Yes games count?

For the fifth blog post, we were asked to decipher the question, "Do games count or hold the same legitimacy as other works that fall within the scope of Digital Humanities such as e-poetry, e-lit, hypertext fiction, etc?".


As a group, we collectively came to the decision of yes, they count, and are no less significant than any other form mentioned above and sometimes even more meaningful. We chose this because certain games can be used to immerse the user in a completely interactive experience that from there can be leveraged to do a multitude of different things. For example, it could be a game like "Assassin's Creed" which takes the user through an interactive story of game play that depicts the rivalry between two medieval groups known as the Assassins and the Templars both struggling for peace and power. These types of games can be powerful story telling methods, just as hyper text fiction and other types of E-Lit, as it can suck users in for hours on hour due to the technology that is being used in the gaming industry making games seem more and more like reality for users.

Furthermore, games can also be used for unconventional causes that are super powerful in their own right. In our opinion, the best example of this is the game that took the nation by storm in early July of 2016. Pokemon Go was a fully interactive game that completely shook up the way DHer's and game designers can use games to influence their users. Pokemon Go is unique because it used the user's smartphone, a tool that has become a necessity for almost all of society, into an avenue to get the users outside an active. Pokemon Go's platform users GPS and a map in the app to have users hunt, search for, and capture virtually generated Pokemon at real geographic places near the user's locations. This is just another prime example of how games can be used as a super-powerful form of Digital Humanities.