Will video games save the world or are they a waste of time?

Review of Ian Bogost's How to Do Things With Videogames in Marketplace Tech Report.

Ian Bogost is a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology where his specialty is the development and meaning of video games. Be sure to check out his game Guru Meditation. His new book, "How To Do Things With Video Games," rejects a lot of the traditional ways of thinking about games.

"I think one of the biggest assumptions is that games are just for fun, entertainment, wasting time," he says. "But there's a flip side to that assumption which is that games have the potential to be used for very serious things like politics or education. If you put the two together, you get the idea that video games are either a waste of time or they can save the world. Instead, I want to suggest that video games, like every mature medium, do a whole lot of things -- everything between wasting time and saving the world."

Published in: Marketplace Tech Report
By: John Moe


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