10/14/2011 Readings Blog Post

I found the section from the book “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter” written by Steven Johnson rather interesting. In this section he discussed positive impacts video games have on the people that play them and why people are interested in playing them. He brought up many respectable points including why do people like completing daunting tasks in video games that would be annoying in real life. His reasoning was that people like to be rewarded for doing well and that is a major part of video games. When one completes a task they gain something from it. Although he poses this as an answer, he acknowledges that nobody knows the real answer and research isn’t being done to discover it. What I don’t understand is why schooling systems don’t use this to their advantage, with regards to using virtual tools such as take home educational games. That would be interesting!