categories to say anything interesting about. (It’s hard to pronounce judgment on a category that includes Tolstoy, Pete the Cat, and a list of all local residential phone numbers.) So I decided to modify the question yet again: what’s a meaningful experience you’ve had from a video game? What’s one you’ve had from a book?
I’m hopeful that exploring the peaks of what these media can give us will be eye-opening, and will allow us to compare the relative strengths of each. But to get a more well-rounded understanding of this, I thought I’d ask y’all about your experiences. So:
What’s a meaningful experience you’ve had from a video game?
What’s one you’ve had from a book?
Comments are open.
Also this is the last year I’m running it, so if you’re interested in checking it out — or the “Reading Comics” class it extends — feel free to!
A while ago I played a Nintendo console game called Earthbound 2 during an ... intense ... period of my life. It's a Japanese style RPG that features a lot of emotional storytelling, to the point that the community has an in-joke that the real boss is the "try not to cry challenge". As they say these days, "content note: suicide".
The original was never released outside of Japan - but there is an unofficial fan translation - and there's rumors that this is because some of the topics would be seen as controversial or not age-appropriate for the usual target market (at this point the teacher in me is screaming into the void).
The rough plot is you grow up in an idyllic rural town, where no-one locks their doors and kids can wander freely around at night - then a bunch of fascist pigs (literally!) takes over and you're in fighting monsters mode. It has very simple graphics and music and mechanics, but it lives off its storytelling.
Along the way the game alternates between slapstick humour and emotional gut punches, touches on innocence and grief and violence and revenge and abuse, death and horror and love and redemption, and offers a not-so-subtle criticism of capitalism and consumerism running wild. One reviewer said its "the closest games have yet come to literature".
It certainly mixes and cuts across the five kinds of understanding from the Egan book review, with a lot of irony thrown in. One moment you're visiting a family member's grave, another moment you have to hunt for a "pencil eraser" because there's a giant pencil blocking the path ahead.
(The game is from 2006, and neither it nor my post is a comment on the current world situation.)
The meaningful experience I had is it washed so many tears out of me that I somehow recovered from a phase of depression and found the will to live again.
If any teacher can pack that much meaning into their classroom, they're doing the world a service. (They've probably also at least heard of Egan.) But I fear some manager somewhere would have opinions on how "age appropriate" some of the topics are, so we'd end back at "Grade 1: learn about your families".
The best game I ever played was Kerbal Space Program. Not only it teaches you orbital mechanics, delta-v, some engineering, but you can also learn quite a few things about what can go wrong in an unpredictable way. If you never played, I highly recommend doing there and return mission to Eve on the first playthrough. The rules are simple: no interplanetary probes, you have to get 2 kerbonauts to the surface of Eve (the purple planet) and back, on your first try playing this game. Quicksaves are okay and you can do as much experimenting on Kerbin as you want.