Flea17's Blogs

Under the NCEA scheme, forms of entertainment past and present are pervading the classroom. There is a standard for film study, novel study, poetry study. These all are or have been accepted forms of entertaining oneself, and have been for centuries (or decades, in film's case). The video game is becoming more and more accepted as a form of social interaction and entertainment, so when will it too find its place in the drab, prefabricated walls of our country's schools?

The video game is no longer a pursuit enjoyed by only spotty nerds in basements, but by virtually everybody from every walk of life, according to Peter Molyneux, director of Lionhead Studios. If it is accepted by everybody as a valid form of entertainment, why are the messages and storylines put across by videogames denied by the schooling system? Surely, just as films have entered the system, video games are soon to follow?

Enough with the airy rhetorical questions, y'all just think I'm a lazy student that likes video games too much and wants to play them at school. Well, that is true, but I also have a valid point I want to get across. Video games should be part of the school system. Perhaps not in the mainstream schooling system that most people encounter, your NCEA Level 1, 2, and 3 courses. But definitely the Scholarship, Level 4, course. In this course, the student has to study literature of his or her own choice to use in the examinations. Films, novels, poetry, hyperfiction (it's written on the booklet but nobody actually knows what the hell hyperfiction is), even television series. But video games are not specified. If a student wants to study a video game, he or she should be able to.

Let's have an example of how it could work. An essay question in the English Scholarship course is "Aldous Huxley wrote that 'a book about the future can only interest us if its prophecies look as though they might concieveably come true.' Discuss how apt this view is today. Refer closely to a range of texts." It really does look as though this question has been written for video games. Final Fantasy VII and its prophecies about corporations controlling the planet and destroying the environment, Half Life 2 and its prophecies about overlords, a closely monitered police state and a rebellion (stunningly similar to George Orwell's 1984), even Halo: Combat Evolved and the release of the Flood as a warning against innate human curiosity and playing God with boilogical experiments. Every single one of these video games can be related to other literature. By the looks of this, video games are perfect for interpretatation in the confines of many Scholarship questions. I've more questions and examples that relate to video games from only last year's Scholarship question sheet, but there's only so much internetz I can take up with my writing :).

I've suggested the scholarship course to adopt video games because it is much more self-motivated, and each student studies their own texts rather than have a teacher tell them what to do in class (though it would be funny to have a teacher set "get up to level ten" as homework). Personally, I feel as though a large chunk of the media is being neglected by ignoring video games in the school curriculum, and I think this should be remedied. Sure, it sounds far-fetched and even a little mad, but it will be able to work within the bounds of the Scholarship course.

If you've got this far, congratulations on reading my wall of text. If you just skipped to the end, you're missing out. Thanks, and let's hope that when your children's children go to school they'll be much more intrigued, fascinated and educated by the world of video games than I am by the world of James K. Baxter's poetry.