<div align="right"><em>Don't know much about history<br>Don't know much biology<br>Don't know much about a science book<br>Don't know much about physics<br>But I do know that I love playing games</em></div>
<div> </div>
<div>Games, like every other media, construct their own reality. They are based on conventions and expectations, innovation and familiarity, genre building and genre subversion, remediation and intermediation.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>No surprises here. Reality is a convention. And games are simply another form of reality, thus, another convention. They are ontologically as consistent/relevant/useless as other "actual", "tangible" situations, perhaps more.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I'm performing a role, I'm playing a part, I have many identities. In real life, in simulated lifes. Digital symbolic interactionism. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Some of these fictions are incompatible with each other - hence the occasional frictions -, but in the age of hyper-tasking and second, third, and fourth lives anything goes. Ah give or take a night or two.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Games that provide "a real intellectual challenge": the <em>SimCity</em> series, the <em>Civilization</em> series, the <em>Europa Universalis</em> series. I have learnt a lot about space by playing <em>Super Mario
</em>and<em> Zelda</em>. <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~dewilson/papers/Thesis_Douglas_Wilson.pdf">Doug Wilson has more coherent and useful thoughts on the matter</a> (PDF link) </div>
<div> </div>
<div><a href="http://www.theoryoffun.com/">Raph Koster</a> argues that the key factor of games is their ability to teach the player new stuff - a game becomes boring (=not fun) when we have learnt everything about it [see chapter 3 and 4 of
<em>Theory of Fun</em>]. And according to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Teach-Learning-Literacy/dp/1403961697">James Paul Gee</a>, games are really teaching devices, tools that teach us how to think. Learning is fun. This is living. Jump in.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>gg,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>matt</div>
<div> </div>
<div> <br> <br>-- <br>Matteo Bittanti<br><br>-------------------------------<br><a href="http://www.mattscape.com">www.mattscape.com</a><br><a href="http://www.videoludica.com">www.videoludica.com</a><br><a href="http://mbf.blogs.com/mbf/">
http://mbf.blogs.com/mbf/</a><br>-------------------------------<br><br>Eadem mutata resurgo </div>