Reflections on Video Games and Such

I'm sure a lot of people would agree with me on this: until Thursday's class, I never gave much thought to how much video games actually communicate to the player. That said, the genres of video games I've experienced the most are sports games and cheap online flash games. And it's really hard to argue that NBA 2K9 really says much politically or tries to persuade the player to believe or change something in real life, except possibly for the opinion that LeBron James is leagues better than Kobe Bryant. But anyways, after Thursday's discussion of rhetoric in video games and seeing the gameplay of Flower and the McDonald's game really opened my eyes to see just what messages could be embedded in certain video games.
I thought back to some of the flash games I used to play a lot, most of them mindless RPGs and tower defense games, and I tried to think of a game that exemplified this idea of "procedural rhetoric." And then I remembered this third-world farmer game. In it, you control a third-world family trying to survive in a community by farming, planting crops, and raising livestock. While most of the mechanics of the game you can figure out easily by playing for a few seconds, the one aspect of the game I wanted to point out the most was this: you "win" the game when you purchase all the advancements--a health clinic, a school, a political representative, a communications system, insurance, and roadways. It's not too hard to see that this game calls for players to take action and get involved in supporting the advancement of civilization in third world countries. Another interesting point is that when you finish the game, whether win or lose, you are notified with a message that says something to effect of "you survived in the harsh third-world community for an astonishing [emphasis added] X turns," as if living in a third-world community for any length of time is so amazingly unbearable.
The point of all this is, video games CAN have an impact on the gamer beyond just entertainment value, and even more profound, it pops up (or hides) in ways that we just don't notice unless we take the time to analyze. I don't think I'll ever look at video games the same way again.