The idea of making video games a more legitimate form of learning is certainly interesting to think about.  I’m a person who loves video games.  I enjoy them a great deal and it has always been something I turn to when I want to have fun or kill some time.  Video games today are not the same as they were when they first became popular.  Some people still think of them as a childish activity.  They have became so much more than that.  Today they are gateways to adventures and in depth stories.  Today’s games can teach you things and even expose you to things that you may never otherwise understand or experience.  Think about war games.  They obviously do not expose you to the true horrors of war and no person is ever going to understand what war is unless they actually experience it first hand.  But they do help one understand certain levels of war and history.  There is pretty much a video game for ever great war there has been.  In these games there are tons of information that is presented to you such as locations and dates of specific battles, names of guns, military terms as well as military tactics.  The games don’t necessarily give you the experience, but they help to familiarize an otherwise foreign concept.

When it comes to video games and legitimate education however, I am a little skeptical.  I believe video games can aid and stimulate problem solving skills as well as teach history.  But I just have a hard time imagining taking everything that I have had to learn and accomplish throughout my academic career and being able to learn those same things through a video game.  I’m not sure if I can believe that such a thing is possible or even effective.  I believe that video games can be even more improved upon to help people learn certain things but I don’t see how they could help in things like mathematics, writing, and reading comprehension.  These are held as very important things in the academic world.  On the SAT’s these are the most important things and the SAT’s are what is used to test and see where peoples intelligence levels are at the academic world.  I feel like if video games were to become apart of learning then we would have to change our idea of what we think is important to learn in the first place.