Argumentative Text of Videogames

Argumentative Text of Videogames

Videogames: a new mirror in which to look at our culture

Every so often, a young man or a group of young people in the industrialized world commit an atrocity that it costs the lives of their classmates and their school teachers, or the unfortunate passers-by of a school commercial. And each time this happens they appear in the media the usual suspects: heavy rock, comic books and, especially, video games. They are accused of contaminating children's minds with violence, of expressing "anti-values" and of being a nefarious influence on contemporary society.

It is a naive, conservative accusation, more willing to look for any scapegoat than to reflect on the world in which his children were born. A case equivalent to that of someone who, when looking in the mirror, discovers an immense pimple on their forehead and is convinced that it is time to discard the mirror. After all, video games are a cultural product, not very different from literature and the cinema, whose job is to give us back a more or less literal image of ourselves, of the world we we create, the decisions we make or the fantastic escapes we dream of to flee from he.

And isn't there the same load of violence, horror, and suffering in an evening newscast? Or are we not so interested in finding out what are the consequences of the wars we wage, the crimes we we commit and the suffering we cause and receive in the real world on the early psyche of our sons?

An interactive mirror in our rooms

It has been decades since the video game has established itself as one of the main ways of investing leisure and consuming fictions by the child and youth sectors (and, increasingly, adults too). And it is enough to look at the world they offer to see its diversity, complexity and, it must be said, its risks.

The video game, like the toys of other times, serve our children as a preparation tool for the challenges of everyday life. In an increasingly digitized and cybernetic world, the eye-screen-hand relationship becomes key to high-level work and endless relationships and transactions, ranging from apps to ordering food until software highly specialized industrial. But, in addition, the narrative dynamics of current video games, far from those repetitive and mechanical "Arcades" of the eighties, pose the gaming experience on an even more complex level, which has to see with the ethics, socialization and decision making.

In some cases, this is due to the fact that the games are obviously inserted in a recognizable, current context that seeks empathize with the suffering of others, giving prominence to those who lack it in the world's media dynamics real.

Independent games like Liyla and the Shadow of War by Rasheed Abueideh, for example, which recreates the horrors of the war in Gaza, are interactive mechanisms to put yourself in someone else's shoes. And this causes, at times, that ethical and social dilemmas arise around the most commercially successful games regarding the type of sensitivities that are being offered to the new generations: something that always meets resistance from conservative sectors of the society.

Take as an example The Last of Us 2, the long-awaited continuation of a post-apocalyptic tale from the PlayStation console. The protagonist of this sequel is a homosexual girl, which caused the indignation of some fans of the delivery, who claimed that the video game had folded to the mandates of the movement LGBTQ. They attacked the mirror again, believing they were attacking reality. Human experience, as diverse as it is, naturally calls for diverse representations, and video games are no exception to the rule.

It is not false, however, that there are large quotas of violence in many of these interactive stories. Nor is it false that it exists in the cinema, in comics or in the real world. Shooting games like the ones in the saga Call of duty They undoubtedly bridge the gap between the young and the world of war and weaponry, but the question to be asked is not whether to allow our young people let off steam with their friends in a fictional setting but why one in a thousand feels the need to bring that impulse to the world real. After all, they have their own personality, they are not the mere reflection of the stories they consume.

A fictional portrait of the real world

On conclusionVideo games are a cultural tool like any other, requiring our attention and participation rather than our disinterested criticism. Undoubtedly the socialization that takes place in online multimedia games will be a reflection of the cultural reality in which we live, as it happens in social networks and other cybernetic circuits in which the user feels protected by the anonymity or the non-physical presence of the other.

But the problem to be analyzed is why the latter is understood as a license to indulge in hateful behavior, sexism, racism or xenophobia. Could it be because these contents are being promoted on the other hand, and they find their natural place of liberation in this area? Could it be that instead of censoring the video game for what it says about us, we should understand it as a warning sign, as a portrait of our culture that may well serve to make us top? Isn't that what we already do with other forms of culture, such as literature, film, and music?

References:

• "Argumentative text" in Wikipedia.
• "Videogame" in Wikipedia.
• "The video game in contemporary culture" in the José Roberto Arze Virtual Library (Bolivia).
• "Crosses of the contemporary video game" in CCCBLAB (Spain).
• "How videogames took over the world" in The country.

What is an argumentative text?

A argumentative text is one that offers the reader a point of view, supported by arguments, opinions, examples, justifications, reasoning and other resources (many of them expository) that have the purpose of convincing you. These are texts that seek to form a specific opinion in the reader, to push him to think in a way about a topic.

Typical examples of argumentative texts are: literary essays, journalistic opinion texts (such as editorials), some advertising messages or electoral campaign texts.

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