Outside my window \u2013 and it\u2019s a different window this time, because I\u2019ve moved the laptop down to the back room because it\u2019s smaller, warmer and has a window I can look out of without turning my head \u2013 I can see the wasps gambolling about, flying up to the ash tree branch their nest is attached to, zipping off to the rhododendron bush, generally getting a lot more enjoyment out of this cold, sunny day than I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are they? I don\u2019t really know how they\u2019re feeling. I don\u2019t have any empathy for, or with, the little devils. Could I have? Empathy can be achieved through the medium of empathy games.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n See if you can see how I felt about these things when I first stumbled onto the term about a fortnight ago.\u00a0 \u2018Empathy games’, I said to the wasps, \u2018sounds like one of those self-help titles Amazon keeps pushing at me, or maybe a mid-70\u2019s attempt to cash in on Fear of Flying<\/a><\/em> with a bit of soft porn wrapped around an undergraduate psychology essay.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n They buzzed around, completely ignoring how famous Lee Martin and I have made them over the years. Gratitude may be the shortest-lived human emotions, but I doubt these bloody things waste a single chemoreceptive neuron on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Games that are written for entertainment can be used for education.\u00a0 \u00a0(Gee), referred to in the article on classifying serious games<\/a>, has numerous examples of teachers re-purposing \u2018entertainment games\u2019 for serious purposes, such as education.\u00a0 From my own experience, the entertainment game Lord of the Rings Online<\/em> had a small repurposing.\u00a0 I wanted character names that would fit in with Tolkien\u2019s nomenclature scheme, so it was necessary to learn a bit of Sindarin to make the names make sense.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t learn enough of it to fit the name seamlessly into Sindarin, but I was closer than if I\u2019d known no Sindarin at all.\u00a0 This wasn\u2019t changing the use of the game so much as taking part of the game, naming your characters, wanting to do that \u2018properly\u2019 and having to do extraneous learning to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The world in which the game is set is detailed enough that with a bit of tweaking the game itself could be used as a teaching tool. For example, you have to make bronze items in the course of the game to improve your ability to craft your own weapons and gear, if you want to, and if you then had to find out, within game context, what bronze is made of, you\u2019d be learning something. This can be arbitrarily complex, and it would be fun to have to scour Middle Earth for deposits of chromium, molybdenum and whatever else in order to suit of stainless-steel armour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Serious games are \u2018any piece of software that merges a non-entertaining purpose (serious)<\/em> with a video game structure (game) (Djaouti, Alvarez and Jessel 2)<\/em>. the type of game it is lies within the control of the game developer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The games deal with serious topics. But the serious topics are all those topics which modern pundits think are significant, the cause celebres<\/em> of the 21st<\/sup> century: climate change, depression, anxiety, bullying, depression, suicide, gender politics, and so on. At first, these games are depressing, and then boring as people playing them can get fatigued being asked to empathise with everything blatted at them during the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPurpose Shifting<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Serious Games<\/h3>\n\n\n\n