Opinion: Video games can spark interests and encourage learning

Pac-Man

Video games changed my life. As a child who struggled with reading and writing, video games made me feel like I had some sort of control or understanding of something that other people did not. As I kept diving deeper into the gaming world from an early age, one game took real-world history to create their world, and thus my passion for Japanese history ignited, and my will to get better at reading and writing began.

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Growing up I was fortunate enough to have a Super Nintendo and a Sega genesis lying around the house. In the ’80s my mother’s family used to own a game shop while she was in her teens, and she decided to collect these state-of-the-art consoles, and so in the year 2000, at the age of 5, my video game adventures would begin. I played Alien invaders, Pong, Alerted beast, Tetris, and many more that my memory cannot recall. As time was spent playing each of these games, I was able to pick up on certain patterns. Seeing how the aliens loom ever closer to the space-fighter as you attempt to ward off the never-ending invasion, while trying to hit the flying saucer that taunts the player as it flies by, to Altered Beast, a game where you collected power-up orbs to transform into overpowered beasts to dominate your foes. These patterns or designs of the game became more familiar as I played, I began to get better and better at it. Being 5 years old and becoming capable to comprehend the laws of a game is crazy. It made me feel accomplished like I found “my thing” as some people would put it. Nowadays children at the age of 2 are seen chilling in their stroller playing on an iPad, kind of scary and a whole other issue to discuss…but I digress, the point is I felt like I was understanding something new, I adapted to the reality the game presented and found ways to ward off the aliens or collect power-up orbs more efficiently.

 

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Now, why do I bring this up? Why do I care that much about these archaic video games that most likely a kid from the early 2000s would not even know about? Well like anyone with nostalgia, they are near and dear to my heart, but they also sparked various interests and passions and provided me with the and desire to learn how to read! By the time I was in grade 2, my reading and writing skills were terrible. I was reading at a kindergarten level… I know what you are thinking; Bailey you were a child you did not need to be good at anything when your 7! Yes, I know, all kids are humans in training, but try telling that to a 7-year-old who cannot even do simple math equations or read and write at a grade 1 to 2 level…For me anyone remotely better at these subjects could see the matric and I felt dumb.

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Soon after expressing my frustration, and my teacher showing my below-average grades to my parents, my family discovered I had a learning disability. This would greatly affect my education confidence up until I went to university. Okay…so what does this have to do with video games Bailey? I am getting there, but this article needs to be a minimum of 1000 words for it to be marked, so please bear with me. When I turned 7, I got a PlayStation 2 for my Birthday. I was ecstatic. This new console had so much to offer. During the PS2’s lifespan, some major franchises were born. Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank are just two of numerous titles that would go on to become some of Sony’s greatest hits. Then during one trip to blockbuster…Wait let’s stop…Remember blockbuster? If your answer was yes, hooray you have earned my respect. If it was no, don’t worry…I’ll tell you!  Blockbuster was created in 1985 and closed in 2010. It was like Netflix before Netflix, but instead of paying a monthly fee, you would physically walk into a blockbuster store and browse the aisles looking for movies and video games to rent. They also had a rewards program and I had way too many free rentals. I had no life.

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Anyways back to what I was saying. During my trip to blockbuster, I discovered a Japanese role-playing game called Way of the Samurai. It launched its first game on the PS2. This game allowed the player to create a Ronin samurai during the latter half of feudal Japan. You would roam cities, villages, and the countryside doing quests and fighting thugs or magistrates. This game allowed the player to join different factions. If you wanted to be a thug you could join them, if you wanted to be a magistrate, basically like a police officer, you could join them. For its time, a game with multiple endings and various in-game choices was astounding! Since Way of the Samurai was created by a Japanese developer, the cutscenes were voice dubbed in English to cover major plot points. However, all the other interactions with NPC’s (non-playable characters) had blips of text above their heads giving you further context on what is happening. Now here is where my struggle started…I fell in love with the feudal japan world before me. I found Japanese culture and the samurai to be interesting. From their clothes, swords, and their code of honor, I was hooked. Sadly, I was only capable of understanding things that were voiced because I could not decipher the text! My reading was so bad, that I could not understand integral details about objectives, or characters telling me how they felt or anything! It made me feel so lost. Here I had this amazing console that allowed me to play this game, that awakened a passion for Japanese history, yet I could only put half of the puzzle together because I was incapable of reading…This frustration grew more and more until I told myself I needed to learn how to read. I began to challenge myself to read harder books and study the dreaded words that would appear on my weekly spelling tests. My passion to understand this game motivated me to get better at reading and writing.

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I guess what I am trying to say is that often-video games are framed around people who are unable of growing up. People who rot their brains away consuming interactive media. Well to you I say…that is your opinion, but for me, I would have never challenged myself to learn without discovering video games. For me, video games nudged my interest and showed me a different world. It gave me a passion for Japanese history that later extended to history in general, and in doing so made me take it upon myself, at the age of 7 to try harder and deal with my reading and writing struggles. Of course, too much of something can be a bad thing, but now more than ever video games have become an interactive platform that offers a variety of genres and unique stories. These games can be gateways to all kinds of passions, it could spark an interest in music, animation, computer science, visual art, history (like me), and many more. These collaborative works are more than just entertainment, they are a medium of discovery. Now if you would excuse me, I have some video games to play.

 

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