Socio-Cultural Aspect of Computer Games

Computer games are an important part of our culture. They are not quite old, because they are invented in previous century. They changed a lot in this time, because they are related to culture and social changes. We can observed these changes in this video….

History of games


Computer games are very important issue, especially nowadays, when we spend lot of our time in virtual word. They have bright and dark sides, because on the one hand computer games have positive influence on cognitive development. On the other hand they can be addictive.

Here some research results…

Socio-cultural context have great influence on computer games. We can see this on example of characters or avatars, which we choose or create. They have changed a lot and present ideal models of femininity and masculinity, which are creating by presently culture. Female and male characters have great bodies. Female are slim, toll and beautiful. They have big eyes, breasts and long hair. They have fancy and sexy cloths and they show they femininity. They embody men’s dreams. Check it out - top 10 video game women.

Top 10 video game womEn


The male characters have got big muscles and big chests. They look like macho man, they are aggressive and formidable. They have got big and dangerous guns. They are tough guys. Top of the sexiest male characters you can see here.
Both female and male characters are strong, agile, brave and very clever.

Beautiful and sexy characters are good. They want to destroy evil and fight with bad figures, who are ugly and defaced. This creation is stereotypical, because people think that handsome men and women are good and unattractive people are bad.
So, we can see that very important attribute of games characters is their body. Both virtual and real bodies must be sexy, because this is a basic requirement of our culture. People like to watching beautiful and sexy bodies, so games’ designer should create characters who are attractive. In this case the everyday life is the ideal to virtual life.

Games create some special demeanors and behaviors, which are specific for postmodern culture. We can see this for example in The Sims, which is one of the most popular games in the world. This game have a few varieties, which cover both private and public dimension of life. Player in this game learn how should students life, dates or relation with another people look like. This game teach how we should live in the real world, what we should do to life in our world. We can ask is this good for people especially young people? I think it can help youth to find themselves in daily reality, which is very complicated and ambiguous.

You can see for example how to do a party...:)

The Sims 3 - PARTY :)



However this could have a bad influence on their life, because these games create word which is unreal. The real life looks rather differently. People may sometimes think, especially youth, that they should behave themselves and look just like the games’ characters. And this, in my opinion, can led up to disaster. Plenty of young people modify they bodies. They have tattoo, piercing, scarification. They go to the gym and work out very hard, sometimes too hard, or they give in to plastic surgery like breast augmentation.
To sum up, I think that our currently culture has great influence on games, but games heave influence on our culture as well. So we should be careful and teach our children that not everything what they see on games world is good.

part 2

Quest to Learn! Interesting school… More I read about using games in educational process than more I think that is an excellent idea. Students loves games and computer, so why we, as teachers, shouldn’t use these tools in our work?

Q2L Commercial



On the Internet we can find plenty of websites, which offer diverse educational games. This is my favorite one –iCivics

Short story of iCivics


And this is an example...


What we can play in iCivics?