Hunting is one of the ancient ways through which humans show their power and satisfy their instinct for adventure and victory. The size and strength of the animal you catch influence your respect among your peers. In acquiring hunting skills, young men learn to provide meat, leather and protection for their families and societies. Though modernization has phased out hunting as a way for expressing power over challenges, programmers create virtual games and adventures for people to feel victorious by overcoming virtual challenges. If they can create virtual games as challenges, they can also direct the virtual games for social responsibility in productivity, administration and security.
Humans have a natural instinct for overcoming challenges, winning trophies, hunting, conquering and getting victory. Apart from surviving, both men and women desire to feel the victory of winning, breaking records or conquering something remarkable. Thus, humans create societies by agreeing to collaborate in using their instincts and natural resources for conquering social challenges or problems. Their instinctive desire for victory continues pushing them to seek and conquer more challenges in the society. Yet, without channelling this ‘instinct for victory’ to social benefit, it either becomes wasted or abused in dangerous purposes.
There is a raging addiction to virtual games and virtual challenges in recent times. Many young people spend several hours daily playing virtual games on phones, computers, television and other gadgets. Apart from the time virtual games take from youths, they often contribute to domestic and outdoor accidents, violence, academic, social and interpersonal distractions. These problems raise questions about the role of virtual games in the society. Do virtual games prepare people to make contributions to the society? How can societies influence programmers to create challenges (as virtual games) for developing people’s productivity and social responsibility?
Some adapted virtual games like scrabble, solitaire, map-jigsaws, puzzles and chess help in developing the intellect for learning languages, geography and critical thinking. Despite their capacity to build the intellect, they become distractions when not applied to enrich or protect the society. So, instead of developing people’s skills and intellect or refreshing them for more productivity, these virtual games become addictive or time-wasting. A fat boy daily spending hours on virtual football games without ever playing on the field could be wasting his time on fruitless luxury. But a boy who learns new styles from playing virtual games and applies them in real football games, improves steadily.
Importance of virtual games to social progress
Apart from the revenue it generates for programmers and government tax, virtual games performs other important roles in the society.
- Entertainment and relaxation to refresh people for better productivity.
- Education: its graphic illustration enables people learn skills and memorize information better.
- Attitude building: some adventure games help you build confidence, patience and zeal to confront challenges in real life.
- Human resource management: with virtual games, people can redirect their instincts for physical and violent victory to virtual competitions and victories.
Since virtual games can be simulated to assist in different areas of human endeavour, it requires more guidance for the society. Hence, sincere governments may take the following steps:
- Facilitate the evaluation of the courses students study in the universities and how important they are in the society.
- Enable different departments in their universities to write game-structures to simulate real-life problems and animated challenges for students to solve. This could become real project topics for masters and doctoral students in their universities, instead of over-flogging stagnant academic discourses. Since the drafts will be coming from people in the field, it will apply and evaluate the principles, laws, potentials and limitations of different courses. So, lawyers could use such projects to compare or dramatize the loopholes in some laws in the society. Students in education, political science, humanities, medical science, engineering, history and other courses can use their own customized games to improve their knowledge and application of the courses.
- Sponsor more computer science students to improve on their ability to design more software and virtual games. This will enable them design or program the game-plots written by people from the different fields.
- Sponsor and publicise competitions on these virtual games to encourage school-dropouts and non-students to increase their knowledge using virtual games in their private times, just like the different typing games.
Like every other invention, virtual games are blessings to the society that must be directed to common good. Societies simply need to direct them properly to avoid abuse that leads to distraction, proneness to violence and waste of time.