War Games!!!!

Why are these games so popular?Different types of war games exist that provide different experiences to the player.Strategic war games ,place the player in a positon of authority,with which you dictate to your troops and watch the results of these actions from the sidelines.Other war games,place the player on the battlefield, assuming the role of an individual soldier in the fight for survival.Im my experience of war games nothing gets you as immersed in a game as you do when you play these types of games.Sweaty palms,beating chest,the rumble of the gamepad as a bullet slices through your body,all of which are encountered whilst experiencing what these games have to offer.However there is a dangerous side to the development of games that exhibit acts of war.These games promote the concepts of power and domination,giving the player an ability that only god should possess,the power to take a life!

Another topic dicussed this week,was that of seroius games.Games that dampen down the entertainment side of games and utilise games to educate the player on a serious topic.
With an ever growing population of gamers,these "serious games" are an excellent way to inform people on a wide range of real world situations.

Learning Vs Teaching

So what do we learn from games or what do games teach us?....huh?I no in my experience,games have taught me a lot,for instance I now know that shooting ahead of a moving target is the way to go, or that one carefully positioned shot to the head is an excellent way to conserve ammunition!But seriously games teach us many things,some useful some not so useful.I mean i'm hardly likely to need to know about the advanced technologies an alien race possesses,well not for the foreseeable future anyways, but for example, say I need to stealthily gain access to a protected location,to do this I observe the guards patrol, and work around it.I observed a pattern and patterns help us to learn.I think it is not what a game teaches that is vitally important but how we learn from them.Games improve our learning process, making it easier and easier for us to assimilated new information and better our understanding of previously acquired information.Having knowledge in a specific area allows us to easily build upon it rather than starting from scratch each time.