Press play to grow! Designing video games as aids to improving yourself

As odd or paradoxical as it may seem, I envision video games being increasingly designed to facilitate human development, as virtual reality technologies continue to evolve and integrate with leading edge developmental practices.

Now being a 38 year-“young” man researching video games at the dawn of the 21st century, I still feel quite amazed and dazzled with what is now being called “a new generation of interactive entertainment”. Recent technological and artistic developments have made some of these games to be so realistic, meaningful and potentially engaging that the line between “virtual” and “real” reality are really starting to fade away... Transported through time from Pong to now, I see myself enthusiastically engaging in a 40 hour (15 days) “action-research” marathon playing Bioshock, a video game set in a beautiful but “fallen” utopia futuristic city called Rapture, located at the bottom of the ocean. The creative storyline is based on Ayn Rand’s constructivist insights from the book The Fountainhead (1943), which unfolds in an exquisite aesthetics of a post civil war art deco decayed environment, providing the adequate atmosphere that invites me to subtly experience with full engagement a series of existential insights.

Suddenly, the quest for the victory is also the quest for my own path and identity as a player. Am I really in control of my choices in the game? Groundbreaking surprises await me throughout the path as I start knowing more about myself, my past history, and why I am really there. Boundaries between my player self and “real self” sometimes seem to disappear… Chosen by many standards as the “game of the year in 2007”, Bioshock is part of an emergent generation of “First Person” role playing video games (RPG) that bring an exquisite mix of high level of aesthetics, technological power, and a fairly amount of subjective depth (if you have the right “eyes” to see it), including “grey” moral choices that go beyond the “black and white” of good and evil. However, as expected from a contemporary best selling action and role-play game (RPG) title such as Bioshock, many aspects of the current paradigm of video game design are still at play, including violence, shootings, weapons, and blood, lots and lots of blood…

But, would that really spoil the other deeper and more positive aspects of the experience? Would that be really only a video game problem, independent of the reactions and interpretations of the player? Are video games, especially from the First Person RPG genre, “doomed” to be a just a mirror of our contemporary mainstream culture, society and entertainment? Well… yes and no, if seen from the lens of the Integral Psychology created by the contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber (2000), which can take into a more balanced account both the “dignity and disasters” of the evolution of video games and virtual reality technologies in a broader and deeper context; a perspective that accounts for many developmental variables and aspects of AQAL.

As I came to realize, the potentials for video games to promote positive and proactive influences can be especially significant at this moment in time and in the future yet to come, with a myriad of educational and developmental possibilities already being explored (see page 16), and many more still waiting to be “discovered” and “downloaded” into concrete video game manifestations.