Pop Culture or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Escapism

Playing games can teach us many things, as well as motivate us.  Gamers are stereotyped as being antisocial loners escaping into a fantasy realm.  This is far from the truth.  Games can be highly social, such as the MMO (massive multiplayer online) game World of Warcraft (WoW).  McGonigal refers to the game as a "collaborative problem-solving environment," where thousands of players come together to help achieve their "epic mission".  This ties directly into both social contact and the idea of goals, challenges, and rewards.  In WoW, players work to help each other achieve goals, overcome challenges, and are rewarded for their efforts.  Players have to communicate and learn to trust each other in order to so. McGonigal brings up that the average young person, by the age of 21, will have spent 10,000 hours gaming.  That about how much time a student will spend in school by the time they graduate.  She refers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour...

The concept of sports athletes as heroes and role models has been around for decades, but never so much as nowadays.  Children grow up wanting to be sports stars, people want that level of talent & celebrity that comes with it.  Take Kiehl Frazier for example - a football player recruited from a young age and even has a sports promoter. The pressure on the athletes to continue to perform at heroic levels is ridiculous.  Kiehl spent all of his time focusing on football instead of being a kid, and yet he didn't even make it into the NFL. The rules of sports are designed to be clear & coherent, so that they are easy to understand.  While football has rules for how players can act on the field, what about when they become injured?  Or when athletes are pushed to limits beyond what is healthy?  While rules for conduct exist, few rules are in place to avoid injuries such as concussions and when a player should be taken out of a game, regardless of the ...