Entertainment can be a means for teaching real-life lessons in a condensed format through analogy and imagery. As an example, many video games tend to offer the player rewards in return for effort, providing a life-lesson of putting the necessary effort into attaining the richest things. If, however, gamers stop viewing the game as merely anecdotal, and the artificial rewards become as real to them as any other, then they end up valuing things of little worth over things of greater. Why put thousands of dollars and years of hard effort into a simple college degree, when you could just put in two hours and save an entire village? This skewed perspective fails to grasp that a village which can be saved in a couple short hours, must not be a village that is much worth the saving. The fact that real-life accomplishments come harder speaks to the far greater value of them. We should let our games encourage us to strive for the best of life, not spend the best of our lives striving in games.
I really like video games, but I agree with your argument here. This issue is especially evident in RPG style games, where your skill level is entirely based on how much time you've spent playing the game. There are other types of games that don't have this element, and these are the games I prefer playing. But, as always, there can be too much of a good thing.
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