Serious Games

The funny thing is: Utopia is different for everyone. Someone’s Utopia might be world peace, another might be eating without gaining weight, and someone else might find Utopia in a world without traffic. In my case, Utopia would be achieved when everyone could pursue their dreams without having the constant reminder of responsibilities and bills. I strongly believe that money has corrupted the world and that we used to be perfectly fine with trading our goods. Right now, people are born, go to school, go to a job they most of the time do not enjoy to pay bills they do not want to have and finally die an unfulfilled life.

The point is, nowadays society might be a Utopia for some people already – those who have enough money to keep afloat in the ever rising sea that is society. The difficult task is to determine whether changing aspects of the world will create more Utopias than we would lose. There will never be a situation in which every single citizen will be happy with the current state of affairs. This is why, in my opinion, a Utopia should be kept a dream world we will never actually reach.

Keeping this in mind, there are aspects of the world we could change in order to grow closer to this much sought after Utopia. In my opinion, the first step should be changing the attitudes people have nowadays. Being able to work for something you want should be a privilege, not something to complain about. It is time to start appreciating the little things of life more instead of walking through life with tunnel vision. Find out what you like, what you love, fall in love, travel all over the world, experience heartbreak, fall in love again, never ever be satisfied with what you have – but remember to appreciate it and be thankful for what you have got.

If you succeed in all those things, you have reached a Utopia that most people will not even be able to reach in their life.

As the course Serious Games tries to tell us, gaming can teach people things. Take for example Codecombat, which is an online platform that teaches children to code in Java while playing a game: beating a dungeon.
Hiding learning in games is the key to teach children, and can actually be applied from a very young age.
Now, teaching coding is one thing, but teaching gratitude is a whole other story. Aiming for younger children, a game could be designed using the emotion wheel. Making the children aware of the emotions they are feeling could be the first step towards finding out what exactly they are feeling during certain situations like losing money, making friends or watching a television show. Once this step is acquired, the foundation for appreciation is made and can be further explored.