View of the pavilion where the 5th Edition of the Electronic Sports World Cup/ESWC 2007 is being held
After spending a week on the video games and education course that we mentioned in a previous post, organized by the UB and coordinated by Begoña Gros Salvat -who in turn is coordinator of the Grup F9, whose experience we learned about in yesterday’s last session-, I read that this weekend the Gaming World Cup is being held in Paris, in which 750 champions from 51 countries are participating who, in good faith, will measure their strengths in various disciplines/games. You can read the news better on the Poptronics.fr site (don’t miss the audio clip at the end of the entry…).
Surely the Gaming World Cup is nothing more than an anecdote, although on the other hand it gives us another measure of the ‘social relevance’, so to speak, that video games have reached. This leads me to ask (again) why, from the educational field, video games are understood almost exclusively as a didactic tool, either with the use of the abominable “educational games” or with much more elaborate experiences such as those of Grup F9, who use commercial video games in the teaching of various curricular content and for ‘education in values’, but not essentially as an object of study in themselves. During the UB course, there has been a lot of talk about the social and cultural changes that the implementation of “new” technologies has brought about, to the point of talking about ‘digital illiteracy’ and ‘electronic literacy’, as Daniel Cassany explained, or of understanding that the Internet opens a “new era in the history of human evolution”. Leaving the latter aside, which would be the least of it, it is evident that information and communication technologies have already brought about an effective, real transformation in the systems of production of goods and meaning with/between which we operate, transformations that reach the deepest strata of that reality, the day-to-day of many people, including students. I am not saying that the study of the “discovery” of America (through the use of video games, textbooks or dramatic representations) is not interesting and should not be studied, but that these transformations (including, I insist, those induced by the massive production and consumption of cultural products such as video games) must also be studied and always from a critical perspective in which we do not give students a closed, unique and hegemonic reading of events. Regarding the conquest of America, I recommend that you take a look at Tropicalamerica, an interactive graphic adventure created by high school students in collaboration with artists, teachers and writers in Los Angeles, produced by the unfortunately now inactive organization OnRamp Arts.
