Life As A Gamer

It was cool to play games and talk about gaming in class last week. I actually thought about letting my students play some of the games and asking them to think about games and the impact it has on their life. I never thought about games being used to give people empathy. Or rather to make them more empathetic. But I suppose games of this nature could have the same effect on people as they think that violent games have on them. I would argue that games don't make you do anything. If the object of the game is make you think about being empathetic and make those types of choices, at the very least you'll be forced to think. This would be a nice change to the senseless violent video games.


In class we had an online discussion about empathy games. Below you will find my tweeted responses to the conversation:

Daily Digital Alchemy

At some point I know I have to try and create my own. And I have an idea, coincidentally it has to do with sound and music. And hopefully, sometime this week my plan is to make that happen. For now, I will continue to do the DDAs that I like. I really look forward to seeing what the daily challenge will be. I must admit that I am avoiding the more tech savvy ones. But that doesn't mean I don't enjoy doing them.

Games: 

In class I played the Bad News game. It was cool because it forced me to think about what I would do to get more followers on Twitter. I never really think about how many followers I have on Twitter. In fact, I can't even tell you how many I have. For the most part I only interact with people that I know in real life or I have developed an online relationship with 40% of those people are in the Net Narr community. 30 %  are from the literary community. And the other 20% is my best friend. And the last 10% is my dad. I am his one Twitter follower. Anyway, the game makes you decide what you're willing to do to gain more followers. It forces you to consider making responsible tweets. The more you play the game the more you learn that the more irresponsible and offensive your tweets are, the more followers you will have. Sounds like Donald Trump right. Well it was pretty much like that.

I played Spent this is game for people who live in a bubble. People who have never had to make a dollar out of 15 cents. I understand and know this life too well. And I see it everyday in the children that I teach. This would be good for people to play that have no idea how other people live their lives.

I also played the Sleep Deprived Mom Game cause well I am a sleep deprive mom. And I learned that my knowledge as a mom of two didn't help me to win or master the game. Again I think this is another game that is good for say a dad that needs to put himself in the mom's shoes. For us moms we get it. Sometimes you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. That's just the way life is as a mom sometimes.

I found that I thought that these games were cool teaching tools but they're not something that I would play in down time-- well the little bit of downtime that I get. I look to games to escape my reality and some of these games seem too real and close to social issues that I deal with on a regular.