VOL-6 Test 1 Passage 2 — IELTS Reading Practice

A Video games, it is often claimed, are about wasting time. It is a misunderstanding that players and game makers have been trying to correct for many years. While movies and television are endlessly analysed in the media, games are often dismissed as irresponsible, unimportant by-products of the broader digital revolution.

A Video games, it is often claimed, are about wasting time. It is a misunderstanding that players and game makers have been trying to correct for many years. While movies and television are endlessly analysed in the media, games are often dismissed as irresponsible, unimportant by-products of the broader digital revolution.

But a growing number of experts disagree. This is, after all, an entertainment medium that worldwide makes $50 billion a year. Using ideas from psychology and sociology, theorists and designers suggest that our love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our most basic desires and motivations.

Game design has become a big business and has led to the creation of a multitude of companies. ‘The industry attitude toward training has changed radically,’ says prominent game researcher Jesper Juul. ‘I recall hearing professionals claim that game design was a strange and unteachable art, but now this attitude has mostly faded.’ Designing video games is increasingly recognised as a valid field of university study throughout the world.

B Central to an understanding of games is the theory that games are fun because they teach us in a way that our brains prefer, that is, through systems and puzzles. Raph Koster, designer of multiplayer fantasy games, points out that an effective learning environment is one in which failure is acceptable, even welcomed. Accordingly, Koster says that in games, the player enters into a situation where the rules of the real world don’t apply - and typically being judged on success and failure is part of the real world. When gaming, people feel free to try things and to learn, and not worry about what might happen.

Consistently, Koster says, the best games are the ones that provide us with interesting tools such as weapons or magic, and allow us to experiment with them. For example, in one early game, players are given the ability to jump, and can practise this for as long as they like, but to get to the next stage they need to master this ability so they can leap over an enemy and onto a platform.

‘Games allow us to create these little systems where learning is controlled really brilliantly,’ says Margaret Robertson, director at a London-based game design company. ‘Something we don’t talk about is that, actually, one of the strengths of games is the vague sense of disapproval that still surrounds them - they feel like something that’s forbidden!’ And that can, of course, be very exciting.