Unit 4 Reflection - Video, Video Games, and VR

 The Art Of Video Games!

    To be honest, I've never been the biggest gamer in the world, but i always found video games absolutely fascinating! I grew up playing the original Wii, and actually had a Nintendo DS at one point in my life, and i remember playing that thing religiously. I genuinely enjoyed the world that video games took me to, and as i grew older i began to enjoy the stores in the games way more than the actual games themselves. 

    When i was 11, i discovered the world of Lets Players, which is basically just people filming themselves playing video games, and i found so much enjoyment in that! why waste so much money when i can watch someone play the game and hear their funny commentary? It opened up my eyes to the wider world of video games, and i got to see so many creative games and ideas that i had never heard of before! I started to watch video analysis of some of my favorite games, and before i knew it i knew more about certain games than people who actually played the games did! I loved hearing the stories around all the characters, and finding all the easter eggs and hidden pieces of lore in every scene being shown to me. 

    I believe this wonder of the world behind video games can be very useful in the classroom, because playing the game isn't really the most important part of a video games, the story and the characters are! 

How Are Video Games Useful?

    Two words, character development. The use of the hero's journey, archetypes, and character development in video games is prevalent, and most video games follow this hero's journey. The article called "Video Games in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom" actually details some ways that students can analyse the games they play, and I would actually love to use this idea in my classroom! I think using this model of learning and combining that with the excitement and passion as described in "Fostering Multimodal Analyses of Video Games" would be a great way to teach "The Hero's Journey"! Using something students love, that being video games, can create a sense of excitement and passion for what they're learning, and you can still include traditional writing as well! 

    Personally, i love analysing video games and characters and stories in them, and why certain things in games work and why certain things in games dont, so im going to link some of my favorite video game videos!! 

The Suicide of Rachael Foster Review: 

https://youtu.be/2ZhWWcxlJdA?si=2i7BBDFJU4sJhit1

The Story of Five Nights at Freddys Explained 

https://youtu.be/I4PulJyAy3k?si=OPrfcTrMgMdAnZwn

The Path Game Review:

https://youtu.be/6MoNp4qEXK4?si=t2e9a_wGO68ishpT

Alright! So i love video games, what about VR?

    So uh..

    I hate VR in the classroom. 

    I don't know how to describe it, but VR in the classroom feels dystopian and just out of place to me. I feel like both articles that we read talking about VR actually made my fears about VR in the classroom worse!

    Let me explain-

    Both articles we read talk about using VR with younger children, and this is the beginning of my concerns. The internet and video games are very illusive to little kids. They don't understand that its fake, so when you pop a headset on their head and put them in the world of the game i feel like that will cause more harm than good. 

    I've been online for a long time, and i've seen how the internet and video games can cause a lot of problems when it comes to children, because they simply don't understand what's real and what's not. And i think when you bring VR into the classroom it almost makes that ability to separate reality from fantasy almost mute. VR scares me when it comes to younger children, so personally i would never use it with kids younger than 15. 

    But for kids who are older 15, i just dont think theres good enough resources for teachers to use. For instance, i would love to have a program to put kids in the scene of a story, like the courtroom scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird", or the creation of the creature in "Frankenstein", but experiences like that just don't exist yet. I do think, though, VR would be great for a history classroom because of the virtual tours of real places! But for english, i think we just need more time to develop more programs, and wait for VR to become much cheaper, because at th emoment VR is very inaccessible to many students and schools. 

Wrap up!

    Video games good, VR bad! 

    Well, in my opinion at least.